Background: The reason for conducting this master thesis within the field of knowledge management derived from the realization that there was a need for an increased understanding of the socio-cultural dynamics of the integration and transfer of knowledge in cross-functional new product development projects. Research advocates that organizations with organic project-based environments with fluid team boundaries may aggravate routine-based work and organizational memory, which in turn may lead to an organizations’ inability of capturing and storing existing personalized knowledge for internal storage and future transfer (Koskinen, 2004). For this reason, the conversion of knowledge for re-use between and within projects in an organization is not supported in a natural way (Lindner and Wald, 2011). To this end, organizational culture is critically important in facilitating a knowledge transfer culture within an organization that supports such knowledge conversion processes (Davenport and Prusak, 1998a). Thus, an increased understanding of the socio-cultural dynamics of knowledge integration and transfer in cross-functional projects is viewed as an opportunity to contribute with findings with interest in both industry and academia. Increasing the understanding of organizational culture’s role in knowledge conversion facilitation is particularly seen as an important research area in existing knowledge management research. The study aimed to produce a deeper understanding of these social processes by exploring and interpreting them in their real-life social contexts. Research question: How does organizational culture and knowledge management strategies support as well as hinder knowledge integration and transfer between cross-functional product development teams and specialists in a project-based organization? Purpose: To increase the understanding of the socio-cultural dynamics of knowledge integration and transfer in cross-functional projects. In order to study the socio-cultural elements, a case study in a global Swedish company engaged in new product development was conducted during the spring of 2016. Method: The research design of the study was case study. The empirical data was collected through face-to-face interviews, observations and studying of internal steering documentations. The author found it necessary to adopt an interpretivist epistemological position with a qualitative focus in alignment with employing abductive reasoning in order to understand the collected data and to explore the posed research question. Quality measures with respect to qualitative research studies were cautiously considered. Conclusion: This study found that an organization with a network-based knowledge culture and a standardized process with standards and routines for effective knowledge conversion processes are two sides of the same coin that can support the knowledge integration and transfer between cross-functional product development teams and specialists in a project-based organization. Further, both a single dominant organizational culture and multiple local cultures within an organization can both support and hinder the integration and transfer of knowledge. In extension to this finding, inconsistencies in the knowledge integration and transfer processes may evolve across these different cultural interpretations which may further support or hinder the social dynamics in an organization. Moreover, my study suggests that a network-based knowledge culture can interact with a standardized process in order to enable effective knowledge integration and transfer routines.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Saint Mary's University, 2009. / Includes abstract. Advisor: Albert J. Mills. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 325-352).

Wikipedia is no longer just another source of knowledge about the world. It is fast becoming a central source, used by other powerful knowledge brokers like Google and Bing to offer authoritative answers to search queries about people, places and things and as information infrastructure for a growing number of Web applications and services. Researchers have found that Wikipedia offers a skewed representation of the world that favours some groups at the expense of others so that representations on the platform have repercussions for the subjects of those representations beyond Wikipedia's domain. It becomes critical in this context to understand how exactly Wikipedia's representations come about, what practices give rise to them and what socio-technical arrangements lead to their expression. This ethnographic study of Wikipedia explores the values, principles and practices that guide what knowledge Wikipedia represents. It follows the foundational principles of Wikipedia in its identity both as an encyclopaedia and a product of the free and open source software and internet freedom rhetoric of the early 2000s. Two case studies are analysed against the backdrop of this ideology, illustrating how different sets of actors battle to extend or reject the boundaries of Wikipedia, and in doing so, affect who are defined as the experts, subjects and revolutionaries of the knowledge that is taken up. The findings of this thesis indicate that Wikipedia's process of decision-making is neither hierarchical nor is it egalitarian; rather, the power to represent on Wikipedia is rhizoid: it happens at the edges rather than in the centre of the network. Instead of everyone having the same power to represent their views on Wikipedia, those who understand how to perform and speak according to Wikipedia's complex technical, symbolic and policy vocabulary tend to prevail over those who possess disciplinary knowledge about the subject being represented. Wikipedians are no amateurs as many would have us believe; nor are they passive collectors of knowledge held in sources; Wikipedians are, instead, active co-creators of knowledge in the form of facts that they support using specially chosen sources. The authority of Wikipedia and Wikipedians is garnered through the performative acts of citation, through the ability of individual editors to construct the traces that represent citation, and through the stabilization and destabilization of facts according to the ideological viewpoints of its editors. In venerating and selecting certain sources among others, Wikipedians also serve to reaffirm traditional centres of authority, while at the same time amplifying new centres of knowledge and denying the authority of knowledge that is not codified in practice. As a result, Wikipedia is becoming the site of new centres of expertise and authoritative knowledge creation, and is signalling a move towards the professionalization of the expertise required to produce factual data in the context of digital networks.

