Organizations Shared Knowledge Formation And Evolution Of Research

Since the upsurge of the research for corporate knowledge resource people have recognized that corporate knowledge has great influence to companies' failure or success. Many static definitions have settled for the notion simply focusing on the substantive content of knowledge, its structure and its effects on behavior. Much of these researches has been done vigorously on anthropology and placed emphases on how aspects of the knowledge are interpreted within the organization. Organization evolution theory has probed into the principle of organization development, focusing on its' evolution process and factors. The purpose of this article is to define the concept of corporate common knowledge in terms of a dynamic model of the evolution process of corporate knowledge and its influential factors.This dissertation starts with review of abundant literature, then it summarizes some key concepts about corporate knowledge, sets boundary of research subjects, clarifies the theoretical rationale of the research, and concludes evolutionary mechanism of the research subjects and its influential factors. Based on the efforts, this dissertation puts forward a conceptual model on the evolution process of corporate knowledge as well as the factors that influence them, trying to describe the corporate knowledge stage, the transition of the stage and it's transition mechanism. Accordingly, this paper chooses two companies as the empirical research objects. Through interviewing, this paper describes the evolution process of their corporate knowledge, and does some comparative analysis to demonstrate the practice value of this knowledge evolution model.Considering the theoretic model and the result of investigation and data analysis, we argue that the evolution process of corporate knowledge, is a process of knowledge transmission in the aspect of the tacit and the sharing degree of the corporate knowledge, from one stage to another, through natural evolution mechanism, which is initiated by the staff, and compulsive evolution mechanism, which is initiated by the environment. There are four main corporate knowledge stages in the organization evolution process: discrete knowledge, glue knowledge, explicit knowledge and system knowledge. In general, corporate knowledge goes through this four stages from glue knowledge to system knowledge. Through natural evolution mechanism, the corporate knowledge will lead to an equilibrium resulting, which may be in one of the four stages or in the transitional condition, and usually disrupted by the revolutionary periods, through compulsive evolution mechanism. The wholeprocess seems in punctuated equilibrium, evolving from one stage to another. There are five main factors influencing the evolution process of corporate knowledge: the change of entrepreneur' s concept, the main incidents of the firm, the change of staff' s character or demand (capability, education etc.), the change of the institution of the organization and the growth of the FT.