We are two Master students, currently finishing our thesis to complete the
International Business Program at the University of Linkvping in Sweden.
Since our thesis concerns organizational issues we have been following
this list with great enthusiasm for several weeks.
The problem we treat in the thesis is how "knowledge-based" companies can
keep their competence. When we first started looking into this problem we
found that many people had been discussing this issue but describing both
the circumstances around it and the problem itself, they had used
different terminology. I.e. we think that there is sometimes a great
confusion in terminology in this area. We have chosen as our method to try
to talk to as many sources as possible that are connected to these issues,
an then try to create an overview of the different theories and
terminology in the area, which will later on be used to describe the
problem in question. This is where we hope to get some help from you.
Since we feel that input from people on this list would be very valuable
and could serve as a great contribution to our thesis we would be thankful
for any input.
One of the main issues in the "knowledge-based" company seems to be how to
keep the competence. Naturally many companies become sceptical towards
investing in the "human factor" to increase the company's knowledge if the
person invested in can leave the organization at any time, taking the
investment with him/her. We ask ourselves to what extent this is really a
problem. Isn't it really a matter of trying to convert much of the
individual capital into structural capital so that it stays in the
organization independently of its actors? Doing this however raises a new
question: Are the individuals interested in "giving" their knowledge to
the organization? Today discussions about virtual organizations and
networks aren4t too rare, but the basic idea here is that individuals have
much more flexible couplings to organizations. Instead of belonging to
only one organization, they see their own personal knowledge and
competence as their possibility of competing with others in any
organization. Logically they would not at all be interested in
organizations trying to absorb their competence. The answer might instead
be to create organizations that are built to survive and be strong having
a high rotation of personnel. If this is the case many of the traditional
views on how to satisfy and motivate people in organizations such as tying
them up with e.g. company-cars, and social benefits would maybee not work
in the future since people are not interested in having these kind of
couplings to the organization.
Well these are some of our initial thoughts, and as we said before we are
happy recieving any kind of feedback on the issue.
Mattias Hultheimer & Peter Palmqvist
Linkvping University
e-mail: mattias.hultheimer@linkoping.mail.telia.com
e-mail: peter.palmqvist@linkoping.mail.telia.com
--Mattias Hultheimer <mattias.hultheimer@linkoping.mail.telia.com>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>