Releasing Knowledge for Practice in Human and Social Service Organizations 3031160975, 9783031160974

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Releasing Knowledge for Practice in Human and Social Service Organizations

David P. Moxley

Releasing Knowledge for Practice in Human and Social Service Organizations

David P. Moxley

Releasing Knowledge for Practice in Human and Social Service Organizations

David P. Moxley School of Social Work University of Alaska Anchorage Anchorage, AK, USA

ISBN 978-3-031-16097-4    ISBN 978-3-031-16098-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16098-1 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Pattern © Harvey Loake This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To the man I met in December at the intersection of 36th and C Street who showed me in stark reality what it means to be a soul in extremis. “Don’t talk to me about homelessness. Follow me, the December man, and I will show you all its nastiness. I will show you the entire face of homelessness. Descend with me. Seeing is better than talking. I can show you homelessness and all of its terror. You will cry. And when you cry, you will know.”

Abstract

The focus of this Palgrave Pivot is the knowledge management system of the human service organization. The monograph engages the distinctive features of human services as a social institution within society and underscores the human services domain as a knowledge-intensive sector. Knowledge intensivity as a theme cuts across the monograph and serves as a red thread organizing the monograph’s seven chapters. The chapters foster readers’ reflection on the knowledge management system of a human service organization. Each chapter incorporates actions for knowledge management so readers can consider the applicability of a chapter’s guidance for the development of their organization’s knowledge management system. After an orientation of the reader to the human services institution and domain in Chap. 1, I introduce readers to the relevance of knowledge management as an organizational system. I make a case for the idea of a knowledge system as a principal way organizations can meet accountability requirements that external entities exhort, exert and require, often times in the form of accreditation and regulatory standards. More importantly, the knowledge management system within a human service organization can advance the organization’s use of best practices or the state of the art, and advance the organization’s appreciation of its intrinsic innovation. It is this intrinsic innovation that may become an important focus of adoption by other human services in the advancement of their own knowledge systems they achieve through emulation and other social learning processes. The expression of innovation may not only come in the form of words (Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, The art and vii

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science of portraiture. Jossey-Bass, 1997). Other approaches capture the intrinsic—visual, the arts in its many forms, and technics. The content of Chap. 3 can deepen readers’ appreciation of the tools of knowledge management that build on the foundations the book offers in Chaps. 1 and 2. Those tools set the stage for deliberate efforts the organization makes in either importing knowledge, especially in the form of practice and in practice technologies, from other organizations, experts, models prescribed by principal funders, and professional groups. And those tools can facilitate how human service organizations can export knowledge to other organizations. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 engage the core competencies of organizational knowledge management in the human services and the capabilities the organization requires to build its own distinctive practice knowledge, often based on the analysis of mission, vision, values, and principles of practice. Chapter 4 addresses the structuring of organizational knowledge systems in human services that involves the interplay between the formal and informal structures of the organization and the liberation of practice knowledge within various members and structures of the organization. Chapters 5 and 6 link conceptual aspects of the knowledge system including dimensions and competencies with the capacities of the system. These chapters offer readers key ideas for producing an operational knowledge management system that can evolve based on an organization’s efforts to appreciate, translate, enact, and confirm (ATEC) what it comes to know in its sphere of human services. Chapter 7 offers a synthesis of the knowledge transformation process. A virtue of this synthesis is its respect for multiple sources and expressions of practice knowledge, which I identify as tacit, indigenous, or canonical. Within and across the chapters, I communicate my humility about knowledge management within the human services domain and within human service organizations. Although I may speak to the aims of unifying practice within an organization through knowledge management, and in searching for a tentative certainty about practice, I freely admit that knowledge of practice is uncertain, and easily surpassed through the introduction of new practice knowledge. Thus, whether informal or formal, an organization’s knowledge management system is dynamic and hopefully evolving as it engages and resolves challenges facing the human services domain, facing practitioners, and recipients, a virtue of the internal change process organizations can embrace.

Contents

1 Knowledge Management in the Human Service Domain  1 2 The Relevance of Organizational Knowledge Management  9 3 Societal,  Social, Technical, and Organizational Aspects of Knowledge Management 21 4 Structuring the Knowledge Management System 41 5 Dimensions  and Competencies of the Knowledge Management System 63 6 Capacities  for Knowledge Management in the Human Services 99 7 Conclusion:  Releasing Knowledge for Practice Advancement Through Transformative Action117 Index125

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List of Figures

Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2 Fig. 7.1

Competencies, capacities, and properties of knowledge management110 Organizational emergence of knowledge management 111 Releasing knowledge through transformative action 121

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CHAPTER 1

Knowledge Management in the Human Service Domain

Abstract  The chapter addresses the central focus of the monograph: that human services and human services organizations operate within a knowledge intensive domain, and incorporate considerable diversity or variation in their practices. The domain itself is quite diverse incorporating different types of organizations including nongovernmental, nonprofit, public and for profit entities. Knowledge management can become an organizational strategy embodied in a system that supports innovation, especially intrinsic innovation, which is defined by the organization itself in terms of its significance for the advancement of practice. The unification of knowledge within an organization, particularly for the advancement of practice, brings professionals and other stakeholders into a common effort to define together what constitutes good, ethical, and potentially effective action in responding to the causes and consequences of serious social issues. Keywords  Human services • Knowledge management • Transdisciplinary • Social development

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. P. Moxley, Releasing Knowledge for Practice in Human and Social Service Organizations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16098-1_1

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The Human Service Domain In this monograph, I underscore the importance of the human service domain in society. It is not a trivial domain since it involves numerous and diverse organizations that are positioned to address and hopefully fulfill human need in positive and productive ways, mindful that people’s lives are at stake. Inherent in the human services is the idea of vulnerability, marginalization, oppression, and risk. I use these terms with some caution so I do not unfairly stigmatize those whose unfulfilled needs compromise their health and well-being. Those needs implicate the centrality of income, affiliation, housing, health care, preparation for employment, and development of human capacities, or what Nussbaum (2011) refer to as capabilities. Many of these needs are fulfilled or at least addressed through the human service domain or perhaps the social institution of human services for those of us who believe that these kinds of entities are now a standing and permanent structure of a society. The organizations that crystallize from this institution or that populate it are quite diverse since they reflect the complexity of human needs in any given society. Traditionally, human services operate in major subdomains involving but not limited to child welfare, income provision, rehabilitation, health, education or socialization, mental or behavioral health care, and substance use treatment. Many of these traditional organizations address vulnerable populations whose members receive some kind of priority within the domain of human services. These include people with disabilities, veterans, people coping with serious mental health issues, those coping with developmental disabilities, the elderly, and those coping with serious health issues, some of which emanate from infectious disease, while others form from societal neglect. When I invoke the idea of coping, I am including those factors that are primary in nature, such as ill health. But even here I must be cautious since coping likely involves people’s efforts to deal with the societal response to the issues they face. In this sense, societal negative responses can add considerably to the burden of coping people can and likely experience. As I delve into human services within this volume, I remain mindful of their complexity. Most are organizationally based with the majority of them operating under nongovernmental, quasi-public, or public auspices. Others, perhaps an important minority, operate as for profit entities. In

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this volume, I am concerned with those human services entities that are nongovernmental in character. However, sometimes it is a challenge to characterize a particular type of organization since it can blend multiple organizational forms into a complex entity. Witness those organizations that combine for profit and nonprofit approaches. The structure of human service organizations is one aspect. Other aspects include their financing, regulation, processes, products, including outcomes, and community and societal impact. Combining and blending these aspects can be artful as a human service organization pieces together a functional whole from often times disparate elements, each of which can possess their own environmental niche and linkages to regulation, funding, and standards. Imagine the human service organization that forms as a matrix with one dimension involving priority populations, such as those with disabilities, older people, and those coping with economic displacement. For strategic, managerial, and administrative purposes, the organizations populates this dimension with considerable diversity. Yet another dimension can include geography, the communities that the organization covers including urban, suburban, ex-urban, rural, remote and frontier areas. And, yet another dimension arrays the technologies for helping. A framework governs the organization as a whole, and a super-ordinate administrative structure may guide the organization in its daily operations and in its short- and long-range development. Still some human service organizations may focus on a given community or place, and address the entire scope of human need within this place. These place-based entities likely take on the character of their local community absorbing local culture and patterns of daily live. They operate as what Perlmutter referred to as local alternative institutions, small in size, complex in mission, and devoted to the pursuit of advancing standard of living and quality of life within the place in which it serves as an on-going source of innovation. Social development aims come to define these place-­ based and place-focused organizations and they adopt action to address needs broadly conceived within a particular geography (Simeon et  al., 2019). The social development approach is prevalent in Africa and Southcentral Asia, but emerging elsewhere across the globe. The nongovernmental organizations emerging from a regional or national framework of social development are very distinctive. Their mission is likely the development of community capabilities. These capabilities are central to facilitating people’s movement out of poverty, health,

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income, and housing. They are particularly adept in improving local infrastructure and in developing local capabilities in the face of the failure of government and business to address the needs of the residents of particular communities. Such organizations engage in the intensive use and creation of knowledge through their investments in public health, food supply, clean and potable water, and income producing efforts (Kebede & Butterfield, 2021). Their notability is found in their efforts to stand ready as a principal local organization that people can count on, commit to, and benefit from. Hasenfeld’s (1972) work deciphers human services by analyzing their discrete purposes. His work highlights how human service organizations likely embody what he calls human processing qualities. His early work underscores how human services process people in relationship to receipt of eligibility and access to benefits including goods, services, and opportunities. Human service organizations can also transform people from dependency to independence, from illness to health, from homeless to housed, from illiterate to literate, and from unemployed to employed (Hasenfeld, 1974). In his later work, Hasenfeld (2005) engages the hybridization of human service organizations and the emergence of complex entities that fulfill a broad scope of human need, focus on multiple priority populations, and incorporate complex helping processes.

Human Services and the Potential of Knowledge Management I approach the potential of knowledge management within this volume as a principal organizational strategy and set of competencies organizations can consider in the advancement of their societal purpose, effectiveness, and impact. I underscore potential in this volume since I do not offer dense empirical prescriptions. Rather, I seek to open the field of consideration and practice through an engagement of why and how human service organizations can build knowledge for the common or greater good. Here I assume that human service organizations are active or latent innovators in society. They approach innovation as a purposeful commitment to advancing the common or greater good and, as a result, they reflect a principal investment by a society in social betterment. Many of us

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can argue whether this occurs in actuality, but I am somewhat of an idealist in this volume. I see nongovernmental organizations as a principal conduit of social innovation. I follow Ackoff and his colleague’s commitment to idealized organizational design (Ackoff et  al., 2006) and Montfort’s concept of human-­ centered design (2017) in this volume. The idealization of organizational purpose and processes places the organization in its near and distant future so that it can anticipate what it is to become. This means that many nongovernmental organizations, especially ones in human services, are pursing knowledge to advance what they do in the fulfillment of their missions and the realization of vision (Liedtka et al., 2017). Although these efforts may result in organizational prosperity, the more important gain in human services resides in the advancement of the quality of life, particularly for those groups that society may fail. Within this volume, readers will find rumblings of contributions to knowledge management by business and public administration. You will see the importance of social marketing, product design, implementation science, and co-production, now popular in public administration as it seeks to involve various publics in the design and deployment of technologies for advancing the public good. Readers, however, will also find contributions by social administration, social work, and other human service disciplines, such as counseling and rehabilitation science. And, readers will see the contributions to knowledge management by information and library science. In particular, library science contributes key concepts to the organization and advancement of organizational knowledge including taxonomies, templates, and ontologies. These three tools reflect the technical aspects of knowledge management involving organizing knowledge (taxonomies), structuring particular protocols in organizational knowledge (templates), and organizing a theory of action (ontologies) (Abbas, 2010). We can add the contributions by the research and development paradigm including the analysis of context in which innovation is needed, conducting state of the art reviews, capturing tacit knowledge within an organization, using prescriptive knowledge (by experts or officials) in design and implementation, and prototyping for advancing practice through the utilization of knowledge. In addition, we can come to appreciate the importance of communities of practice, and the organization of work at the level of individuals and groups. Crawford’s (2009) idea of “Shop class as soulcraft” reminds us

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that practitioners, including craftspeople, artists and servers, use knowledge for the advancement of their purpose. Making this knowledge systematic so that others can use and benefit from it are important aims of knowledge management (Abbas, 2010).

Knowledge Management in Transdisciplinary and Interprofessional Practice I do not endorse any one discipline in formulating ideas about knowledge management practice. No one discipline or profession has a monopoly in thinking about knowledge management and its practice. I do underscore that knowledge management is transdisciplinary. What I come to call a knowledge management system is and can be informed by different practices introduced by multiple disciplines and professions, and their practitioners. Human services has evolved over the decades from a multidisciplinary matrix of professions working on different aspects of a person’s being and functioning to eventually embrace an interdisciplinary approach. This interdisciplinary approach implicates a blending of multiple professional or disciplinary perspectives into a unitary approach while the various professions maintain their identities, distinctive practices, and claims to authority. This interdisciplinary approach persists, but transdisciplinary approaches are now ascending. We can discover a consolidation and blending of best practices within a transdisciplinary framework that supersede any one discipline or profession. In other words, there is increasingly a common knowledge base to advance a purpose or mission of human services so that the edges separating professions/disciplines and struggles between various professions, and between professions and recipients, the intended beneficiaries of human services, fade. As edges yield to blending, and as power differentials end, human services become a composite of efforts to bring about a common set of outcomes, such as advancing people’s quality of environment, standard of living, quality of day, and ultimately quality of life. Interprofessional practice can embrace this emerging unity involving the location and advancement of solutions that lead to social betterment at individual, group, community, and societal levels. Indeed, as I have argued elsewhere, interprofessional ethics require human service

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professionals to find a common base of understanding and action. In this sense, ethics evolve from the intersection of the professions whose members jointly take action using a common world view. A principal aim I seek in this volume involves explicating knowledge management for advancing conscious engagement in action that the organization undertakes for advancing the public or common good, or the good for particular groups. And, as you, my reader will discover, such an aim requires social innovation, which serves as the subtext of this entire volume. The red thread of innovation runs through the monograph since breaking through to new practices is an essential strategy for meeting human needs, particularly of those individuals whose needs likely go unrecognized, go unmet or are seen as unimportant (Harvard Business Review, 2019).

