Power, rules of the game and the limits to knowledge management: lessons from Japan and Anglo-Saxon alarms

Much of the Knowledge Management (KM) literature assumes that all relevantknowledge can be represented as information and 'managed'. But the meaning of informationis always context-specific and open to subsequent reinierpretation. Moving over time or betweencontexts affords scope for new meanings to emerge. Making sense of information signals(speech, body language, tone-of-voice or whatever)-and the absence of such signals involvesdimensions of individual and collective tacit knowledge that are frequentlymisrepresented or ignored in mainstream KM. By relating power and knowledge to 'rules of thegame', it is possible to consider how the contexts in which information is rendered meaningfulare bounded, as well as crucially related in the stretch between macro-level processes and micro-levelpractices. In the knowledge debate, Japan stands as a counterfactual to Anglo-Saxonexpectations about formal rules, liberal individualism and market-rational entrepreneurship.While seminal accounts of knowledge creation in Japanese companies impelled the Westtowards KM, there has been no corresponding KM-boom in Japan. Our interpretation of theprocesses by which Japanese and Anglo-Saxon practices are situated suggests that KM islimited by the separation of knowledge from power and information from meaning.