Knowledge transfer in management: the problem statement

An approach to knowledge transfer has dramatically transformed through the 20th century. While it was initially commonly regarded that knowledge transfers only between individuals, in 1960s the focus moved on how this process goes between organizations as well as individuals. In 1990s knowledge transfer became a managerial process. As for now, researchers face new question: what is knowledge which transfer is to be managed and what properties does it have? Knowledge management investigators adopted several answers to such a question, but, unfortunately, did not sufficiently grounded their choices. This paper argues that to solve such a question means to find out what definition of knowledge is implicitly used in knowledge management theory and practice. To do so, it should be clarified how the theory in which knowledge management originated defines knowledge and its properties. This paper shows that knowledge management has arisen from social constructionism. That means that the former applies to knowledge as being organizational, embodied, pragmatic and constructive. Thus, an approach to knowledge transfer implicitly used in knowledge management theory and practice can be described as «embodied knowledge approach». According to it, knowledge always exists in activity of a person or an organization so that to have knowledge successfully transferred means to reconstruct the context of activities in which the knowledge was initially embodied. The results of this paper would be important for both epistemology and knowledge management because they provide a linkage between both subject fields.