Action for Knowledge Management The following are some ideas for putting ideas in this chapter to use in a human service organization: 1. Assume that the organization is an innovator, and appreciate the sources of innovation within individuals, teams, informal groups, and relationships the organization maintains with other sources, such as universities, senior practitioners, early career practitioners, recipients who understand benefits of assistance, and researchers. 2. Document how the organization addresses the needs of recipients, and appreciate how the organizations and its members meet those needs. 3. Appreciate how the organization creates knowledge for practice, and for the administration of practice. Identify how the organization creates knowledge for practice in its daily work. 4. Although discipline or profession based knowledge is important, encourage the organization to investigate how it engages in interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and interprofessional practice strategies. 5. Underscore the importance of building the knowledge base(s) of the organization and release appreciation of “what we know that can and does improve people’s lives” as a principal strategy of organizational action.

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References Abbas, J. (2010). Structures for organizing knowledge: Exploring taxonomies, ontologies, and other schemas. Neal-Schuman. Ackoff, R. L., Masidson, J., & Addison, H. J. (2006). Idealized design: Creating an organization’s future. Prentice-Hall. Crawford, M.  B. (2009). Shop class as soulcraft: An inquiry into the value of work. Penguin. Harvard Business Review. (2019). On business model innovation. Author. Hasenfeld, Y. (1972). People processing organizations: An exchange approach. American Sociological Review, 37, 256–263. Hasenfeld, Y. (1974). Human service organizations: A conceptual overview. In Y. Hasenfeld & R. A. English (eds), Human Service Organizations (pp. 1–23). Ann Arbor, MI: University of MIchigan Press. Hasenfeld, Y. (2005). Understanding multi-purpose hybrid voluntary organizations. Journal of Civil Society, 1, 97–112. Kebede, W., & Butterfield, A. (Eds.). (2021). Incorporating engaged research in social development. iUniverse. Liedtka, R., Salzman, R., & Azer, D. (2017). Design thinking for the greater good. Columbia University Press. Montfort, N. (2017). The future. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Nussbaum, M. C. (2011). Creating capabilities: The human development approach. Belknap Harvard. Simeon, A., Butterfield, A., & Moxley, D. (2019). Locality-based social development: A theoretical perspective for social work. In M.  Payne & E.  R. Hall (Eds.), Routledge handbook of social work theory (pp. 294–307). Routledge.

CHAPTER 2

The Relevance of Organizational Knowledge Management

Abstract  The author develops the idea of narrative, an organized and storied approach to capturing what human service professionals and stakeholders come to know about their practice and its enactment. Narratives themselves are varied, and often link to the location of organizational members who imbue their stories with considerable perspective on why, how, and under what conditions they undertake practice. Conflict in knowing reflects the imperfect nature of practice knowledge, and although unity in action is important, there are numerous organizational forces offsetting the realization of certainty. Unifying practice is not necessarily elusive, it is challenging to find common ways of knowing that steers the action of human service practitioners within organizational units or the organization as a whole. Keywords  Narrative • Political • Perspective • Contested knowledge

The Importance of Knowledge Management The importance of knowledge management in social and human service is twofold. Knowledge management is about an organization managing what it knows in order to achieve more competent and more effective © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. P. Moxley, Releasing Knowledge for Practice in Human and Social Service Organizations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16098-1_2

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performance. It also is about how domains and fields of practice may transform themselves over time through the purposeful creation and destruction of knowledge. Knowledge management can be a cornerstone of today’s human service organizations and may be a principal strategy for effecting innovation and evolution in the ways societies address and meet human needs. Nonetheless, there is no unitary form of knowledge within human and social services, and much of the knowledge base of this or any other particular field or domain is open to criticism by those who seek to challenge the status quo and offer different perspectives on the nature and substance of human needs and the manner in which to fulfill them. Most knowledge within this sector emerges within organizations in which human service professionals interact with colleagues, administrators, and recipients in dense networks or groups in which knowledge is generated during dialogue and reflection (Hirschhorn, 2002; Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995). Often, knowledge emerges and is encapsulated in the form of narratives that reflect and elaborate the culture of the organization and allow practitioners and recipients to articulate and share what they know. This knowledge likely comes in the form of stories that contain organized descriptions and explanations guiding and justifying actions designed to identify and fulfill human needs. It is these narratives and their explication that often are a principal product of knowledge management systems within human service. And, these narratives also reflect greater cultural values of the larger society. The stories developed and shared in human service organizations often have implications that go beyond the context of a particular organization and reflect and illuminate societal values that constitute the basis and rationale for legitimizing claims the human service sector makes on societal resources. Knowledge management, therefore, as a social product of the culture of human service operating in a particular society, is shaped by society’s approach to meeting the needs of its members. Human service is a knowledge intensive sector of any society. This sector incorporates complex and controversial perspectives on social issues, human needs, and human functioning. Whether human services are provided through the nonprofit, public, or private sectors, accessing and acting upon the knowledge required to effectively identify and address human needs and intervene in people’s lives to provide services to help meet those needs is an activity that certainly should not be taken for granted (Manela & Moxley, 1999).

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The knowledge intensive character of human service requires practitioners to be mindful of the factors that create human need and carefully consider the theories, models, procedures, and tools they use to address those needs. Human service agencies and those who work in them may have to dismantle barriers to effectively meet human needs, and they may have to counter the negative consequences of social forces that block their efforts to help recipients. Providing the information and tools to accomplish this is an important function of knowledge systems in human service organizations (Manela & Moxley, 1999). There are a number of fields of practice within the domain of human service, giving the knowledge necessary to effectively work in this domain a rich and encompassing character. A particular society may contain a number of groups and their communities, each with different needs and each requiring different responses from human service organizations. Because the knowledge relevant to human services is so extensive, rich, and encompassing, it is necessary to use various criteria and strategies for identifying and amplifying the key aspects of this knowledge so society can address the needs of its varying populations and groups. Some populations may contain large numbers of people in age groups that depend on others, such as children and the elderly. Other populations may contain significant numbers of people who cannot readily participate or compete in the economic life of the society. Some of these people may be coping with serious illness or dealing with debilitating physical conditions or disabilities. Others may not have the education and training necessary for employment. There also may be groups of people in society whose behaviors or characteristics are judged unacceptable by other members of the greater society, leading to strong negative emotional reactions and the social rejection or marginalization of these people. A society may allocate or link the provision of certain social benefits, including protection and human rights, enhanced opportunities, special or augmented services, and particular types of interventions, to specific groups of people. Such linkages are likely to follow prescribed normative conventions. The ability or inability of a group to have its needs met reflects the pattern of these normative conventions. These conventions also legitimate particular forms of dependency and shape patterns and strategies of societal intervention (Gibelman, 2003). A society’s patterns of eligibility for and allocation of the resources and social benefits necessary to meet human needs communicates much about the society’s core assumptions, beliefs, and values concerning the nature of

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human needs and relative importance and value of meeting the needs of different groups in society. They also can define the relevant knowledge needed to provide social welfare and other human services to specific populations (Meenaghan & Kilty, 1994). The culture of the greater society plays an important role in influencing, if not determining, the boundaries and membership in different groups and sub populations. It also defines which of the needs of these different groups and sub populations are legitimate and necessary to fulfill and how much of society’s resources are to be allocated to meeting those needs. Specifying the scope and adequacy of social provision to meet the needs of different populations in a society defines who gets what and how much they get (Nussbaum, 2004). In addition, the culture of the greater society plays a critical role in establishing the preferred form of delivery of the resources and services, including opportunities, it provides to different populations. Some societies may institutionalize locality-based and informal strategies of assistance, while others may organize helping using market-­oriented approaches, bureaucratic mechanisms, or hybrid forms. The issue of resource allocation and distribution in society is relative to knowledge management, because the nature and extent of social welfare and human services are socially, politically, and culturally determined functions within society (Hoffman, 1989). They reflect ideas and beliefs about human needs that are keys to assuring human well-being, and, consequently, knowledge about human needs and how to satisfy them is crucial to the provision of human service. So it is important to recognize that such knowledge is an artifact of assumptions, beliefs, and values about human nature which are deeply engrained within the culture of any particular society (Schein, 1998). This has profound implications for knowledge management. For example, if a society has core values that elevate the importance of individualism and self-sufficiency, it may assume that its members should take it upon themselves to fulfill their various needs through broadly accepted means for generating income, such as competing for the best job they can get and working at that job once they obtain it. In this case, few individuals are expected to be dependent on social welfare arrangements or receive special consideration outside of the principal norms of self-sufficiency a society values and prioritizes. Human services would be reserved for those individuals who cannot readily fend for themselves, and the tests applied to determine eligibility for those would likely be severe. In addition, a relatively small amount of the society’s

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resources would probably be allocated to provide for the needs of those who depend for their support on social welfare. Or, perhaps a society views those who possess certain human needs as having a social affliction or disease requiring some kind of specific and time-limited response, particularly a response following the tenets of the medical model. In this case, the need for social welfare services and support would be expected to not extend for long, and resources for such services and support would be allocated according to specific guidelines that establish the approved nature, extent, and duration of helping. In each of these situations, the knowledge necessary to determine eligibility is essential and different and reflects different societal assumptions about human need and how those needs should be met.

The Imperfect Nature of Knowledge in Human Services There can be great controversies about knowledge and how to use it within the human service domain. Politicization of the assumptions, beliefs, and values about human nature leads to strongly held positions supported by ideologies and the distribution of power in society, which emanate from deeply engrained aspects of a society’s social structure and culture. Various groups may contest the relevance, content, and validity of knowledge in human services, and they are likely to compete for control over what constitutes knowledge of human need and how best to address and fulfill those needs (Moxley & Manela, 2001; Moxley, 2021). Such contests are apparent within the history of human service and social welfare. For example, in the 1970s there was a conflict between groups of professionals that subscribed to a behavioral or psychodynamic model of how to treat emotional problems and those that subscribed to a medical model of treatment. The approach one supported shaped the rationale for implementing different ways of responding to people with problems and providing services to them. Other examples of conflict over the knowledge base of various areas of human service can be found among advocates within the disability rights movement, the psychiatric survivor movement, and those who subscribe to a self-help or mutual support approach as alternatives to models of professional helping and service, especially as alternatives to the

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medical model and the control of services by medical professionals (Moxley & Mowbray, 1997; Moxley, 2021). Although the positions, arguments, and knowledge articulated and referenced by the representatives and advocates of competing perspectives may have seemed controversial at the time they were hotly contested, contemporary mainstream human services now incorporate a blend of many different theories and models from which particular practices and perspectives emanate. Still, knowledge about human need is never complete or certain and also is highly influenced by social and cultural forces. It is likely, therefore, that controversies among advocates of different approaches within the fields of human service will continue, and what emerges and is accepted as relevant knowledge within a particular human service initiative is likely to be a product of such controversies. In fact, the resolution of such controversy that result in the creation, extension, or expansion of models and paradigms of human needs and how to fulfill them is a valuable mechanism for creating and expanding knowledge within the domain of human services. While the nature, mission, structure and practices of human service organizations reflect society’s culture, beliefs, and values, it is the level of certainty cultures assign to the knowledge available to and used by social welfare and human service organizations that provides those organizations with stability and the confidence to act with assurance that the services they provide are useful. However, controversy within the domain of human service can compromise the stability of key assumptions and challenge core knowledge in human services thereby raising important questions about how to best address the needs of particular populations and specific individuals and groups within those populations (Moxley & Manela, 2001). Like knowledge within any other sector of a society, knowledge within human services is political, dynamic, constructed, and amenable to deconstruction, given the existence of opposing groups who question what is known about human need and the social issues that produce such need. Nevertheless, particularly within the organizational venues in which human service professionals address human needs through the provision of benefits, opportunities, or services, knowledge often is treated with a high degree of certainty, even though some practitioners may feel considerable personal doubt about how best to intervene into the lives of the recipients. Despite this, there is a tendency for human service organizations to treat their knowledge and assumptions about how to best do what

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they do with a high degree of certainty, even though knowledge in the human services is especially likely to be imperfect and open to controversy, given the dynamics of the problems and issues human service organizations address (Bergquist, 1993). Because of the tension within the domain of human service between certainty and doubt, knowledge management systems in human service organizations must be permeable and open to new ideas because the knowledge they work with has no fixed and immutable end point. Rather, it is a continually evolving aspect of an organization, especially in relation to the operation of human service delivery and the groups or communities such organizations serve. This is especially true because of the dynamic and action oriented nature of the fields within the human service domain and the social, cultural, and political dynamics that shape the issues human service organizations address and how they view the world in which they operate (Kunda, 1992). Because human services draw on and incorporate different forms of knowledge to fashion the action they take with the people they serve, they have to maintain relatively open and flexible knowledge management systems and take an open and flexible stance toward the consideration of different perspectives and different kinds of information. This openness also can make them particularly sensitive to the influence of various stakeholders on the value and utility of knowledge they collect and draw upon to develop the practices, routines, procedure sand ultimately the policies they implement. An important group of such stakeholders who are in a position to define the relevance of knowledge for particular human service organizations are the professional practitioners who provide assistance within organizational forms. Their perspectives are likely to be influenced by the various professional ideologies, paradigms, and models of practice of the particular professional discipline to which they belong. The funders of human service organizations also are an important and influential group of stakeholders who may have ideas about the relevance and applicability of some kinds of knowledge to the mission of the human service organizations they support, and they may act to regulate the funding for the gathering, analysis, and application of some forms of knowledge. These important stakeholders can influence the acceptance of models and paradigms used to define the needs of recipient populations and the nature of social or human services provided to address those needs. The interests and influence of some stakeholders may focus on reinforcing the

