Summary

Two themes have become epicenters of new management thinking in the late 1990s: knowledge management and competence-based approaches to strategic management. These two themes share a common interest in identifying important forms of organizational knowledge and in understanding processes through which knowledge can be transformed into organizational capabilities and competences.Knowledge Management and Organizational Competence draws on the latest research by a number of noted management scholars. It presents new insights into various kinds of knowledge that are of value to organizations, organizational interactions that can create strategically useful knowledge, alternative processes for managing knowledge, and approaches to integrating key forms of knowledge into organizational processes of competence building and leveraging. The papers in the volume collectively define a powerful conceptual framework for understanding organizational knowledge and its central role in building and leveraging competences. They present well articulated, logically consistent conceptualizations that will provide new theoretical impetus for management researchers, while at the same time providing case studies and examples of practical applications that suggest useful new methods and tools for management practitioners.