Introduction to special issue: Brokering knowledge and corporate culture

Peris Ortiz Marta, Fink Gerhard , Hernández Penélope

2013

European J of International Management

This special issue on “brokering knowledge and corporate culture” covers the relationships between culture and knowledge as concepts or areas of reality that are closely linked to company practice and management literature. As regards knowledge, “all forms of our action upon reality (know how, technology, organisational routines and differing practices) or of our understanding of the world (systematic organisation of ideas and concepts) are forms of knowledge; and all the ways in which physical, technical or social reality manifests itself as a consequence of nature or human action, are the supports on which knowledge is founded” (Akehurst et al., 2011, pp.183–184). These supports explain basic aspects of knowledge creation and its transfer or dissemination (brokering knowledge). In an analysis of knowledge with reference to the creation of knowledge through interaction between tacit and explicit knowledge Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995) and Crossan et al. (1999) refer to individual members of the organisation, groups and the organisation as a whole as the ontological supports of knowledge; and in a broader vision, where knowledge creation stems from experience and practice in different areas of reality, the ontological basis or support for knowledge lies in the physical, technical and social dimensions of that reality