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status quo prevailing in the fields of human service. However, the perspectives and interests of the established groups in society, often expressed through and reinforced by the media or politicians, may be at odds with the perspectives and interest of the recipients. Perspective matters in framing knowledge of human needs and how to respond to them. Knowledge management systems in human service organizations likely incorporate the perspectives and efforts of different stakeholders to influence the nature, access to, and application of the knowledge they maintain and manage. The fact that there are multiple perspectives and various levels and kinds of social power and influence among those interested in the provision of human services adds complexity and complicates the task of knowledge management in human service organizations. Knowledge within human service is precarious because it is imperfect, dynamic, shaped by social and political issues, reflective of cultural beliefs and values, often contested and open to controversy. Nonetheless, increasingly, human service organizations likely struggle to create, maintain, and apply their knowledge—organizing it, specifying it, testing it, and validating it. The motivation for such effort can come from an organization’s search for legitimacy, especially in societies that seek accountability over the resources they invest in meeting the needs of the vulnerable, dependent, or at-risk populations they assist. Governments, foundations, and philanthropists support human service organizations. Often, they are part of policy networks and operate in political arenas where they address controversial social issues. In the environments in which these funding sources play important roles, there can be a strong press for justification of expenditures and human service programs. Knowledge on which funding decisions are based is crucial to the rationale and justification for those decisions. Since knowledge management in human service and social welfare is closely tied to organizational accountability for the use of societal resources, knowledge management decisions may not be independent of political influence. However, if an organization can control its own knowledge management, the utility of its knowledge for achieving the organization’s purposes can be greatly enhanced. Because most human service organizations are dependent on external funding, they are open to scrutiny by the organizations and agencies that provide their funding. The knowledge bases and competencies human service organizations use to develop and provide assistance are likely to be particularly interesting to those who examine and evaluate organizational

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operations, and interest likely will be paid to how knowledge is developed, applied, shared, and safeguarded. Some human service organizations will focus primarily on the outcomes or results the organization expects to achieve compared to what it actually has achieved. Other organizations also may try to explain why they achieved their results. It also is important for human service organizations to identify ways to improve both their core processes (and core competencies), and the results they produce.

Approach to Knowledge Within Human Services Recognizing the influence of controversy, uncertainty, and conflict as key aspects of knowledge within human service and social welfare is critical to a full understanding of how to proceed with knowledge management. While it is important to realize that in the domain of social welfare and human services, knowledge is a product of social, political, economic, and cultural forces, it also is important to view this knowledge as: (a) the intentional and purposeful encoding of how things are done to fulfill human needs, (b) the reasons these things are done, (c) the controversies that surround these efforts, (d) the confidence organizational members have in the ways they address human needs, (e) the reasons they do what they do, and (f) the effects and impacts they seek to achieve through their actions. Ultimately, it is the confidence organizational members have in the linkage between why they take action to address human needs (rationale), how they do things (means), and what they seek (ends) that produces organizational knowledge in human services. Passing this knowledge of rationale, means, and ends on to organizational members facilitates the formation and encoding of knowledge in narrative forms. Through such narrative forms of knowledge, organizational members identify and demonstrate acceptable knowledge by telling stories that describe and elaborate the manner in which an organization addresses or fulfills human need (Bruner, 1996). By the time knowledge within human service organizations takes a narrative form, it often is a product of critical dialogue occurring within dense organizationally bounded groups of practitioners and other stakeholders (Brown, 1995; Czarniawska, 1997).

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Action for Knowledge Management Reflect on how knowledge management can evolve within the organization in which you are a member. Consider the following as points of departure for building knowledge management within human services. 1. Although unity of practice is an important organizational aim, the human service organization likely incorporates multiple ways of knowing. Legitimize different forms of knowing that link individuals, informal groups, teams, and organizational units to the knowledge management strategy. Too often the knowledge individuals possess, both professionals and recipients, goes unappreciated or underappreciated within the organization. Liberate it by inviting various members to share their knowledge no matter how it may fly in the face of the knowledge the organization may consider sacred and free of criticism. 2. Liberation of practice knowledge can be found in narratives within the organization. Encourage those narratives and ask a key question: “what do those narratives tell us about policies, procedures, data, and information that the organization has overlooked or otherwise ignored.” 3. Look critically (and in an evaluative way) at the practice knowledge powerful external sources press on the organization. There is likely wisdom or usefulness in such knowledge, but it may also block the search for new types or forms of practice knowledge. 4. Appreciate the perspective of people or groups in how they frame practice knowledge and think about it. Someone who holds a relatively unempowered position like an outreach worker may have much to offer about, for example, the living conditions of those whom the organization assists. Elevate such knowledge so that the organization considers it as an important contribution to practice. 5. Admit that knowledge is fragile and uncertain even though organizational members assert its truth in practice. Challenge the certainty of knowledge as the organization seeks to generate new assertions about its good or best practices.

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References Bergquist, W. (1993). The postmodern organization: Mastering the art of irreversible change. Jossey-Bass. Brown, J. (1995). Dialogue: Capacities and stories. In S. Chawla & J. Renesch (Eds.), Learning organizations: Developing tomorrow’s workplace (pp. 153–164). Productivity Press. Bruner, J. (1996). The culture of education. Harvard University Press. Czarniawska, B. (1997). Narrating the organization: Dramas of institutional identity. University of Chicago Press. Gibelman, M. (2003). Navigating human service organizations. Lyceum. Hirschhorn, L. (2002). Managing in the new team environment: Skills, tools, and methods. Addison Wesley. Hoffman, L. M. (1989). The politics of knowledge: Activist movements in medicine and planning. State University of New York. Kunda, G. (1992). Engineering culture: Control and commitment in a high-tech corporation. Template University Press. Manela, R. W., & Moxley, D. P. (1999). The new pillars of agency-based evaluation. Applied Behavioral Science, 7(1), 1–17. Meenaghan, T., & Kilty, K. (1994). Policy analysis and research technology: Political and ethical considerations. Lyceum. Moxley, D. (2021). Consumerism in the human services: Rationale, evolution, perspectives, and policy strategies. Palgrave Macmillan. Moxley, D. P., & Manela, R. W. (2001). Expanding the conceptual basis of outcomes and their use in the human services. Families in Society, 82(6), 569–577. Moxley, D. P., & Mowbray, C. T. (1997). Consumers as providers: Social forces and factors legitimizing role innovation in psychiatric rehabilitation. In C. T. Mowbray, D. Moxley, C. Jasper, & L. Davis (Eds.), Consumers as providers in psychiatric rehabilitation. International Association of Psychosocial Rehabilitation Services. Nonaka, I., & Takeuchi, H. (1995). The knowledge-creating company: How Japanese companies create the dynamics of innovation. Oxford University Press. Nussbaum, M.  C. (2004). Hiding from humanity: Disgust, shame, and the law. Princeton University Press. Schein, E. (1998). Organizational culture and leadership (2nd ed.). Jossey-Bass.

CHAPTER 3

Societal, Social, Technical, and Organizational Aspects of Knowledge Management

Abstract  Knowledge management is as much about social processes as it is about technological ones. The chapter develops this idea and how knowledge management incorporates designs to liberate knowledge that the organization can encapsulate within particular work groups. Knowledge management systems can form differently in various organizational types, inclusive within this chapter of adaptive, transformative and transcendent forms. Each form addresses knowledge management in different ways with the adaptive form relying on practice knowledge likely emanating from powerful regulatory environments, including accreditation. Transformative organizations in the human services likely adopt emerging practices and encode these into their organizations making them innovative relative to what is found as acceptable practice. Transcendent organizations create new models of acting on social issues thereby making them leading parts within the human service domain. Keywords  Sociotechnical • Technology • Adaptive organization • Transformative organization • Transcendent organization • Culture • Design

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. P. Moxley, Releasing Knowledge for Practice in Human and Social Service Organizations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16098-1_3

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Societal Evolution of Knowledge Management Social theorists anticipated the emergence of the knowledge-based organization and of knowledge workers decades ago. Daniel Bell (1999), Peter Drucker et al. (1998), and other management theorists (Cleveland, 1985) suggested that knowledge-based organizations would become a norm in the post-industrial society that was increasingly dependent on information and knowledge. The explosion of relatively low cost information technologies, as well as the organizational revitalization, quality management, and re-engineering movements of the 1980s and 1990s have fostered the large-scale emergence and expansion of knowledge management (Neef et  al., 1998). Additionally, movements in the social, life, and physical sciences, as well as in the arts and humanities, have amplified and legitimized the influential role of social and cultural factors in the construction and deconstruction of knowledge. These movements assert that knowledge is socially, culturally, and organizationally mediated and situated, and these movements, in turn, have fostered new and alternative methods of inquiry (Bruner, 1996). It is such developments that influence the emergence of knowledge management as an essential competence of almost any professionally educated person (Cortada, 1998). One of the distinguishing hallmarks of professionalism in contemporary society (and in the societies of the future) is the ability to engage in purposeful knowledge management to create social benefits of high value for a diverse array of constituencies. The coming revolution in Artificial Intelligence will likely accelerate knowledge management. Artificial Intelligence can stream line data gathering and most importantly, data analysis and interpretation. Such intelligence will facilitate the translation of data into information through interpretation. However, even as Artificial Intelligence gains ground, humans will increasingly use knowledge in taking action. It is the realm of action that will demarcate professionalism even as those who hold the status of professional will become increasingly dependent on machine forms of information (Summit & Vermeule, 2018).

Socio-technical Aspects of Knowledge Information technology has made the storage, manipulation, transformation, and utilization of data more practical. Innovations in software and the emergence of informatics make the codification, analysis, and display

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of data relatively easy (Smith, 2000). Yet, computers and software merely represent an electronic infrastructure that enables organizations to build knowledge repositories and readily access knowledge bases. Knowledge creation and its management still require the active involvement of people who assign meaning to their experience and create knowledge through the appraisal, packaging, and application of the knowledge derived from their experience, as well as from other sources (Myers, 1996). Without such human involvement organizations are likely to be information rich but knowledge poor (Teresko, 2000). Knowledge management is more complex than data collection, organization, and analysis. It is as much a social process as it is a technological one (Farley, 1991). While knowledge development and management is a distinctively human and professional activity, it is now facilitated by machine intelligence that can rapidly search large matrices of data, and by software that aids in the compilation and analysis of information gathered from diverse data sources that include: documents, video, audiotape, direct and participant observation, and findings from structured data collection and recording instruments. But all of this information is relatively sterile and of little use until it becomes part of an organization’s knowledge base that can shape how the organization fulfills its mission and function by providing the services and products it was established to provide. The embodiment of knowledge at the level of practice is particularly important. How professionals and other actors come to embrace knowledge and even produce additional knowledge through use will likely become the signature of the knowledge building organization of the future. For this to occur, data must be transformed into knowledge. Often, knowledge formation occurs within groups, making team development an essential aspect of an organization’s approach to knowledge management (Hirschhorn, 2002). While knowledge management relies on information infrastructure, it also requires innovations in organizational culture and practice (Farley, 1991; McMaster, 1996; Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995; Skyrme, 1999). Many of the practices implemented to build a knowledge management system in an organization involve the introduction of social arrangements that foster knowledge exchange, including group- or team-based work arrangements, mentor-based and non-hierarchical approaches to supervision, and organizational norms that foster fluid transactions across a variety of different organizational levels (Farley, 1991; Lesser & Prusak, 1999). These innovations may require changes to the physical

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environment of the organization that foster social interaction, the installation of continuous systems of learning, and rewards for the creation and use of knowledge (Garvin, 2000). Knowledge management begins with personnel who recognize that they need and want to find and use knowledge to enhance their practice. Such attitudinal readiness sets the stage for developing and implementing a successful knowledge management system. The development of readiness for knowledge management may be one of the most important steps a human service organization takes in preparation for acquisition, use, and development of practice-oriented knowledge. The development of readiness is an indication that the leaders and members of the organization recognize the central importance of positive attitudes toward knowledge and its use, the valuing of inquiry, the creation of capacities for the development of knowledge, and the implementation of administrative supports that facilitate the development of an organizational culture in which knowledge management is both legitimized and actualized.