Non-fiction film shares a long and relatively uncharted history with the museum. Today, filmmaking is a widespread yet critically neglected area of modern museological practice. This practice-based PhD situates itself within these critical gaps to examine the knowledge producing potential of film archives and film practice at the Manchester Museum. Its primary historical sources are a group of taxidermy objects at the Manchester Museum, an archive of 16mm acetate films at the North West Film Archive and a collection of travel journals at Cheshire Archives and Local Studies. These diverse collections were generated by Maurice Egerton, the 4th Baron of Tatton in Cheshire during his travels in Africa in the first decades of the twentieth century. This thesis brings all three together for the first time since their moment of production. These collections recur throughout the thesis as I ask how film archives can complicate and enrich our understanding of collections and how filmmaking practice might continue to bring new types of knowledge into the museum and archive. Two research films are submitted with and discussed within the thesis. The first, 'Living Worlds at the Manchester Museum', adapts observational methods from visual anthropology to record objects and staff during the re-display of the mammal gallery at the Manchester Museum in 2011. The second, 'Articulating Archives' is the result of a creative collaboration in 2014 with Year 8 secondary school students and the institutions and archives named above. Within the production and analyses of these films I draw on diverse critical sources to suggest that film can illuminate properties of materiality, embodied knowledge and performed engagement that textual accounts fall short of capturing.

Orientador: Sergio Ferreira do Amaral / Tese (doutorado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Faculdade de Educação / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-13T07:19:51Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Santos_GildenirCarolino_D.pdf: 4566029 bytes, checksum: 9b2ce0a20310e771ad8b8ed4b433abc5 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2008 / Resumo: O presente estudo, de caráter descritivo-análitico, com foco na pesquisa exploratória, analisa as percepções dos gestores, através de diretores e vice-diretores em 04 (quatro) escolas públicas e municipais de ensino fundamental e médio, sobre aspectos relacionados à administração pelas habilidades e competências de operar em suas escolas à rede BEDnet. O principal objetivo desse estudo é, a partir das percepções particulares investigadas, compreender o sentido do trabalho coletivo perante as habilidades apresentadas e o que o mesmo pode significar para as escolas públicas e municipais de ensino fundamental e médio ao ingressar na BEDnet, através da competência informacional. Foram empregados nos procedimentos de coleta de dados: entrevista, baseada no roteiro de entrevista de indicadores de desempenho, com ênfase na experiência de vida de cada sujeito pesquisado como gestor e; a aplicação de um questionário de afirmativas e respostas abertas contendo 15 questões e semi-estruturado a partir da noção de quatro grandes áreas de atividades (pessoal, profissional, tecnológico e gestão) relacionadas a seu conhecimento e administração da rede BEDnet. Por fim, estes procedimentos nos levaram a identificar as habilidades e competência informacional dos gestores como receptores e disseminadores de conhecimento na integração e compartilhamento do portal BEDnet. Finalmente, a investigação não se finaliza aqui, representa apenas uma etapa concluída de um estudo mais amplo, onde a metodologia apresentada poderá ser estendida e aplicada em escolas públicas, deficientes de bibliotecas escolares presenciais. O compartilhamento de saberes e união dos conhecimentos técnicos e teóricos dos bibliotecários, professore e alunos, demonstrarão que é possível aplicar na realidade a construção de um projeto social necessário para a complementação do ensino nos dias de hoje. / Abstract: This descriptive and analytical study, focusing on an exploratory research, analyses the perceptions of managers, through the views of 04 (four) public and municipal elementary and middle schools directors and vice directors, on issues related to the administration, skills and competencies to operate the network BEDnet in their schools. The main objective of this study is, starting from the individuals perceptions investigated, to understand the sense of collective work in face of the skills presented and the meaning for public and municipal elementary and middle schools to join the BEDnet through the informational competence. The procedures for data collection were: interviews, based on a previous plan of performance indicators, emphasizing the living experience of each subject searched as manager, and also, applying a half-structured questionnaire of affirmative and open answers containing 15 questions, starting from the notion of four major areas of activities (personal, professional, technological and management) related to their knowledge and network administration of BEDnet. Finally, these procedures led us to identify the skills and informational competence of managers, as receivers and disseminators of knowledge in the integration and sharing of BEDnet portal. Finally, the research does not end here, it represents a first step in a broader study, which methodology could be extended and applied in public schools, poor of school libraries. The sharing of the librarians¿ technical and theoretical knowledge, teachers and students, demonstrate that it is possible to implement a social project necessary to complement the education today. / Doutorado

