by Denis Larrivee
Corporate offices represent
epicenters of management character and mission. Information giants like Google
and Apple peddle a future that has already arrived. Precious metals firms promote
glamour and good taste. By these signs and symbols the public infers the actions
corporations intend to carry out. More than a wall plaque for the itinerant
visitor that inscribes the corporate mission, however, corporate offices are
also meant to transmit a host of intangibles – norms and values, for example –
that convey corporate essence. They are intended to convey more than corporate
mission, because the intangibles intended for transmission are instrumental for
those who are instrumental to the mission’s conduct.
Marshall
McLuhan famously coined the maxim ‘the medium is the message’ by which he meant
that linguistic content is never central to communication. Shaping and
propelling content was the medium that conveyed how the content was meant to be
interpreted, articulating the meaning for whom the content was intended.
Management functions analogously. It propels corporate mission amidst
intangibles that shape the corporate medium that is responsible for executing the
content of its mission. Corporate offices exhibit those intangibles in actions
that reveal through signs and symbols, intended and unintended, how value is
allocated; that is, how value is intensified or lessened, where or whom it is
directed to, and which norms are sacrificed in its stead.
In today's
allocation of value, it has become fashionable to view knowledge as 'the'
critical resource irrespective of economic sector or type of organization. By
contrast fixed tangible resources of the corporation are no longer a
sustainable source of competitive advantage. Davenport and Prusak explain this
central role of knowledge as a reservoir for novelty that grows continually
with investment
'Unlike material assets ... knowledge assets increase
with use: ideas breed new ideas, and shared knowledge stays with the giver
while it enriches the receiver'
Knowledge is valued for being more
than mere information. It is a process of guiding information manipulation.
Information that is so modified generates new meaning and new knowledge. By
extension, the process of manipulation is multiplied by the number of
individuals who are engaged in its use. Knowledge transfer is thus perceived by
management as a variable crucial to corporate vitality and viability. Indeed,
it has become akin to a physical law that resources are multiplied by knowledge
redistribution and whose use is predictive of corporate success.
For corporate
management this is a singular conception since it proposes to transpose a
difficult to measure, intangible asset into a visible metric crucial to
management’s role of sustaining the corporate enterprise and promoting
expansion. As a corollary, it means also that corporate vitality will depend on
how well management understands and implements this metric. For the well-disposed
corporate manager, gauging conformity to the law functions to guide management
behaviour. The evidence for this statement can be seen in numerous scholarly
articles concerned with knowledge transfer. A host of parameters now provide a
digitized and quantified portrait relating administrative oversight to
canalizing knowledge resonance through the corporate enterprise. Management
success is thereby gauged by the ability to manage parametric matrices that
index the most favourable regression correlation.
Two of the better-known
theories that have been used to predict outcome in managing knowledge transfer are
social cognition and social capital theories. According to these theories, personal relationships are a valuable resource because they promote knowledge
sharing and so can be exploited to enhance the distribution of knowledge within
the corporate structure. Hence, they predict that optimization of social
capital will enhance corporate performance through improved knowledge exchange.
Management, by inference, functions to optimize social capital.
Yet when the
theories are tested, Chin et a – among others – find that performance is
related to variables that have little to do with such social relations; e.g.,
focal efficacy, a variable related to outcome expectations, involves personal
and community endorsement, which are themselves antecedents of social capital.
That is, as antecedents that relate to the intrinsic value of the individual in
some form they are essential to performance. In fact, incentives premised on
extrinsic rewards that entail only self-interest, such as money and advanced
position, soon turn ineffective, whereas recognition engenders more long-lasting
investment in the corporation.
All this seems
to say that there is a significant factor influencing worker performance that
is not correlated with information manipulation and this factor is neglected to
the detriment of the corporate enterprise. That is, when management focusses on
the message of knowledge transfer alone it is conveying a normative position
about the working staff who will convey to the public corporate persona. The
signs and symbols of this kind of management are seen in the emphasis on the process
of parametricization that link corporate vitality to the numerical assessment
of knowledge redistribution, and which suborns the working staff to a medium
only,
It seems to
mean also that when management narrowly focusses on external indicators it is
misconceiving the nature of the corporate enterprise. Naughton, Alford and Brady,
for example, describe the corporate enterprise as a hierarchy of goods. They
identify the basic need of the corporate structure to survive; which, in their
words, motivates the need to sustain positive cash flow and attain to
profitability. However, they also characterize this as a lowest-level need, one
that meets only the minimal standards of basic goods provided by the
corporation. They point out that also present are higher goods constituted of
the corporate community. Corporate models that satisfy only a basic dimension
of profitability, in their view, have as primary objectives the satisfaction of
external parties alone, like that of stockholders. Other models, multifiduciary,
for instance, are mixtures of intermediate and lower goods, with the highest goods
provided by those corporations identifying a ‘common good’ recognized by the
corporate community as a whole, which is essential for its vitality. This existence of this latter seems a message
needing to be transferred to the corporation in its entirely and requiring that
it be made manifest by the management.
Complicating
management's task for manifesting the common good are a number of modern
hurdles, however. The need to maintain
corporate presence in a ‘global village’, to use another of Marshall McLuhan’s
phrases, invokes extended networks of staffing whose social relations and
communication rely solely on internet media. Globalization thus challenges the
corporate enterprise by limiting the very resources on which its vitality is
premised. That is, the corporate structure is assailed by a plethora of
influences that are not merely new and different in their formal expression
within the corporation, but which exist in a medium shared by external forces
that encroach on corporate membership. Consider, for example, that in today’s
globalized, internet community maximal knowledge transfer is already the
default position of the technology. Oxford's Floridi documents, for instance,
that for every person on the planet there are now 5 communication devices with
internet access. By extension, this means that knowledge transfer is already
maximized and that the law of multiplication is saturated, no longer an
effective criterion for gauging effective knowledge resourcing.
Equally
significant, knowledge transfer is often no longer the province of the corporation
alone but extends beyond corporate structures to enlist other entities,
thereby diminishing the ability to uniquely drive corporate prowess within the
business community. Shallot and Usoro characterize these diverging influences
as spontaneous and self-organizing, which they designate communities of
practice. Motivating the formation of these communities are shared interests
and expertise and the desire to participate in joint effort, goals also prioritized
by corporate staffing. Because they are self-organizing both membership and
lifespan are determined solely by member choice and allegiance. Accordingly,
their span lies beyond corporate boundaries, where, motivated by socialization,
knowledge transfer is extended.
The presence of
externalized knowledge transfer through vehicles like communities of practice
implies that the sort of social capital extending beyond the corporation is
unable to confine knowledge redistribution within the corporation; hence, it is
insufficient to sustain the ‘common good’ and perhaps even lower level goods,
that is, the corporate community as an effective reality. Accordingly, Stuart
and Usoro posit that it is not enough to rely on self-aggrandizement alone, of
the sort that may come from social satisfaction, either through personal
exchange, common interests, or similar motivating factors that enhance the
individual at the expense of the corporation as a valued entity. That is, the
corporate entity bears within itself a value that needs to be recognized and
endorsed by the staffing. In other words, there is a value congruence between
management and staffing that subsumes the value of knowledge transfer to that
invested in the corporate enterprise.
The recognition
of this valuation defines the ‘common good’ that Naughton, Alford, and Brady
speak of. Hence, it commits the virtual organization, despite its ethereal
reality, to a normative premise mutually accepted by staff and management that
is meant to bridge the divide of time, space, and even presence.
It is the
recognition of this corporate normativity that needs appealing to, and that the
signs and symbols management needs to resort to for evoking its recognition and
endorsement.
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