Utilization Focus and Organizational Effectiveness Knowledge management requires the intentional collection and storage of what often is heterogeneous data and information that the organization garners from many different sources and through the application of multiple methods of inquiry and data collection. But, knowledge management also requires people to manipulate and transform data and information into knowledge that is useful to the formulation and implementation of a range of organizational products, including theories, frameworks, concepts, plans, programs, and various tools (Pfeffer & Sutton, 2000). Utilization of knowledge and the production of additional knowledge derived from utilization activities give knowledge management a practical focus within human services (Spinello, 1998). Utilization requires application, and it is this latter process that promises the achievement of practical outcomes and the possibility of translating what is learned by doing into what is known about how to create and implement useful technology that improves the doing, that is action. Ultimately, the real measures of effective knowledge management come, on the one hand, from the use of organizational knowledge to resolve successfully the challenges, problems, or issues an organization faces, and, on the other hand, from the progressive changes that move an

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organization closer to fulfilling its mission and achieving its vision (Pfeffer & Sutton, 2000; Roberts-Witt, 2000). Knowledge management becomes relevant, therefore, when an organization embraces improvement, innovation, experimentation, invention, and the systematic creation, application, and dissemination of the knowledge developed through these accomplishments. The success of knowledge management resides in its impact on organizational effectiveness measured through metrics that reveal the fulfillment of the agency’s mission (Kaplan & Norton, 1996, 2001). A secondary benefit of an organization’s knowledge management system is that other organizations and practitioners within the domain or field in which the human service organization works find the knowledge to be useful and, therefore, knowledge management can foster positive change in a particular practice domain, especially when other organizations mimic, emulate, or transform practices that emerge as useful (Horvath, 2000). From this perspective, knowledge management may be a fundamental social learning strategy for encouraging organizational transformation and for the transformation of entire fields of practice (Brown et  al., 1988; Clegg et  al., 1996; von Krogh & Roos, 1996).

Organizational Culture and Design in Knowledge Management Considering the nature of knowledge management raises important questions about what constitutes knowledge. As has been noted, knowledge involves much more than merely the collection of data and information and its analysis. Indeed, the transformation of data and information into knowledge requires the application of values by human decision makers who must judge and weigh the importance and utility of data and information and convert them through interpretation into forms of knowledge that an organization finds meaningful and useful. Selecting and applying values involves the exercise of power and authority. Some organizations may ignore lower echelon actors without power who may be unable to get others to listen to them and consider their perspective. In doing so, these organizations limit what they define as legitimate knowledge by reducing the status of certain individuals or roles within the organization, thus ignoring important sources and repositories of knowledge by refusing to consider what those actors have to offer.

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Knowledge is power, and the opportunity to participate in its creation and application is an indicator and reinforcement of power. The distribution of power within an organization influences how the organization defines knowledge and who is to be respected and involved in the knowledge management enterprise (Sparrow, 1998). Thus, organizational culture is an important determinant of whether an organization can make use of all of its internal sources of knowledge (Hirschhorn, 1998), as well as engage in the use of this knowledge in everyday commerce (Preskill, 1991). Those cultures that are open, participatory, flexible, and nonhierarchical may be in the best position to take advantage of the broad scope of knowledge that exists within most human service organizations. Organizations without such attributes are likely to find that knowledge remains centralized within the upper echelons of the organization, or is encapsulated within the minds of middle or lower echelon actors or groups and is never accessed and dispersed throughout the organization so that it can be drawn on and applied to carrying out and improving the organization’s practices (Ackoff, 1994). Knowledge management requires a synergy of exchange among all members of an organization, and therefore, some organizational designs are more effective than others in fostering the development of an organization’s knowledge management system (Argyris, 1993; Hirschhorn, 1998). Knowledge management has strategic value, since it can help an organization become more effective in achieving and maintaining its viability within its environment. And, knowledge management possesses tactical value, since it can enable members at all levels of an organization to appreciate the importance of applying their own and other’s knowledge to their work. As a consequence, they can come to see themselves as knowledge workers who create knowledge through their professional activities and efforts. Indeed, one of the most fundamental resources of knowledge management is the reservoir of members who come to see themselves as knowledge workers (Drucker, 1999). It is these workers who animate knowledge management on a day-to-day basis. A knowledge management strategy often begins with the development of system-wide understanding of the many different forms of knowledge and the need, literally, to mine knowledge at all organizational levels. This requires an organization to redraw its boundaries and to think of itself as producing knowledge to advance what it sees as the practice it typically undertakes within a particular domain or field of application. Thus, a central question of organizational

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design is how the organization seeks to create knowledge and how it wants to apply this knowledge across the organization as a whole, within discrete segments, and within particular units. Design may originate in the idealized form and effectiveness the organization seeks (Ackoff et al., 2006).

Variation in Knowledge Management Aims Across Organizational Forms Making the process of knowledge production conscious, intentional, and purposeful is the essence of knowledge management within human services (von Krogh et al., 2000). Becoming conscious of knowledge management as an essential organizational function is likely to move a human service organization to figuring out how to form and implement knowledge management—conceptualizing relationships among key variables, modeling service processes, measuring what is done, creating and testing explanations, engaging in innovation, and creating work or practice routines from what is known as a way of fostering higher levels of certainty and coherence for workers. Knowledge management demands dissemination and reporting procedures in which organizations portray what they know about human need and its fulfillment through intentionally crafted helping arrangements. Perhaps the most powerful knowledge management strategies such organizations can undertake involve socializing their members into what is real and important in their field of practice and what knowledge they should act upon within their particular organizational roles and settings. It is especially important for experienced members in an organization to teach other members (particularly newcomers) how to enact critical job functions and roles (Wanous, 1992). Socializing and teaching among organizational members about what is accepted as legitimate organizational knowledge increases certainty among workers about how to take action, and can reduce controversy by legitimizing alternative explanations about the origins of human need and its fulfillment, expanding the tool kit of methods for intervening and satisfying human need, and bringing competing perspectives into the established organizational knowledge base. Thus, knowledge management is a form of organizational control, albeit a control characterized by properties of dynamism, fluidity, and development, in which conflict and controversy challenge certainty and

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coherence (Kunda, 1992). Determining and” making sense” of which human needs are the focus of particular organizational actions, why the organization elevates certain needs over others, and how needs are fulfilled can serve as foundations of any knowledge management approach within human service organizations. Those human service organizations seeking control over their knowledge and, as a result, seeking to establish their power and functionality or expand the scope of their power and the success of their activities within a particular domain likely—although sometimes unconsciously—engage in some kind of knowledge management practice. While the formal explication of knowledge management within human services may be nascent, the use and management of knowledge varies across at least three different organizational forms, which can be characterized as adaptive, transformative, and transcendent. The adaptive human service organization seeks to replicate the template the greater society considers legitimate for defining human need and its fulfillment. These organizations literally adapt to the assumptions, beliefs, and values of the greater society and structure themselves according to a mainstream social and organizational template, using stipulations of external accreditation, regulations, and requirements as key properties for assessing their operations, so they look and function like any other competent organization within their particular field or domain. Knowledge management becomes a means by which these human service organizations seek to fit the prevailing organizational model. As a result, these organizations produce little controversy about their methods and means for fulfilling human need. Consequently, they likely produce little innovation or challenge the status quo with new practices. The adaptive organization may engage in simple forms of social learning designed to enable it to mimic other successful organizations, incorporating their key features and key practices, and replicating what works and what is acceptable within the substance of societal goals (Bandura, 1986; Kim, 1997; McMaster, 1996; von Krogh & Roos, 1996). Innovation or change undertaken by such an organization is usually directed toward closing the gap between where the organization is relative to desired properties and the prevailing template within its given field or domain. Such changes are implemented to promote and ensure the incorporation of broadly accepted and endorsed practices that serve as important if not principal aims of knowledge management for these adaptive organizations (Manela & Moxley, 2002). The idea of design-driven

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innovation indicates that advancement is an intentional and conscious process that incorporates knowledge from multiple sources (Verganti, 2009). As Verganti emphasizes, design-driven innovation is a purposeful strategy of action. For transformative human service organizations, knowledge management is a process of strategically identifying and specifying the next evolutionary step in a particular field or domain (Kaplan & Norton, 2001). The transformative human service organization stands as a model and guide for changes that are taking place in its field or domain. Its successful innovations serve as the template for those organizations seeking to better adapt and fit the changes occurring in the environment or the ones anticipated to emerge in the near future. The transformative human service organization seeks to alter the prevailing template through innovation. For example, employment policy in many developed nations, particularly in the United States, has been shaped by transformative organizations which have expanded or modified assumptions, practices, and templates about how to sustain the employment of people coping with various disabilities, particularly developmental or psychiatric ones. While the basic paradigm of employment remains unchallenged, the transformative organization identifies new methods and ways of facilitating employment of people whom the greater society says should work, even though the kinds of jobs they obtain may be not be personally fulfilling and may fail to offer viable career paths. The transformative organization in this instance does not question the basic paradigm of work within the society, nor does it seek to change social values that elevate the importance of work, even work that is not particularly fulfilling for the incumbent. But, the transformative organization does seek to develop and implement new ways to support work for a particular population that needs them. The changes sought by transformative organizations are “middle range” changes that facilitate the effectiveness of human services without addressing the underlying social assumptions, values, or goals. Knowledge management in transformative human service and social welfare organizations focuses on technologies, procedures, and approaches to providing assistance to people in need in order to address changes in the society and in the populations requiring some kind of relevant response. It also is sensitive to shifts in its funding and/or regulatory environment and, as a result, can be agile in its policy environment.

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Transcendent human service organizations eschew the prevailing template and may come to redefine the basic paradigm underlying the fulfillment of human need. Such organizations may be founded on counter-cultural ideas and concepts that define a new ethic, aesthetic, and/or theory of why and how to proceed in a given area of human service (Moxley, 2021). Some of the best examples of such transcendent organizations can be found in the fields of disability rights and HIV/ AIDS. Some disability rights organizations emerged outside of the traditional organizational domain of disabilities and have invented new ways of serving or supporting people; for example, the independent living movement. Their innovations provide examples of what is possible and effective which directly challenges the prevailing paradigm and template for assistance, as well as helping to reshape social policy to incorporate aspects of a transcendent worldview. By so doing, they challenge traditional providers to emulate and incorporate the best practices their innovative approaches have demonstrated and to continue to invent and implement novel approaches within a new model of societal values that elevates the rights and desires of recipients that had previously been invisible or not considered. During the early period of the AIDS pandemic, Gay groups and communities fostered considerable innovation in social services, community support, and self help. Their innovations literally transcended the nihilistic thinking and limited action of established social service or health care providers. Such transcendence may define the leading part of a particular domain or field of service, one that is likely to be ignored in the early phase of the emergence of a particular social issue, only to become the relevant and prevalent template for other organizations later, as the social issue evolves and as transcendent organizations demonstrate new forms of knowledge and a new world view through social action. In a visionary manner, the transcendent organization not only anticipates what is to come, it transcends the present and gives birth to organizational forms and innovative approaches that characterize a new paradigm of how communities or societies come to think about a particular human need, the social issues that produce such need, and the ways human service and social welfare functions in society. Adaptation, transformation, and transcendence may reflect various and perhaps competing or conflicting knowledge bases within a particular field or domain. They also represent and embody different knowledge

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management strategies. Each organizational form suggests a contrasting approach to knowledge management, which reflects the interplay among uncertainty, controversy, and conflict. The existence and character of these different knowledge bases reflect the great stake any society has in fostering alternative ways of knowing within human services and social welfare. From another perspective, these organizational forms and their knowledge bases can be seen as reflecting and responding to evolutionary stages and new paradigms in the development of human services in a society. The domain of human service and social welfare is not static. It responds to changes in social values and assumptions as well as to shifts in populations, their needs, and the issues they face. This creates the impetus for human service organizations also to evolve and adapt. Templating likely reflects a society’s confidence in what it thinks it knows and in the stability of that knowledge. It shows that organizations in key sectors of society, such as human services and social welfare, are willing to foster emulation as the principal form of knowledge management within a particular field or domain. Nonetheless, over reliance on templates can result in considerable isomorphism within a field or domain (Van der Ryn & Cowan, 1996) thereby making the domain less flexible and responsive in the face of large scale environmental demands. It can limit the amount of innovation a field undertakes or requires to address the properties of a particular issue. It also can blind one to the need for change as these properties morph over time (Van der Ryn & Cowan, 1996). Appreciating other forms of knowledge management— ones that foster the transformation of a template or the creation of an entirely different competing template—reflects a cultural willingness to experiment, create, and innovate within a particular field or domain (Sparrow, 1998). Transformative and transcendent strategies of knowledge management are particularly important when there is considerable nihilism surrounding a particular social issue and/or population of people. Societal neglect of certain groups (such as was experienced by people coping with HIV/ AIDS in the early period of the pandemic) may stimulate transformational or transcendent work at local community levels, even if such changes are not undertaken by mainstream professionals and only emerge from the actions of individuals who bear the direct negative effects of the particular social issue, or who define themselves as advocates for people who carry the burden of a particular social issue. Breaking through nihilism is perhaps one of the most important aims of the transcendent human service

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organization. This kind of organization produces new knowledge through action, and it embodies a form of social learning within society. It is such entities that likely bring about new paradigms of action.

