This introductory level textbook critically reviews and analyses the key themes underpinning knowledge management in organisations. It presents the key debates in this area, including coverage of epistemologies of knowledge, managing and sharing knowledge, and learning and innovation.

Knowledge management has been growing in importance and popularity as a research topic and business initiative. This book documents the key issues of knowledge management and serves as an useful resource for academicians, practitioners, researchers, and students.

Knowledge management (KM) is about managing the lifecycle of knowledge consisting of creating, storing, sharing and applying knowledge. Two main approaches towards KM are codification and personalization. The first focuses on capturing knowledge using technology and the latter on the process of socializing for sharing and creating knowledge. Social media are becoming very popular as individuals and also organizations learn how to use it. The primary applications of social media in a business context are marketing and recruitment. But there is also a huge potential for knowledge management in these organizations. For example, wikis can be used to collect organizational knowledge and social networking tools, which leads to exchanging new ideas and innovation. The interesting part of social media is that, by using them, one immediately starts to generate content that can be useful for the organization. Hence, they naturally combine the codification and personalisation approaches to KM. This book aims to provide an overview of new and innovative applications of social media and to report challenges that need to be solved. One example is the watering down of knowledge as a result of the use of organizational social media (Von Krogh, 2012).

Knowledge management (KM) is a set of relatively-new organizational activities that are aimed at improving knowledge, knowledge-related practices, organizational behaviors and decisions and organizational performance. KM focuses on knowledge processes—knowledge creation, acquisition, refinement, storage, transfer, sharing and utilization. These processes support organizational processes involving innovation, individual learning, collective learning and collaborative decision-making. The “intermediate outcomes” of KM are improved organizational behaviors, decisions, products, services, processes and relationships that enable the organization to improve its overall performance. Knowledge Management and Organizational Learning presents some 20 papers organized into five sections covering basic concepts of knowledge management; knowledge management issues; knowledge management applications; measurement and evaluation of knowledge management and organizational learning; and organizational learning.

Annotation Twenty essays present current research on knowledge management as related to effective design of new organization forms. The first section of the book covers frameworks, models, analyses, case studies and research on the integration of knowledge management within virtual organizations, virtual teams and virtual communities of practice. Themes covered in this section include business model innovation; design of virtual organization forms; net-based models; techniques for enabling knowledge capture, sharing and transfer; and collaboration and competition at intra- and inter-organizational levels. The focus of the second half is on key success factors that are important for realizing virtual models of business transformation. Topics include the role of organizational control systems, the role of internal and external employees and customers in creation of organizational knowledge, and information quality issues. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

Organizations of all sizes and types are facing a duel threat and opportunity. At the very moment when global markets are becoming available, these organizations are losing valuable people resources due to "boomer" retirements and downsizing strategies. As the technologies arrive to facilitate knowledge sharing across organizational and people boun