The global business environment has changed dramatically in recent years, as competition in complex knowledge-based economies has increased. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems have been viewed as a way to manage increased business complexity, leading to the rapid adoption and implementation of such systems, as ERP can support enterprises to improve their competitiveness. Knowledge management (KM) is crucial for ERP systems implementation, however a highly demanding task. Therefore, the primary concern of this research is to examine the effectiveness of knowledge management activities that would contribute to achieve ERP implementation success. This study adopted mixed methods approach by combining semi-structured interviews and a questionnaire to collect empirical data from ERP professionals in both manufacturing and service sector organisations. In the qualitative phase, it develops the “framework of integrative knowledge” based on empirical evidence, that can improve KM competence for ERP implementation success. Data analysis has been undertaken using a combination of thematic analysis and comparative analysis with respect to 14 ERP implementations in the UK. The framework integrates multiple perspectives in terms of knowledge components to enhance KM competence, including knowledge types, knowledge layers, KM lifecycle and knowledge determinants. It discovered 19 knowledge determinants to drive knowledge management activities during ERP projects, which is another vital contribution to the existing knowledge. Furthermore, the study develops the “knowledge network model” for ERP implementations in order to facilitate the knowledge flows between various stakeholders involved in ERP implementations, which can help to understand the interactions between the knowledge components. Moreover, sub-knowledge types (knowledge elements) under each knowledge type were discovered through empirical evidence. The quantitative phase was adopted to extend the findings of the qualitative phase. The knowledge types and knowledge elements were prioritised using Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method through an online AHP based questionnaire with 77 responses from ERP professionals involved in UK ERP implementations. Furthermore, knowledge prioritisation demonstrates how effectively the framework of integrative knowledge can be used during ERP implementations with the help of prioritised knowledge. In total 4 knowledge types and 21 knowledge elements were ranked based on their contribution to achieve ERP success; four variables of information quality, systems quality, individual impact and organisational impact were used to measure ERP success. This study has number of theoretical contributions including framework of integrative knowledge, knowledge network model for ERP implementations and ERP knowledge prioritisation. Moreover, the framework of integrative knowledge can provide ERP practitioners with useful guidance on what the key knowledge determinants are and how the relationships between knowledge components should be best managed to achieve ERP implementation success in business reality.

To counter hybrid threats – for example, international terrorism, transnational organised crime and (cyber-)attacks – security and intelligence communities increasingly gather, process and exchange vast amounts of data on presumably suspect individuals. This trend has been enabled by recent developments in surveillance capacities related to Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs). As a result, cross-border data transfers have become not only an element of international trade but also an important component of law enforcement strategies. Nevertheless, the exchange of data for policing purposes is not always smooth. Rather, there are frictions that emerge therein as well as technical and legal issues relating to the combination of data from different information systems and under different formats. This study advances the concept of data lifecycle in relation to the practices, such as the collection, entry, processing, storing, and analysis that direct data in specific ways to create multiple “cycles” of uses. Through the analytical lens of the lifecycle I aim to examine specifically how data are repurposed, not only by digital technologies, but also by provisions regulating access, storage and use of information for criminal matters. The core task consists in identifying the socio-political, legal and technical conditions of possibility that allow for the exchange of data at the pan-European level. By bringing together multiple conceptual and methodological subfields, I shed light on the politicality of EU data infrastructures that appear physically very remote or less visible, yet in a way that people do not realise how mundane they have become. Investigating the data lifecycle as a network of practices generates findings that are useful for understanding how security is enacted through the collection and use of different forms of data and hence for interpreting the evolving landscape of data-driven security governance in the EU.