The Australian Army’s knowledge management strategy: a reflexive organizational approach to knowledge capture and sharing

Establishing the art of contextualizing management ideas and panaceas as a research field

“…third, there is already a research tradition aiming at putting certain management ideas and panaceas into context. examples include the adaptation of supply chain management to make it fit tanzanian small and medium sized enterprises (sMes) (Hamisi 2011); the adaptation of the learning organization to make it fit schools (kinder 2002), elderly care organizations (abrahamson Löfström 2013), Islamic organizations (ahmad 2013), and higher educational institutions (HeIs) (Watkins 2005; Örtenblad and koris 2014); the adaptation of knowledge management to make it fit chinese organizations (Mitra and Ruan 2014), Mexican organizations (delgado-Hernández 2014), the army (Mcdowell et al 2014), indigenous organizations (Lwoga et al 2014), and energy sector organizations (edwards 2014); and the adaptation of corporate social responsibility (csR) to make it fit the shipping industry (Lekakou et al forthcoming) and organizations in developing countries (Jamali and karam forthcoming). Possibly, these works could be regarded as having been conducted in response to more or less explicit calls for context-adapted models of various management ideas and panaceas from, for instance, sorge and Van Witteloostuijn (2004) who suggested that management ideas may make tangible contributions, but only after they have been adapted; and Mamman (2002), who argued that modification of management ideas/ panaceas is inevitable, taking into account the characteristics of the idea in question and the organization's internal and external contingencies, and advocated the need for versions of management ideas accommodating the diversity of organizations.…”