Tools for Knowledge Management Within Human Service Organizations Even though the formalization of knowledge management is nascent within most human service organizations, many organizations nonetheless engage in some form of development if not management of their knowledge, even though they may not be fully cognizant of their knowledge management strategies. There is a growing appreciation for the importance of knowledge processes within these organizations, even though this appreciation is bound sometimes too rigidly to formalized research and inquiry. Knowledge is not an extrapolation directly from research. Influencing knowledge formation in human services is lived experience among recipients of human services and practice experience among those who provide such care. Linking experience with practice as a means of advancing knowledge, and coupling the engagement of experience by the organization, can shape a powerful strategy of innovation (Liedtka et al., 2017). Knowledge management is much broader than research, although systematic inquiry can contribute much to the formulation of organizational knowledge and to its use in action (Stringer, 1999). Human service and social welfare organizations undertake research to different degrees, with some organizations sponsoring full research programs in partnership with universities and professional schools and others supporting their own research programs and departments. Human service organizations may pursue research for different reasons and are motivated to do so by different incentives than academic researchers and the academic organizations in which they work. Some human service organizations may see research as something others, such as academic researchers, come to their organizations to undertake for their own reasons and not to specifically address the needs of their organization. In such instances, the human service agency may see itself as a host or collaborative partner, but not the initiator or leader of the research, nor necessarily the direct beneficiary of it. The human service organization may expect research to produce knowledge for a broader

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field or domain, but their direct use of the results may be of secondary significance. Other human service organizations may see collaborative research with an academic entity as a source of additional resources and/ or as a means to enhance their standing and status in their field or community. Focusing the research enterprise on the strategic knowledge development needs of the organization moves the human service organization further towards knowledge management. Research and development, for example, requires the explication of specific organizational knowledge aims, and it likely requires an organization to identify what kind of technology—both soft and hard—it seeks to create. This form of research more than any other links knowledge management to the formulation and evaluation of technology, and its application typically involves the organization in addressing and resolving the issues it faces in assisting others and achieving desired outcomes on behalf of recipients. Intentionally and purposefully creating and developing technology is knowledge management in action and requires the human service organization to move in a disciplined manner through the specification of an issue or problem, the identification and assessment of the state of the art, the creation and testing of a prototype, the evaluation of its consequences within specific action settings, and the diffusion or dissemination of knowledge into the organization (and, perhaps into the larger domain or field of practice) (Rothman & Thomas, 1994; Thomas, 1984). Such a disciplined process is highly demanding and requires numerous organizational resources and competencies to sustain this sequential approach to the development and utilization of knowledge. Other tools human service or social welfare organizations can use in the management of their knowledge include the organization’s management information system, which can contribute important data and information to the formation of knowledge, although the content probably emerges in response to external expectations that emanate from the organization’s regulatory environment, particularly from expectations, priorities, and requirements of funding entities. Data from management information systems require close scrutiny and demand that organizational personnel figure out how to mine the value of those data so it can yield relevant and useful practice knowledge (Teresko, 2000). The fact that many human service organizations engage in formal evaluation of programs and projects offers another avenue for moving towards knowledge management (Moxley & Manela, 2000).

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Unlike basic or even applied research, the purpose of which is to illuminate insight into the dynamics of problems and solutions, the purpose of evaluation is to judge the merit and value of a particular organizational program or project, and the results and products of good evaluation often involve lessons learned that inform similar projects and programs in the future (Preskill, 1991). Other promising avenues for pushing human service organizations closer to knowledge management include systematic resource development efforts that incorporate state of the art program designs, quality oversight and quality improvement of existing services and programs, organizational policy management, and training and education of organizational personnel. Training and education may be the ultimate form of knowledge management. They demand knowledge inputs to form content and require the intentional arrangement of information and knowledge in the form of curricula, lessons, and learning assignments. Content and curricula reflect critical decisions about what the organization wants to teach its personnel, and they prescribe what is to be known. Professional development efforts are particularly germane to knowledge management, since they require organizational leaders to consider the theories, conceptions, practices, procedures, and tools they want to pass on to newcomers as well as to seasoned workers. In answering the question “What knowledge do we pass on to the members of our organization so they can execute their responsibilities effectively?” the human service organization must rely on its culture—that is, its basic assumptions, beliefs, and values that steer what is known and define what is important (Kunda, 1992; Schein, 1998). Training and education within an organization is knowledge management, since it requires competence in translating what the organization thinks it knows (often at a conceptual, tacit, or narrative level) into specific content that possesses merit and practicality. This translation can involve the movement from highly narrative ways of knowing toward the development of specific procedures directing the behavior of the organization’s workers. When an organization’s leaders decide what is important enough to teach, they are making explicit decisions about the knowledge the organization’s personnel require for doing their jobs effectively and for sustaining the organizational culture.

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Importing and Exporting Knowledge Knowledge management within human service organizations reflects an interplay between the importation and exportation of knowledge. Certainly, no organization will produce all of the knowledge it requires. Human service organizations are likely to import considerable knowledge from their own domains and fields and may work by analogy to draw implications from the knowledge in other fields that overlap and apply to their own work. Importation requires competencies in searching for and locating relevant knowledge, appraising and evaluating its relevance, and translating and converting it for specific use. Adaptive organizations and transformative organizations, in particular, may build strong importation competencies since they are mindful of the importance of reproducing or slightly modifying existing templates. Exportation of knowledge requires human service organizations to become mindful of their distinctiveness in the human service sector, which often requires them to clearly identify and describe what they know or have learned before they can share this knowledge with other organizations and then find other organizations or service providers that are likely to find such knowledge useful. Exportation competencies are likely to be found in the areas of social marketing, dissemination, and utilization management. The organizations that possess or develop these competencies may be seen as powerful ones in which they become a “go to” source for relevant models of innovation, and perhaps effectiveness. The transcendent quality of these human service organizations may drive their ability to export, since they clearly stand out as something different if not exemplary, and other organizations may come to them for technical assistance, consultation, and advice or help with organizational development. Organizations that drive innovation and export considerable human service knowledge serve as powerful models within their domains or fields. Dissemination of knowledge about human need and its fulfillment may serve as a principal asset of a human service organization and enable it to expand its visibility and power and elevate its standing. Creating knowledge for export, particularly as a way of influencing the templates or paradigms of a field or domain, shaping practice, and creating new ways of working may strengthen and expand the power of a particular human service organization by establishing that it is a developer and repository of knowledge that is important and useful in and perhaps

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beyond its field of practice. Such power will likely attract more interest in the organization’s knowledge and promote the emulation of its basic paradigm and programmatic templates of practice.

Action for Knowledge Management What are some important take away from this part of the monograph? Those interested in organizational knowledge management in the human services may wish to consider the following: 1. Practice continuous assessment of the knowledge base of the organization as a whole. Consider what its members see as critical knowledge, particularly practice focused knowing, and identify the status of this knowledge within the organization. Organizational surveys may be important for large scale organizations while more informal processes, such as discussion groups, or workshops, may have a better fit with smaller organizations. 2. Take narratives seriously at individual and group levels. Call for narratives in written or recorded forms and reflect on what they communicate about the rich knowledge of an organization. Mining narratives may be an important way of identifying what organizational members see as the distinctive features of organizational practice and action, assertions various actors make about the character of the organization, and ways of doing that stand out as important aspects of knowledge, particularly at a practice level. 3. Review and analyze narratives for what they communicate about aspirational knowledge—that is, the knowledge the organizational seeks to achieve idealized outcomes—and, requisite knowledge— that knowledge external systems or structures require including ­professional organizations, accreditation bodies, regulatory expectations, and expectations of funders. 4. Pay attention to the knowledge internal groups seek to understand, such as professionals, staff, and recipients within the human service agency. Consider the internal and external bodies of knowledge as reflective of perspectives that may conflict or may be incompatible with organizational purpose. Appreciate the tension in certainty of knowing that differing perspectives can introduce and assess whether those differences are tactical starting points for advancing innovative views or stances on practice knowledge.

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5. Undertake internal knowledge campaigns that integrate key questions about the existence and purpose of the organization, and its strivings, with the knowledge various actors offer. Look for threads about knowing, for example, assertions about quality of care that cut across the organization and can serve as points of consensus. 6. Appreciate gaps in knowing as starting points for building new knowledge or for reorganizing existing knowledge.

References Ackoff, R. L. (1994). The democratic corporation. Oxford University Press. Ackoff, R. L., Masidson, J., & Addison, H. J. (2006). Idealized design: Creating an organization’s future. Prentice-Hall. Argyris, C. (1993). Knowledge for action: A guide to overcoming barriers to organizational change. Jossey-Bass. Bandura, A. (1986). Social foundations of thought and action: A social cognitive theory. Prentice-Hall. Bell, D. (1999). The coming of post-industrial society: A venture in social forecasting. Basic Books. Brown, J. S., Collins, A., & Duguid, P. (1988). Situated cognition and the culture of learning. Educational Researcher, 18, 32–42. Bruner, J. (1996). The culture of education. Harvard University Press. Clegg, S. R., Barrett, M., Clarke, T., Dwyer, L., Gray, J., Kemp, S., & Marceau, J. (1996). Management knowledge for the future: Innovation embryos and new paradigms. In S. R. Clegg & G. Palmer (Eds.), The politics of management knowledge. Sage. Cleveland, H. (1985). The knowledge executive: Leadership in an information age. E. P. Dutton. Cortada, J. W. (1998). Rise of the knowledge worker. Butterworth-Heinemann. Drucker, P. (1999). Knowledge-worker productivity: The biggest challenge. California Management Review, 41, 79–94. Drucker, P., & associates. (1998). Harvard Business Review on knowledge management. Harvard Business School Press. Farley, J. (1991). Sociotechnical theory: An alternative framework for evaluation. In C. L. Larson & H. Preskill (Eds.), Organizations in transition: Opportunities and challenges for evaluation. New Directions for Program Evaluation, 49, 51–62. Garvin, D. A. (2000). Learning in action. Harvard Business School Press. Hirschhorn, L. (1998). Reworking authority: Leading and following in a postmodern organization. MIT Press.

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Hirschhorn, L. (2002). Managing in the new team environment: Skills, tools, and methods. Addison Wesley. Horvath, J.  A. (2000). Working with tacit knowledge. In J.  W. Cortada & J.  A. Woods (Eds.), The knowledge management yearbook: 2000-2001 (pp. 34–51). Butterworth-Heinemann. Kaplan, R. S., & Norton, D. P. (1996). The balanced scorecard: Translating strategy into action. Harvard Business School Press. Kaplan, R.  S., & Norton, D.  P. (2001). The strategy-focused organization: How balanced scorecard companies thrive in the new business environment. Harvard Business School Press. Kim, L. (1997). Imitation to innovation: The dynamics of Korea’s technological learning. Harvard Business School Press. Kunda, G. (1992). Engineering culture: Control and commitment in a high-tech corporation. Template University Press. Lesser, E., & Prusak, L. (1999). Communities of practice, social capital, and organizational knowledge. Information Systems Review, 1(1), 3–10. Liedtka, R., Salzman, R., & Azer, D. (2017). Design thinking for the greater good. Columbia University Press. Manela, R. W., & Moxley, D. P. (2002). Best practices as agency-based knowledge in social welfare. Administration in Social Work, 26, 1–24. McMaster, M. D. (1996). The intelligence advantage: Organizing for complexity. Butterworth-Heinemann. Moxley, D. (2021). Consumerism in the human services: Rationale, evolution, perspectives, and policy strategies. Palgrave Macmillan. Moxley, D. P., & Manela, R. W. (2000). Agency-based evaluation and organizational change in the human services. Families in Society, 81(3), 316–327. Myers, P.  S. (1996). Knowledge management and organizational design. Butterworth-Heinemann. Neef, D., & associates. (1998). The economic impact of knowledge. Butterworth-Heinemann. Nonaka, I., & Takeuchi, H. (1995). The knowledge-creating company: How Japanese companies create the dynamics of innovation. Oxford University Press. Pfeffer, J. I., & Sutton, R. I. (2000). The knowing-doing gap: How smart companies turn knowledge into action. Harvard Business School Press. Preskill, H. (1991). The cultural lens: Bringing utilization into focus. In C. L. Larson & H. Preskill (Eds.), Organizations in transition: Opportunities and challenges for evaluation. New Directions for Program Evaluation, 49, 5–15. Roberts-Witt, S. L. (2000). Practical taxonomies. In J. W. Cortada & J. A. Woods (Eds.), The knowledge management yearbook: 2000-2001 (pp.  214–222). Butterworth-Heinemann. Rothman, J., & Thomas, E. J. (Eds.). (1994). Intervention research: Design and development for human service. Haworth.

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Schein, E. (1998). Organizational culture and leadership (2nd ed.). Jossey-Bass. Skyrme, D. (1999). Knowledge networking: Creating the collaborative enterprise. Butterworth-Heinemann. Smith, D. (2000). Knowledge, groupware, and the internet. Butterworth-Heinemann. Sparrow, J. (1998). Knowledge in organizations: Access to thinking at work. Sage. Spinello, R. A. (1998). The knowledge chain. Business Horizons. Indiana University Kelley School of Business. Stringer, E. T. (1999). Action research. Sage. Summit, J., & Vermeule, B. (2018). Action versus contemplation. University of Chicago Press. Teresko, J. (2000). Information rich, knowledge poor? In J.  W. Cortada & J.  A. Woods (Eds.), The knowledge management yearbook: 2000-2001 (pp. 321–325). Butterworth-Heinemann. Thomas, E. J. (1984). Designing interventions for the helping professions. Sage. Van der Ryn, S., & Cowan, S. (1996). Ecological design. Island Press. Verganti, R. (2009). Design-driven innovation. Harvard Business Press. von Krogh, G., & Roos, J. (1996). Imitation of knowledge: A sociology of knowledge perspective. In G. von Krogh & J.  Roos (Eds.), Managing knowledge: Perspectives on cooperation and competition. Sage. von Krogh, G., Ichijo, K., & Nonaka, I. (2000). Enabling knowledge creation: How to unlock the mystery of tacit knowledge and release the power of innovation. Oxford University Press. Wanous, J. (1992). Organizational entry: Recruitment, selection, and socialization of newcomers. Addison-Wesley.

