Knowledge markets in firms: knowledge sharing with trust and signalling

Knowledge sharing and learning are critically important to the success of knowledge management. In this research, we study the design of incentive rewards to facilitate knowledge transfer utilizing an internal knowledge market within organizations. The internal knowledge market is modelled as a marketplace where knowledge providers can send signals about their knowledge and learners may voluntarily acquire the knowledge based on the signals. Three types of knowledge recipients are differentiated with respect to their signalling threshold functions: knowledge connoisseur, knowledge public, and knowledge dilettante. In addition, a knowledge recipient may be either humble or arrogant, with different propensities for learning characterized by different learning inhibition cost functions. For different knowledge recipients, we study the knowledge providers’ best signalling strategies and the firm's optimal design of reward structures. Knowledge providers will adopt different signalling strategies if they lack the necessary trust that knowledge recipients will accurately report their learning. We analyse how the firm can offer learning rewards and employ IT support to improve the trust so as to increase knowledge transfer. This research provides valuable insights for practitioners to manage an internal knowledge market.     

Wind,Water, and Wi-Fi: New Trends in Community Informatics and Disaster Management

In emergencies, information sharing among and between officials, volunteers, and citizens is essential for effective recovery and management. Recently, volunteers and others have been using community technology centers, community wireless networks, and end-user social technologies such as blogs and Wikis to prepare for emergencies and communicate and coordinate response when they happen. This article argues that there is a need for a research agenda that combines our knowledge of community informatics with the principles of disaster management to understand how social networks form and mobilize in disasters and how information and communication technologies should be designed and deployed to engage, inform, and mobilize those volunteer and citizen networks.     

Recordkeeping in the Production of Scientific Knowledge: An Ethnographic Study

Recent scholarship in archival studies has employed “non-traditional” modes of analysis to theorize the nature of the record and recordkeeping in organizational contexts. In that tradition, this paper discusses the author's use of ethnographic methodology to study recordkeeping in one academic research laboratory. The paper explores how ethnography contributes to our understanding of the laboratory as a recordkeeping organization and the intersections of scientific practice and the kinds of records scientists create and use. The paper calls for more analysis of recordkeeping as an information infrastructure and inquiry into the nature of the record in other kinds of knowledge production environments.