Critical Rationalist Knowledge Management

Distance Learning Workshop 14: Critical Rationalist Knowledge Management

As a formal discipline, Knowledge Management is very young. And many of its practitioners would even deny that it is a formal discipline. So it's not surprising that there haven't been very many clearly recognizable conceptual approaches to it that have gained currency and popularity. In the Gateway Workshop, the distinction between First and Second Generation KM was emphasized and the point was made that Second Generation KM focuses on enhancing both how we make new knowledge and how we integrate it our organizations. Among conceptual approaches to Second Generation KM, there are only three that have gained adherents beyond the authors of the approaches themselves. These are the Knowledge Creation Approach, the Complex Systems Approach, and The Critical Rationalist Approach (which, as developed in KM, also incorporates complexity theory).

Of the three, the Knowledge Creation approach is probably most popular, and has had the most exploration in KM. The complex systems approach has had a lesser number of adherents, but probably more have been trained in it than in the Critical Rationalist (CR) Approach. This Workshop, however, will focus on CR, because (1) it is growing, (2) it provides a vision for KM, (3) it provides a strong combination of both epistemology and ontology for KM, and (4) it is motivating an increasing amount of good KM-related work in universities that promises to influence future generations of theory and practice in industry. The Workshop will cover:

The General Outlook of CR
The Meta-contexts of Justificationism and Criticalism
The Tetradic Schema and the Knowledge Life Cycle
Emergence, Complexity, and Evolutionary Epistemology
Objective Knowledge
The Idea of the Ecology of Rationality and KM
Visions for KM

Open Teams

Communities of Inquiry

The Open Enterprise

Knowledge Zones and Knowledge Cities

The Open Society

Critical Rationalist Knowledge Management

The Workshop Syllabus is available here.

The Workshop is taught by Joseph M. Firestone, Ph.D. Dr. Firestone's credentials are available here.

Text and other materials for the workshop include:

Karl Popper (1999), All Life Is Problem Solving, New York, NY: Routledge

Joseph M. Firestone and Mark W. McElroy (2003), “Corporate Epistemology: Competing Philosophies of Truth in Business and How They Influence Knowledge Management,” available at:
http://www.kmci.org/media/Corporate_Epistemology.pdf

Joseph M. Firestone and Mark W. McElroy (2003), Key Issues in the New Knowledge Management, Burlington, MA: KMCI Press/Butterworth-Heinemann.

Joseph M. Firestone and Mark W. McElroy (2003) Excerpt #1 from The Open Enterprise: Building Business Architectures for Openness and Sustainable Innovation, Hartland Four Corners, VT: KMCI Online Press, available at: http://www.dkms.com/papers/
openenterpriseexcerptnumb1final.pdf

Joseph M. Firestone (2003), “How Knowledge Management Can Help Identify and Bridge Knowledge Gaps,” An EIS Professional Paper, Wilmington, DE: Executive Information Systems, Inc., 2003, available at: http://www.dkms.com/professionalpapers.htm

Joseph M. Firestone's forthcoming book, Riskonomics: Reducing Risk by Killing Your Worst Ideas (.pdf file)

In addition, a set of extensive course notes will be provided, and a
Certificate of Workshop Completion will be issued upon completion of this Workshop.

The Workshop is available weekly on Tuesdays and Thursdays. You can reserve it one week or earlier from the date you want to take it. After that time, you may still be able to enroll in the Workshop, if others have already scheduled it. But if it hasn't been scheduled, you still may not be able to enroll if another workshop has been scheduled for the same day. Register here for the Critical Rationalist Knowledge Management Workshop.