CHAPTER 4

Structuring the Knowledge Management System

Abstract  Functional knowledge requirements emanate from the organization’s mission. Functional knowledge requirements can focus organizational knowledge building on what the human service agency must know to engage in various practices, how to implement those practices, and how to bring about outcomes recipients or advocates want, professionals seek, or the policy environment may dictate or otherwise require. The organization must legitimize various knowledge sources, and use those as the building blocks of its system. The organization can shape its knowledge system in concert with other organizational structures, such as resource development, and human resource development, and it can structure its knowledge system. Structuring the knowledge system can involve (1) respecting multiple forms of organizational knowledge, (2) understanding the structural encapsulation of knowledge, and (3) appreciating the mediating role of organizational culture in knowledge formation Keywords  Functional knowledge • Knowledge systems • Organizational knowledge • Organizational structures

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. P. Moxley, Releasing Knowledge for Practice in Human and Social Service Organizations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16098-1_4

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Mission Based Functional Knowledge A distinctive feature of human service organizations is their commitment to a social purpose, as spelled out in their mission statements and reinforced by their engagement in mission-oriented activities and management. The noted organizational theorist Peter Drucker once commented that business managers of for-profit organizations could learn a great deal about mission-based management by observing nonprofit organizations at work (Drucker, 1990). While nonprofit human service organizations may be distinctive because of the central role their missions play in defining their organizational purpose, the effectiveness of human service organizations also requires that they accumulate and apply a considerable amount of mission-relevant knowledge (Brinckerhoff, 1994). This knowledge encapsulates and contains the know-how and experience the organization has gained addressing various social issues and meeting the needs of the recipients of their services (Handy, 1989, 1994, 1996; O’Dell & Grayson, 1998). Over time, as the organization develops and refines this knowledge—either implicitly or explicitly—through the work its members perform, the organization’s knowledge can become one of its most valuable assets (Nonaka, 1998; Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995; Sparrow, 1998). Implementation of organizational missions creates functional challenges for human service organizations. Human service organizations can meet these challenges by collecting and processing information, identifying and implementing best practices, developing experience gained fulfilling the needs of recipients, and serving public purposes. Although many human service organizations are not wealthy in the financial sense, their knowledge bases constitute a form of organizational and public wealth, which are assets that cannot be ignored, either by organizational members or by those who fund and support the work of social welfare agencies. The value of knowledge in human service organizations may be intangible and difficult to measure, but in assessing the worth or value of a human service organization, it is not sufficient to focus only on so-called hard measures of an organization’s wealth, such as income and the worth of tangible assets, like buildings. In assessing human service organizations, one also must assess the value of soft assets, such as organizational knowledge. The emergence of balanced scorecards, designed to help translate strategy into action both within the for-profit and nonprofit sectors illustrates the importance, and the difficulty, of documenting the value of

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knowledge as an asset (Kaplan & Norton, 1996, 2001). But, unless we consider the value of the soft assets of human services, organizations will be unable to truly characterize the current and future worth and contribution they can and will make to their communities and ultimately to their society (Manela & Moxley, 2002). In framing the concept of organizational knowledge, the author suggests that knowledge and its development should be considered from a broader perspective than that provided by positivist models, which see empirical knowledge derived from rigorous research as the highest and perhaps the only legitimate form of knowledge. Certainly, the demand for and the elevation of evidence-based practice and empirical practice are movements within the human services that amplify the importance of knowledge and stress building knowledge through highly structured investigation and research. But, seeing evidence based or empirical practice as the only legitimate form of knowledge severely limits what organizational members can include within the sphere of an agency’s knowledge base (Argyris, 1993). And, using rigid positivist parameters to limit what are accepted as legitimate ways to create knowledge may actually prevent human service organizations from appreciating and developing the full range and scope of knowledge relevant to their fields of practice (von Krogh et al., 2000). This observation is especially relevant when knowledge emerges from the experience and the direct action of agency staff, rather than from systematic research, and when an agency tries to pass this knowledge on to its members through internal processes of social learning and organizational socialization. Such internal social learning and the use of in-house knowledge and in-house presenters, rather than relying on the services of external trainers, has a variety of both direct and indirect benefits. It enables an organization’s members to develop and sharpen their skills as presenters, develop an especially deep understanding of the material they present, become exposed to and known by other members of the organization, and remain as in-house experts and consultants about the material they presented and the issues that material addressed (Schein, 1998; von Krogh & Roos, 1996).

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The Centrality of the Organizational Knowledge System Following Sparrow’s (1998) broad conceptualization of organizational knowledge, the development of organizational knowledge systems must involve the recognition, appreciation, and inclusion of a wide range of mental material, different patterns of thought, varying theoretical and conceptual schemes, and a variety of intellectual products that occur in organizational contexts and are uncovered by organizational intelligence (McMaster, 1996). Only by embracing this kind of broad conception of organizational knowledge can an organization’s members be in a position to recognize and fully appreciate all of the diverse and sometimes unfamiliar forms of knowledge that are relevant and have value to the advancement and improvement of their human service organization (Czarniawska, 1997). With this broad conception of organizational knowledge, agency leaders and human service practitioners can begin to identify how knowledge influences and is influenced by different organizational contexts and activities. But, even the broadest conception of knowledge is not by itself sufficient for understanding the origins, ramifications, and nuances of organizational knowledge in the human services. A full understanding of the nature, function, and role of knowledge requires breakthrough insights and new approaches to thinking about organizational knowledge that can come from innovations in thought, feeling, and actions by providers and recipients of service and other stakeholders who focus on understanding and improving the domain of human services (Myers, 1996). To understand how such knowledge is developed, used, shared, and amplified equips human service professionals with invaluable assets (Pfeffer & Sutton, 2000). They also need to understand how this knowledge becomes a core asset for human service and organizations and how its application eventually becomes part of the organization’s culture. Breakthrough insights derived from the illumination of these aspects of knowledge help organizations transcend restrictive conceptual models of knowledge and their application. Developing such a full understanding of the multifaceted, multi-form nature of organizational knowledge is by no means an easy task, and the job is especially difficult in the human services because of the complex features and challenging missions most human service organizations incorporate (Gibelman, 2003).

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The diverse and complex forms of organizational knowledge in the human services are not without boundaries or structure. Functional challenges created by an organization’s mission force members of human service organizations to define and prioritize the knowledge that is relevant and needed to accomplish mission-driven activities within a given domain. Interpretation and implementation of the organization’s mission establishes the imperative, priority, and sequence for developing and utilizing knowledge. Organizational knowledge collected from the firsthand experience of organizational members in their work helping recipients deal with the challenges they face is especially valuable. The pattern, richness, and utility of an organization’s knowledge base come from translating this firsthand experience into forms of knowledge that other organizational members can apply. In the process of transforming the personal knowledge and experience of the organization’s members into organizational knowledge, information is shared, discussed, analyzed, and enhanced by a variety of people in the organization. The methodology of autoethnography can play an important role in liberating the personal experience of those who engage social issues from a first person stance (Richardson, 2013). This activity can produce a refined body of knowledge that reflects the insights of multiple organizational actors, and an ancillary benefit is a more closely knit and communicative organization. When this kind of knowledge is incorporated into the organization’s knowledge base and repeatedly used, it becomes part of the core content of the organization’s knowledge system and enters the institutional memory of the organization, contributing to and enriching the organization’s culture (Douglas, 1986). Sometimes, in the process of transforming personal experiences into knowledge that is functional for the larger organization (that is, knowledge useful in addressing organizational challenges), patterns of understanding emerge that lead to dramatic breakthroughs in how the organization can more successfully fulfill its purpose and align helping with the fulfillment of mission. In this way, the organization’s knowledge system becomes more than just an archive of facts. Instead, the knowledge system becomes a creative tool for helping the organization use the collective experiences of its members to develop and demonstrate innovations that enable it to more effectively fulfill its mission and better meet the needs of its clients, as well as satisfy the needs and expectations of other stakeholders (Ackoff, 1991, 1994).

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Valuable organizational knowledge is not just derived from the analysis of how an organization successfully meets the challenges it faces. An organization can also derive knowledge from the analysis of its failures. By reflecting on failures as well as successes, workers in human service organizations develop a deeper appreciation of the underlying forces that determine how successful they are when they translate knowledge into action. An effective organizational knowledge system is one that gives equal weight to the examination of both success and failures. Such an examination should go beyond the superficial view that the organization merely follows routine procedures to examine, deduce, and describe how things are done (Garvin, 2000). In-depth analysis of organizational successes and failures is essential because only in-depth analysis has the potential to reveal a realistic and true picture of how the organization functions by uncovering decision making structures, illuminating the values and philosophical positions of the organization’s members and leaders, exposing the ways helping occurs within discrete areas of an organization’s activities, revealing how the organization’s mission is actually pursued in action (Nonaka, 1998). Much of the richness and utility of an organization’s knowledge system is reflected in its ability to apply patterns of knowledge collection and utilization so it captures knowledge about deep organizational structures and activities. This kind of information can be expressed in the organization’s knowledge base both as metaphor and as new models and paradigms of the organization’s manifest behavior (Brown, 1995; Campbell, 1972; Cunningham, 1994). Additionally, well-developed organizational knowledge systems can capture and incorporate fugitive knowledge derived when individuals and groups depart from approved procedures and undertake innovative and creative ways to implement effective practices. Positive drift in procedures can illuminate new ways of practice. Drift involves a departure from official procedure and offers the organization ways of learning about practice. Negative drift, however, involves the modification of procedure by practitioners that produces negative consequences. The discovery of positive drift within an organization can facilitate innovation. The reduction of negative drift can advance quality. A mature organizational knowledge system will capture this kind of knowledge, even when powerful organizational forces mandate that the actions of such individuals and groups are not legitimate, and the knowledge they produce as a consequence, is not formally recognized and is

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likely to go unheralded and unused (Sparrow, 1998). Organizational actors who are seen as unlikely innovators should get attention since their development of knowledge, particularly proceduralized knowledge, can advance practice. While some organizational knowledge systems may emerge haphazardly, this is neither optimal nor desirable. Because knowledge systems are strategically and functionally important to an organization’s operations, identity, and performance, they should be conceived and constructed with the organization’s mission and aims in mind. They should be built on the experience of organizational members, and they should be developed purposefully and thoughtfully to reflect and enhance the culture of the agency. The term ‘knowledge system’ underscores the purposeful intention on the part of human service organizations that set out to build valuable knowledge bases. By design, such a knowledge system incorporates organizational purposes in the formation, articulation, and application of knowledge useful to the achievement of organizational purposes. This means the knowledge system reflects and supports central and strategic organizational aims, activities, and goals. Therefore, it both commands and deserves the attention of all organizational members. The centrality and strategic importance of the organizational knowledge system make its development and maintenance a sound and necessary investment of organizational resources. Since the knowledge system is a basic root or foundation system that supports and influences the development of higher-level organizational systems and shapes the course of organizational actions, and future growth and development, the investment developing, maintaining, and growing the knowledge system is likely to pay handsome dividends. Characterizing an organizational knowledge system as a root system from which other administrative systems branch highlights its strategic importance and centrality. Other systems include strategy formation, financial planning, accreditation management, budgeting, resource development, evaluation, quality management, organizational development, and research and development. Purposeful development of the organizational knowledge base imbues research and evaluation with practical significance. Research is undertaken with a clear understanding of the need for the collation and assessment of basic knowledge that will inform agency practice and may be especially important in identifying relationships, patterns, and causal pathways among variables that are critical to the agency’s purpose and aims.

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Evaluation is undertaken to judge the application of organizational knowledge and its consequences—both intended (as in traditional outcome studies) and unintended (as in nontraditional qualitative or mixed designs). Research and development are undertaken to transform knowledge into products and services, which may alter the basic technology of the agency (Thomas, 1984). All forms of inquiry are rooted in and contribute to the organizational knowledge system and derive from it their meaning, purpose, and direction. It is the knowledge system and its practical implementation that influences the formation of the organization’s technology. When organizational knowledge is extensive and is used to shape technology, management is in a position to realistically plan and adjust budgets and better control unit costs, shape the quality of service, and facilitate innovation (Gibelman, 2003). When an organization’s knowledge system is given a central strategic position, the effectiveness of the organization’s other systems reflects the quality of the knowledge system. When the knowledge system is not seen as having central strategic importance, management may have significant blind spots about how the organization operates, either because that knowledge is sparse or because the organization does not routinely tap into and use its knowledge base (O’Dell & Grayson, 1998). When the knowledge system is not given a key role, the organization is likely to perpetuate incorrect or misinformed assumptions about the nature and complexity of its operations and services, the appropriate use of personnel, the sequencing of activities, and the inputs necessary to achieve the provision of high quality social service.

