In most of the approaches to knowledge management, organizational learning and strategy generation and implementation knowledge is understood primarily as some good, something with certain attributes that has certain determinants and consequences and that needs to be managed, distributed, stored, validated, and used most efficiently and effectively. While such an understanding of knowledge and its production has served us well and has certainly been a major bases for the development of new information technology and its innumerable uses, it has also been overly restrictive in being able to deal with many of the new challenges with which organizations are faced in the process of globalization, an enormously increased speed of change, and an increasingly complex interdependence among a large number of stakeholders.
Particularly, the social processes and its epistemological bases have hardly been addressed with respect to knowledge generation in general and its functions within and between different organizational actors. As a result methodological individualism and entitative epistemological meta frameworks have dominated the explanations of knowledge generation and therefore limited the potential of possible alternative social actions with respect to knowledge management, knowledge generation and strategy finding and its implementation.
The present paper attempts to outline an alternative conceptual approach whose focus is less on the individual actors (or their aggregation), their attributes and behavioral potentials, but on the social processes and underlying epistemological taken for granteds on the basis of which a certain understanding is given the stamp of truth and becomes the local reality, defining that which is the case, normal, rational, ethical, objective and in that sense self-evident. It is suggested that such a social process approach allows for alternative problem perspectives and potentially different approaches to some of the challenges faced by today's organizations. Secondly, on the basis of a social process approach, knowledge generation is shown to be fundamentally a political and power process which has until now been hardly discussed with respect to its consequences on knowledge generation and its management. Finally, some of the possible implications for the scientific as well as managerial discourses on knowledge generation and its management will be discussed.