Emerging Autopoietic Communities - Scalability of Knowledge Transfer in Complex Systems

Abstract

Abstract-Knowledge-based communities are important but poorly understood systems for helping enterprises maintain their organizational integrity and address organizational imperatives. Based on an autopoietic theory of organization, we examine the emergence and development of knowledge-based communities at different scales up to large distributed enterprises and industry clusters. Knowledge-based communities are highly complex systems that evolve and mature through the phased emergence of new features and capabilities. Development and support of successfully sustainable communities needs to be based on a better understanding of how these features and capabilities emerge. To comprehend the impact of emergent behavior within and beyond organizational communities requires an understanding of the social or sociological aspects of a system in relation to the explicit formal/physical structures in the organization.

Social Networking Tools for Knowledge-Based Action Groups

“…The networks define complex adaptive systems at different hierarchical levels of organization from local groups, formal organizations and governing bodies. Many of these bodies have properties allowing them to be considered autopoietic (i.e., living [33], see Section 2.3) at a level of hierarchical organization above individual people and below economic or statutory organizations [18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41].…”

“…Within large social systems, action groups can emerge from networks of people with interests in particular problem areas [12,16,25]. However, there is a large gap between the emergence of an action group and assembling its members' personal knowledge into coherent objective knowledge to support rational decisions by a bureaucrat or functionary.…”

“…We have argued elsewhere that cells, people, organizations and other entities in the complex systems hierarchy of the biological world are all autopoietic or living [18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25]. Autopoiesis (= "self" + "production") is a condition of a complex dynamical system at any level of structural organization that gives it the autonomous ability within its environment to self-produce and maintain its dynamic state of organization.…”

Textual representations and knowledge support-systems in research intensive networks

“…Personal tacit knowledge may be shared to become 'common tacit knowledge' (Nousala 2006;Nousala, Hall and John 2007). For example, apprenticeships, 'grapevines', 'rumour mills' and undocumented routines-'that's the way we do things here'-all provide examples of how 'personal knowledge' can be transferred and made 'common' without being made explicit.…”

“…Also, for various reasons, researchers may not want to explicitly advertise their expertise (Ardichvili 2008;Bock et al 2005), because they may fear this might diminish their own particular position, they may not welcome critiquing of their professional expertise that could arise if they make their expertise explicit, or they simply may not wish to be bothered by people asking for help. On top of this, even where people are willing to share, there may still be limitations to sharing because of the principle of bounded rationality (Else 2004;Hall et al 2007;Nousala 2006;Nousala et al 2005Nousala et al , 2009Simon 1979;Snowden 2002). That is, people cannot share all that they know, and sharing invariably results in some loss of knowledge.…”