Relationship Between the Knowledge System and Other Organizational Structures There are a variety of reasons administrators in social welfare organizations should give their knowledge system a high priority and a key place within their grand strategy. One is that human service agencies often must deal with dramatic changes in their environments (Bergquist, 1993; Moxley & Manela, 2000; Manela & Moxley, 2002). At such times, administrators must set aside bureaucratic organizational models based on hierarchical command structures and implement newer more flexible and adaptive organizational forms and professional adhocracies within which teams of

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organizational members, strengthened by common interests and affinities, search for, develop, and demonstrate new practices (Hirschhorn, 1998). A diverse and rich organizational knowledge system is key to negotiating such transitions and adaptations from more traditional organizational forms to more innovative ones (Moxley & Manela, 2000). That these transitions require the articulation of linkages between knowledge and resource development, technology, human resources, team structures, and organizational learning underlines the critical importance that organizational knowledge assumes during periods of rapid and tumultuous change. Resource Development An organization that gathers, organizes, and uses knowledge can sometimes leverage and extend the value of its knowledge system to good effect by applying it to resource development and to the search for external funding from foundations, corporations, or government. Also, external sources of funding may consider the extent to which human service organizations are in command of their own knowledge bases to be an indicator of an organization’s effectiveness and viability. If a human service organization can demonstrate how it applies knowledge to advance an agenda of social innovation, funding sources may see the organization and its programs as an effective provider of services and an attractive investment. The resource development and allocation strategies of many funding agencies are predicated on the assumption that, as providers of funds, they will realize an appreciable increase in their own knowledge as a result of their investment. This means that creating, organizing, and sharing new knowledge is no longer just the esoteric domain of researchers. Good organizational practice requires human service organizations to serve the needs of their recipients and also to satisfy the desires of stakeholders in funding sources for advances in the general level of knowledge in particular fields of practice (Gardner et al., 2001). To do this, they have to document what they learn, demonstrate how to incorporate this knowledge into effective delivery systems, and share their knowledge with those who provide their funding, as well as with others in their field (Gardner et al., 2001). The explication of knowledge within an organization is essential to the formation and improvement of the technologies the organization uses to provide its products and services. Indeed, technology itself can be defined organizationally as the “practical implementation of intelligence”. In

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human service organizations, this intelligence is situated in a context in which the solution of problems often is accomplished by service providers, and creates ‘know-how’, a form of knowledge that is derived from and depends on the application of knowledge in the actions that accomplish effective modes of helping (Ferre, 1995). The implementation process, however, is difficult to rationalize, and numerous models of research and development have emerged within social welfare to explicate this process, including process evaluation, examination of design and development activities, and intervention research. To achieve progress, human service organizations must become more purposeful in their use and application of what they know in the domains in which they undertake concerted social action. Much knowledge within the human services is domain specific. It weaves together mission, strategy, knowledge development, and technology in the creation of a fabric of direct experience and involvement in the provision of social services. One human service agency, for example, which developed a sound knowledge base of its practices, found that the structure of its services needed to be inverted by placing the most experienced, senior, and skilled personnel at intake. Of course, this raised the front end cost of service, but the agency discovered that, compared to its old system, the knowledge and sophistication of its new intake workers resulted in stronger treatment plans, decreased time to service, and ultimately produced a better resolution of those issues that brought recipients to the agency. The new intake system generated important benefits and benchmarks of performance, led to more streamlined and more effective services, provided information that made it possible to better estimate and control costs, and eventually improved client satisfaction, recruited additional clients, and increased revenue. This example illustrates how knowledge has origins in the socio-­ technical structures of an agency in which workers, typically working on their own or in small groups, apply technology that solves problems and fulfills human needs. Through the process of application, knowledge about “what works” emerges in the action settings bringing helpers and recipients together into sustained interaction (Argyris, 1993) and is embedded in and relevant to the contexts where the action takes place (Stake, 1995). This is what Argyris refers to as “actionable knowledge”, and it enables an organization to streamline and improve services. This kind of knowledge comes from the agency’s intimate experience with the environment in which it operates, from an in-depth understanding of its

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service delivery system, from knowledge it possesses about how to implement the technologies it employs, and from a good sense of the tasks it must undertake and complete to achieve its mission. Such invaluable knowledge and experience usually reside with experienced workers who have been members of the organization long enough to know how it responds to changing expectations and shifting social priorities. These workers are aware of the nuances and subtleties of organizational operations because their experience gives them an historical perspective which enables them to recognize the importance of changes in the context in which the provide services and in the demand for those services. This places them in an excellent position to be key informants and important allies of the knowledge system. Their knowledge and experience are so important because they can illuminate the nuances and subtlety of organizational operations and produce a level of detailed information and knowledge that is both rich and relevant to meeting the challenges presented by the organization’s mission. This makes it especially important to translate their personal experience into organizational knowledge, and subsequently into generally implementable technologies (Drucker, 1999). It is this kind of knowledge that, according to Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995) and Sakaiya (1985), adds the most value to efforts to improve a process or a product. Human Resources Because the experienced professional human service worker has a pivotal role in the articulation of organizational knowledge, building an effective organizational knowledge system has important human resource implications. The central importance of the knowledge system highlights the quality of human service professionals as knowledge workers. They collect, analyze, and apply knowledge to bring value to the recipients of the organization’s services, and by doing so, they enhance the functionality and success of the organization that employs them. Recognizing that these professionals are knowledge workers can enhance their status, expand their roles, and honor the central importance of their work to the fulfillment of the agency’s mission. Wedding the organizational knowledge system to a system of human resource development underscores the fact that human service professionals are both the users and creators of knowledge. As such, their job designs and reward structures should reflect the pivotal interface they occupy

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between the organization’s knowledge system and the delivery of its services. Appropriate job design, job titles, career ladders, and compensation are some of the ways to recognize and reward their valuable knowledge work. One way a human resource development system can support and enhance knowledge development is by framing specific jobs in ways that highlight their knowledge development function. Knowledge-oriented jobs focus on four activities. They require human service workers to: (1) implement those practices the organization has identified as most effective; (2) import and apply new knowledge; (3) explicitly describe and explain to others what creative practices they use in their own work; and (4) socialize newcomers into the organizational knowledge system. Making sure role designs and job descriptions include knowledge development and utilization functions underscores the importance of the organization’s workers in the articulation, development, and application of knowledge (Hirschhorn, 1986). Teams As human service organizations adopt team structures that mediate between individuals and super-ordinate parts of the organization, teams themselves become important repositories of knowledge (Hirschhorn, 2002). Those teams that are the most internally cohesive and the most autonomous are likely to develop their own indigenous knowledge systems. An absence of fit between what individuals know and what the team knows as a group can create tension. And, one of the challenging aspects of organizational life for team members is resolving the tension between being and acting as an individual and being and acting as a part of the team. Another challenge arises when personal interests or the interests of the team seem to conflict with the interests and policies of the larger organization. But, fragmentation between individuals and their teams and between teams and the organization as a whole can be a source of organizational creativity and innovation as well as being a source of strain. Dealing with the relationships among team members and between teams and the larger organization can illuminate patterns of interaction and activity that may reveal new and innovative modes of interaction and ways of getting work done. The concept of a mode or schema of interaction encompasses both approved ways for getting things done within an organization and

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unapproved ways individuals and teams get things done by skirting organizational constraints (Sparrow, 1998). While new schema and innovative patterns of activity may create controversy and conflict within organizations, they also can energize staff, direct action, and foster innovation. Learning As human service organizations develop organizational knowledge systems, those systems should respect and incorporate the forms of knowledge that evolve, including knowledge about the paradoxes, conflicts, and controversies that exist within the organization (Gadotti, 1996). Describing organizational problems and conflict often illuminates the edges and boundaries of organizational systems and structures that may artificially restrict knowledge to certain areas or processes and limit the broad development, dissemination, and utilization of knowledge within the organization. The knowledge system may be one of the only ways organizations can comfortably and creatively incorporate uncertainty, controversy, and conflict in ways that can help everyone understand and respect the fact that people, groups, and teams work in different ways and proceed down different paths in their efforts to enhance organizational performance. Investigating, analyzing, and mapping areas of controversy within an organization and treating disagreements as important sources of knowledge possess potential for fostering knowledge about creative innovations and solutions that, in turn, can become critical features of and inputs to the organization’s knowledge system. Diversity within the organization can drive the formulation of innovations and solutions, particularly if the agency assigns less importance to consensus, and prioritizes the lessons that can be learned from different courses of action, varying perspectives, and multiple voices. Knowledge systems require learning, and learning entails trial and error as well as successfully executed and rationalized projects. Knowledge development and utilization involves processes of reflection, discourse, and action that are indispensable to the health and activity of a dynamic organizational knowledge system (Garvin, 2000). Thus, the purposeful creation of a knowledge system can help human service agencies sharpen the skills they need to function as effective communities. In such communities, practitioners’ voices are amplified and can have an impact on the administration, operation, and policies of the agency. Administrators alone

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are not the only ones defining and establishing what the core aspects of knowledge in the agency are or should be and who should have influence and input to the design, development, and application of the knowledge system (Hirschhorn, 1998). Developing organizational processes that promote insight into how staff think and work is particularly important in organizations that encourage people to work in teams (Hirschhorn, 2002). Effective teamwork encourages and incorporates considerable diversity by placing a premium on insight into the ideas and actions of others. This emphasis on the acceptance and promotion of the diversity of ideas and perspectives within teams can help form a coherent basis for effective teamwork. As an organization develops insight into how individuals, teams, and larger organizational units integrate divergent perspectives, resolve conflicts, and build consensus, it will be better able to create a climate where dialogue, discourse, and knowledge building orient all toward mutual understanding, cooperation, coordination, and more effective working relationships.

Structuring the Knowledge System Respecting Multiple Forms of Organizational Knowledge Organizational knowledge is complex and diverse and emerges from a variety of organizational activities. According to Sparrow (1998), such activities involve dynamic combinations of particular forms of thinking. This type of thinking has to be effective at dealing with multiple sources of information and at recognizing and using particular patterns of information. In essence, this type of thinking requires flexibility in the collection, integration, and analysis of a variety of information inputs. It then requires the application of insights developed from the analysis of this information and its application to relevant areas of practice. From Sparrow’s perspective, organizations that are good at this encompass a number of different forms of thought and types of thinking that can be combined in different ways to yield rich, deep, and extensive knowledge. He cites Blackler (1995), who considers knowledge to be a product of active processes that are mediated interactions, situated, provisional, pragmatic, and contested. From the perspective of these authors, knowing is a variable process that is grounded in a particular organizational context and requires a range of mental processes and the skills, talent, and the effort of a number of people. As Brown and his colleagues emphasize,

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intelligence and the knowledge it requires is situated and distributed within networks of people (Brown et  al., 1988), and culture plays an important role in distributing knowledge, recognizing its importance, and making it available (Bruner, 1996). Knowledge within human service organizations is not monolithic, nor does a central hierarchy control it, even though some internal or external stakeholders may press their conceptions of knowledge on other organizational members (Hirschhorn, 1998). Despite pressure from upper management or from powerful external agents, sub-units and front line workers exercise considerable discretion over what they know and how they come to form and value their own knowledge (Hirschhorn, 2002). Therefore, it is best to think of organizational knowledge as so broad in scope that there inevitably is, and should be, considerable variation in the ways this knowledge is obtained, evaluated, and applied. The organization’s substantive knowledge is that which the members find useful enough to incorporate into institutional structures and processes and pass on to newcomers, as the way things should be done and how to get them done. Of course, there is a risk that the organization will perpetuate the “wrong” kind of knowledge (dysfunctional or contra-­ productive knowledge). But, conscious and deliberate intent that agency members invest in the development of a knowledge system designed to promote and enhance agency operations is likely to lower this risk considerably. Conceptions of organizational diversity should be extended to include diversity of thought and knowledge (von Krogh et al., 2000). For example, some workers may think in terms of theoretical propositions. Others may rely more on images and visual or lyric portrayals of their knowledge and actions through pictorial, graphic, narrative, and even poetic representations. Some workers may adopt deductive approaches to knowledge, while others may feel more comfortable with inductive approaches. Some workers may take an abductive approach, in which they use rich metaphors (e.g., the organization of my cases is a tree with three branches diverging off of a main trunk and rooted in a particular type of soil). Some may find thinking in terms of logical propositions oppressive. Others may have trouble with specificity and the limitation of detailed descriptions of current situations, opting to think and speak in broad generalities and focusing on projections and visions of preferred, idealized, or anticipated outcomes, instead of on the details of present circumstances. For some people, their thinking will be colored by their mood, and their

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representations of reality will change with and reflect how they feel or how they adapt emotionally to their work. Understanding the Structural Encapsulation of Knowledge How people think and the structure and content of their knowledge reflects individual variation and the influence of their interactions with each other. The organization’s environment can induce the formation of ideas that shape the knowledge people develop and influence the structure and content of jobs that in turn shape the formation of workers’ knowledge. How people think and the knowledge they develop will be different in different organizations and in the different contexts in which organizations and their workers operate. It also is likely that there will be differences among different units or locations within the same organization (Sparrow, 1998). Coping with the demands of a particular job and figuring out how to implement tasks that are central to effective work performance also can influence the formation of knowledge, so that workers performing different kinds of jobs will develop knowledge that not only differs in content but also in form (Hirschhorn, 1986). Administrators will likely conceive of what they know in ways that differ markedly from the ways direct service practitioners understand and think about their knowledge. In some organizational units, knowledge will be encapsulated within key individuals and groups, who, in turn, may shape the whole knowledge base of that particular unit. In other parts of the organization, knowledge will reflect technologies and approaches typically used to achieve desired outcomes. Family service workers who work primarily in schools will know children and their parents in ways that can substantially differ from the knowledge of family workers in foster care and adoption programs, even though these workers may work for the same organization and even serve the same families. This makes it extremely difficult to create a one dimensional and uniform knowledge base. Understanding that the structure of knowledge is complex and that its forms are diverse, multifaceted and variable is essential if one is to appreciate and appropriately apply the principles that guide the articulation of knowledge systems within social service agencies. Organizational knowledge systems should respect and encompass the local knowledge that forms through the confluence of organizational structure, culture, technology, personnel, purpose, and experience. And, organizational knowledge systems should also respect and encompass the

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personal knowledge and experience workers bring to their jobs, as well as the unique manner in which they think about and execute their work. Capturing diversity and variation by individual, role, position, and location is an essential feature of organizational knowledge development. This requires an organizational knowledge system to encompass the dynamic, flexible, and impermanent character of organizational knowledge (Clegg et al., 1996). Appreciating the Mediating Role of Organizational Culture in Knowledge Formation Given the multi-faceted, sometimes fleeting, distributed, and diverse character of organizational knowledge, it is most likely that the knowledge systems in human service and social welfare organizations will emerge inductively and be built from the ground up, rather than unfold deductively as the particular embodiment of some general principle or established design. Such knowledge systems will probably be assembled over time through ongoing efforts to collate, organize, and evaluate information and experience at different levels and locations of the organization, rather than as a preplanned and packaged product. Still, the knowledge system, even in its early stages of development, will have architecture, but that architecture will be emergent and malleable so that it can take a form appropriate to encompass the developing critical mass of knowledge that is intentionally collected with a wide net and analyzed in ways that reveal pattern and nuance that may be important for the purposes of advancing organizational practice (von Krogh et al., 2000). As the work of assembling the knowledge system radiates out into the organization, the organization’s culture will influence and shape the formation of the knowledge system in both dramatic and subtle ways (Bruner, 1996). Organizational culture will provide much of the basis for determining what knowledge is valued within the organization, legitimizing some knowledge and discounting other knowledge. Some organizational cultures will narrowly define what is legitimate and, as a result, they may undermine and negate the value of how some personnel think and act. Other organizational cultures will be robust enough to incorporate a variety of different ways of thinking and knowing. Their knowledge systems will include many different forms of knowledge. Some complex and diverse systems may on the surface seem chaotic, but their apparent chaos

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is likely to be transitory and counterbalanced by their adeptness at integrating disparate ideas and encompassing a broad base of knowledge. Organizations with such knowledge systems may become very good at carrying out a concerted effort to unite diverse knowledge and focus it on achieving the agency’s mission. The extent to which an organization’s knowledge is formalized into a knowledge system is also a product of the organization’s culture. Organizations that make their organizational knowledge system explicit and strive for concrete formal mechanisms of knowledge development, dissemination, and utilization likely will take a different approach to organizational knowledge than organizations that strive for an implicit system that operates in the background through informal mechanisms.

