Organisations in all spheres of industries are facing constant change and need to be innovative to carve out a competitive market share. Knowledge is universally recognised as the organisation’s most valuable asset and strategic resource. The competitive business environment is impelling organisations to utilise and strengthen their knowledge capital in order to manage these changes. The relationship between knowledge management and innovation is not well understood and there is a need to explicitly examine this relationship explicitly. The objective of this study is to focus on the internal environment of listed companies in South Africa and determine to what extent knowledge management practices can contribute to an organisational culture of innovation and whether or not these practices are antecedents to innovative behaviour by knowledge workers Senior members in these companies were contacted by email and requested to access a questionnaire that was available via a Web address and complete the questionnaire. All completed questionnaires were analysed, using Item analysis, multiple regression and discriminant analysis. Results show that knowledge management practices: the organisation's science and technology human capital profile and the organisation is flexible and opportunistic are important predictors of innovativeness in organisations that are perceived to have an organisational culture of innovation.

Study Supervisor: . Completed: 2008 / Purpose – To investigate the utilisation of intranet as a knowledge management (KM) tool in South African organisations Findings – The intranet is under utilised in many South African organisations, only 25 percent of the organisations represented in the survey has indicated to have been using the intranet as a tool to facilitate knowledge management. Most respondents indicated that emails and meetings were most effectively utilised as knowledge management tools in their respective organisations. The study also reveals that the content on the intranet is mainly focused on policies, employee contacts and communication bulletins. Employees do not contribute directly to the intranet content, hence the content on the intranet is mainly generic in nature; Information Technology (IT) teams, management and Human Resource (HR) teams are the main contributors of the intranet content. Research limitations/implications – Further research is needed to compare and deduce the benefits of utilising the intranet as a knowledge management tool with regard to business performance indexes such as, competitive advantage, market share, profits, long term growth, bottom line, sales, turnover, cost savings, etc.

Learning organizations is a concept which is little understood and researched in Southern Africa, particularly in Zimbabwe. The researcher chose the subject matter of learning organizations because she feels it is critical to the success of organizations. To date in most organizations the understanding of learning organizations and what they represent has been understood to a very small extent, if any at all. The concept of learning organizations has been researched and practiced mainly in the European and American parts of the world but not to the same extent in Africa. This paper seeks to examine, The extent to which organizations in Zimbabwe are learning organizations, a case study of BancABC.

The aim of the research was to investigate the prevalence of KM practices in The Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (DAFF) (focussing specifically on the Agricultural component of DAFF) to enable its delivery on its mandate by exploring DAFF’s position in relation to specific KM enablers. / Graduate School for Business Leadership / (M.B.A)

Philosophy / M.A.(Philosophy)

This study involved close observation of 26 pupils aged 9-14 years in four schools over a period of 12 weeks, and then a further study involving 111 secondary school pupils, carried out over three years. It investigated the influence of prior knowledge on children's understanding of ideas in science, in three related areas: evidence for and against the contention that pupils formulate 'alternative frameworks' of interpretation; the pupils' understanding of the purpose of their work; and the influence of context upon meaning. Findings include (1) a caution against the rigid postulation of alternative frameworks, (2) indications, nevertheless, that pupils do anticipate and explain observations by constructing tentative predictions from prior experience, and (3) evidence that pupils often invent their own purposeful aims for lessons. During the investigation several issues relating to the teacher as researcher emerged, and the thesis chiefly reports this over-riding aspect of the inquiry. The study highlights and appraises implications for teacher-researchers in the following areas: the theory base of the research; the choice of questions to be investigated; the choice of methods; means of improving reliability and validity; and the practical opportunities for teachers. The thesis suggests ways for teachers to guard against such dangers as eclecticism, subjectivity and lack of perception. It compares the strengths and weaknesses of qualitative methods, includes an interview checklist, and compares the contributions which teachers and non-teachers can make to research. The study also suggests the need to develop semi-structured interviews in classroom research, and argues for a combination of the expertise of teacher- researchers and professional research teams in tackling inquiry into concept development in science.

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Internet-based and mobile technologies enable new ways of learning. They offer us new possibilities to access an enormous amount of knowledge at any time and everywhere. Among many advantages, the adaptations require a rethinking of our previous learning behaviour patterns and processes. The challenge for students is no longer to get access to information and knowledge, but to select the right one and to deal with the information and knowledge overflow. The aim of this research is to define, design and validate an advanced concept to support the contemporary learning processes. Therefore, the requirements for a new approach have been assessed, the available solutions from the related area of (personal) Knowledge Management have been investigated, and the weaknesses in the context of learning identified. The identified issues have been substantiated by university students via a quantitative survey. Besides several smaller aspects, knowledge fragmentation and the nescience of the knowledge formation process have been classified as the most critical ones. To overcome these problems, a methodological concept has been developed, and a corresponding technological design created. The chosen approach is an intelligent, independent intermediate layer, which traces the different steps our knowledge entities are going through. Based on personal and individual configurations, the system provides a comprehensive and overall observation of nearly all our knowledge work activities. It supports the building and accessing of the knowledge formation paths for every important knowledge unit, later path combination and the access to automatically generated versions of our work. Moreover, it helps the users not only to remember what they did, but also gives them some strong indications why they did it. This is achieved by combining different knowledge actions and looking at the influences they have on each other. The suggested concept has been critically proved and confirmed via a qualitative expert analysis and backed up by a quantitative survey among university students.

Three related topics in probabilistic epistemology are studied. 1. Issues in the theory of rationality raised by cases in which eithermultiple doxastic attitudes would be warranted if you had them or none would. 2. The concept of credential deference, which lies behind David Lewis's Principal Principle, Bas van Fraassen's Reflection Principle, et al., is analyzed. Particular interest comes from considering agents who are not always certain what their own credences are. 3. The concept of conditional probability. It is argued that the ratio formula for conditional probability functions as an analytic constraint on what can count as conditional probability, yet the abiding interest of the concept stems from the different concrete relations that (often imperfectly) model this formula. The chapter traces the appearance of these concrete relations through the early centuries of probability theory, in which conditional probability went unrecognized as a distinct concept.

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