Action for Knowledge Management Engage knowledge as imperfect as you search for possibilities of certainty. This is a paradox that can stir action. 1. Clarify the knowledge demands and requirements of organizational purpose and mission. Assess functional knowledge requirements emanating from purpose and mission. Identify what the organization needs to know (x) in order to bring about a desired outcome (y). 2. Amplify the voice of those who the organization likely ignores or those structures that do not hold powerful positions within the organization. Be open to dissent in which relatively unempowered groups have much to say that may differ from central narratives of what is good or best practices. 3. Do not reject difficult to operationalize or measure experience of the various members or stakeholders of the organization. Something that is difficult to measure may indicate subjective experience that once explained may hold considerable value for the organization. 4. Use what the organization knows in encoding practices for clinical care, teams, human resource development, resource development, information systems, evaluation, and grant writing. The organizational interfaces between the incipient knowledge management system and other organizational systems can facilitate the translation of practice knowledge into daily use at the levels of policy, procedure, quality management, and outcome management.

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5. Extend the idea of diversity within the organization to include diversity of thought and knowing. Thus, diversity can incorporate ways of knowing that link to class, profession, education, race, ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, and language. 6. See knowledge as part of organizational culture operating in what the organization passes on as legitimate ways of knowing to new generations of staff, professionals, and recipients.

References Ackoff, R. L. (1991). Creating the corporate future: Plan or be planned for. Wiley. Ackoff, R. L. (1994). The democratic corporation. Oxford University Press. Argyris, C. (1993). Knowledge for action: A guide to overcoming barriers to organizational change. Jossey-Bass. Bergquist, W. (1993). The postmodern organization: Mastering the art of irreversible change. Jossey-Bass. Blackler, F. (1995). Knowledge, knowledge work and organizations: An overview and interpretation. Organization Studies, 16, 1021–1046. Brinckerhoff, P. C. (1994). Mission-based management: Leading your not-for-profit into the 21st century. Alpine Guild. Brown, J. (1995). Dialogue: Capacities and stories. In S. Chawla & J. Renesch (Eds.), Learning organizations: Developing tomorrow’s workplace (pp. 153–164). Productivity Press. Brown, J. S., Collins, A., & Duguid, P. (1988). Situated cognition and the culture of learning. Educational Researcher, 18, 32–42. Bruner, J. (1996). The culture of education. Harvard University Press. Campbell, J. (1972). Myths to live by. Penguin. Clegg, S. R., Barrett, M., Clarke, T., Dwyer, L., Gray, J., Kemp, S., & Marceau, J. (1996). Management knowledge for the future: Innovation embryos and new paradigms. In S. R. Clegg & G. Palmer (Eds.), The politics of management knowledge. Sage. Cunningham, I. (1994). The wisdom of strategic learning. McGraw-Hill. Czarniawska, B. (1997). Narrating the organization: Dramas of institutional identity. University of Chicago Press. Douglas, M. (1986). How institutions think. Syracuse University Press. Drucker, P. F. (1990). Managing the nonprofit organization: Principles and practices. Harper Collins. Drucker, P. (1999). Knowledge-worker productivity: The biggest challenge. California Management Review, 41, 79–94. Ferre, F. (1995). Philosophy of technology. University of Georgia Press.

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Gadotti, M. (1996). Pedagogy of praxis: A dialectical philosophy of education. State University of New York Press. Gardner, H., Csikszentmihalyi, M., & Damon, W. (2001). Good work: When excellence and ethics meet. Basic Books. Garvin, D. A. (2000). Learning in action. Harvard Business School Press. Gibelman, M. (2003). Navigating human service organizations. Lyceum. Handy, C. (1989). The age of unreason. Harvard Business School Press. Handy, C. (1994). The age of paradox. Harvard Business School Press. Handy, C. (1996). Beyond certainty: The changing world of organizations. Harvard Business School Press. Hirschhorn, L. (1986). Beyond mechanization. MIT Press. Hirschhorn, L. (1998). Reworking authority: Leading and following in a postmodern organization. MIT Press. Hirschhorn, L. (2002). Managing in the new team environment: Skills, tools, and methods. Addison Wesley. Kaplan, R. S., & Norton, D. P. (1996). The balanced scorecard: Translating strategy into action. Harvard Business School Press. Kaplan, R.  S., & Norton, D.  P. (2001). The strategy-focused organization: How balanced scorecard companies thrive in the new business environment. Harvard Business School Press. Manela, R. W., & Moxley, D. P. (2002). Best practices as agency-based knowledge in social welfare. Administration in Social Work, 26, 1–24. McMaster, M. D. (1996). The intelligence advantage: Organizing for complexity. Butterworth-Heinemann. Moxley, D. P., & Manela, R. W. (2000). Agency-based evaluation and organizational change in the human services. Families in Society, 81(3), 316–327. Myers, P.  S. (1996). Knowledge management and organizational design. Butterworth-Heinemann. Nonaka, I. (1998). The knowledge-creating company. In Harvard Business Review (Eds.), Knowledge management. Harvard Business School Press. Nonaka, I., & Takeuchi, H. (1995). The knowledge-creating company: How Japanese companies create the dynamics of innovation. Oxford University Press. O’Dell, C., & Grayson, C. J. (1998). If only we knew what we know: The transfer of internal knowledge and best practice. Free Press. Pfeffer, J. I., & Sutton, R. I. (2000). The knowing-doing gap: How smart companies turn knowledge into action. Harvard Business School Press. Richardson, L. (2013). After a fall: A sociomedical sojourn. Left Coast Press. Sakaiya, T. (1985). The knowledge-value revolution. Kodansha International. Schein, E. (1998). Organizational culture and leadership (2nd ed.). Jossey-Bass. Sparrow, J. (1998). Knowledge in organizations: Access to thinking at work. Sage. Stake, R. (1995). The art of case study research. Sage. Thomas, E. J. (1984). Designing interventions for the helping professions. Sage.

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von Krogh, G., & Roos, J. (1996). Imitation of knowledge: A sociology of knowledge perspective. In G. von Krogh & J.  Roos (Eds.), Managing knowledge: Perspectives on cooperation and competition. Sage. von Krogh, G., Ichijo, K., & Nonaka, I. (2000). Enabling knowledge creation: How to unlock the mystery of tacit knowledge and release the power of innovation. Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 5

Dimensions and Competencies of the Knowledge Management System

Abstract  Human service organizations can orient to various sources of knowledge, such as the experience of staff, the lived experience of recipients, or the ideas or stipulations experts may make. An organization can focus on specifying its knowledge in the form of procedural terms or on allowing knowledge to form in soft or ambiguous ways. Coherence involves the rationalization of knowledge so that the knowledge contributes to a theory of action all practitioners within the organization embrace. Alternatively, the knowledge base of an organization may be fragmented across organizational structures. Still, coherent knowledge may operate within particular units. Breadth maps against the functional knowledge requirements of mission, and depth involves the penetration of the knowledge base into structures at various levels of organizational life. Keywords  Dimensions of knowledge system • Competencies of knowledge system • Best practices • Quality management Because, the knowledge system is one of an organization’s core or root systems, it is a basic organizational resource, and considerable thought and effort should be invested figuring out how to best configure this

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system. A number of dimensions can guide the configuration of organizational knowledge systems, including orientation, explicitness, coherence, breadth, and depth.

Dimensions of the Knowledge Management System Orientation This dimension involves the location from which the organization derives knowledge. Some organizations will limit their focus to very specific aspects of knowledge, perhaps concentrating only on the collation and documentation of best practices they import from external sources, ignoring or discounting the practices their own personnel have formulated and tested in the field, and overlooking agency generated discoveries and inventions (Manela & Moxley, 2002). While these organizations are likely to become particularly good at legitimizing knowledge from external sources, they are not likely to develop and implement mechanisms for valuing their own members’ knowledge or for rewarding in-house expertise and firsthand experience. Such organizations may invest a great deal in cultivating contacts with external experts and in importing the experience of people from other places who represent what the organization sees as standards of practice in the domain in which it operates. Other organizations may value their own experience and knowledge so much that they discount or never consider the knowledge and experience of outsiders. Their strong orientation to internal knowledge development ensures that these organizations will make full use of internal experts and will recognize their workers who implement good practices and articulate their knowledge in ways other members can readily understand and utilize. The common thread that unites the approaches of both types of organizations is that they depend on experts, either external or internal, as their primary source of knowledge. Organizations also may take a more balanced approach to the solicitation and application of expert knowledge by using knowledge from internal experts to temper and validate knowledge they import, and by using external expertise to expand, extend, and/or validate knowledge developed internally. For example, as part of its quality management strategy, an organization, that has developed internal knowledge of how to prevent violence among youth, may annually engage experts from across the

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country to critique, expand, or extend the best practices agency supervisors and staff develop and use daily in their provision of service. Explicitness Explicitness involves the clarity and specificity of organizational knowledge. Some organizations are comfortable with ‘soft’ knowledge that remains ambiguous and open to debate among organizational members. This knowledge may come in the form of images and rich portrayals by specific personnel of cases that illuminate key practices. However, these kinds of case histories may not present or discuss the theoretical assumptions or propositions that guided the application of procedures in the case, so that they could be applied to other cases. Alternatively, an agency’s knowledge base may contain specific information from reports by personnel who use commonly accepted evaluation and documentation tools, instruments, and questionnaires, which they have systematically applied to collect information from carefully selected samples of recipients. This kind of knowledge is not primarily based on a unique in-depth case history that provides a personal narrative of what occurred; instead it incorporates and relies on so-called standardized and supposedly objective measures of process and outcomes which link results to specific procedures that are described in formalized program assessment documents. In such cases, explicitness may be a dimension that taps directly into the deep culture of an organization that relies on ‘scientific’ and ‘objective’ information and forces decisions about what constitutes legitimate knowledge, what knowledge the organization is willing to act upon, and what knowledge the organization seeks to measure and collate to conform with the model of what is acceptable and valuable knowledge that is embedded in and supports the culture of the organization (Douglas, 1986). However, regardless of how carefully and how explicitly knowledge is documented and collected, and regardless of how carefully it is analyzed, explicitness itself does not immunize knowledge from controversy. On the other hand, neither does the richness of personal narrative presented in case histories ensure the value and applicability of the experience of individual practitioners. Perhaps, it is the reconciliation of conflict and controversy over different forms of knowledge and their relevance and applicability that is the mark of a healthy organization and is what is likely to result in the development and utility of data sources in the design of new

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technologies, instruments, and approaches that lead to innovative reformulations of essential practices and procedures in human service organizations. Coherence Focusing on the extent to which the knowledge base of an organization holds together, coherence is determined by and reflects organizational form, structure, and, ultimately, organizational culture. A highly rationalized organization may develop a coherent knowledge base that utilizes unified and integrated procedures of knowledge collection, focuses on information about well-documented outcomes, and is able to directly link the knowledge it collects to the achievement of mission integrity. Such a rationalized organization may incorporate a number of bureaucratic features that enable it to control practice centrally and to exercise considerable surveillance over the adherence of practitioners to prescribed procedures and practices. The extent of rationalization of knowledge within an organization may be a function of its perception of the degree or scope of risk it faces (Douglas & Wildavsky, 1983). One tactic for the management of risk may be standardization of knowledge and the control of the use of knowledge through tight supervisory and administrative mechanisms. Thus, the emergence of tightly controlled knowledge systems within organizations facing substantial risk, like health care facilities, psychiatric treatment programs, and some child welfare programs, is not surprising. A matrix organizational structure, in which administrative and operational lines of authority are interlaced, may ensure that knowledge workers execute appropriate procedures to advance the purposes of the organization’s program and focus their work and the work of their team or unit on implementing those procedures and achieving those purposes through adherence to the knowledge requirements of a specific discipline, approach, or practice. In such an organization, quality can be defined as the utilization of appropriate procedures, the reliability and validity of which are subjected to continuous testing and reformulation using best practices that are generic, predefined for the field, and which constitute accepted ways of ensuring adherence to standard measures of excellence. It is likely that standard principles and procedures of evidence-based practice and ‘management by measurement’ will prevail in these agencies. And, organizations of this type are likely to base their identities on measurement, data

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collection, and knowledge utilization as ways to achieve and document their achievement of their specific organizational aims. The knowledge systems of these agencies may have a balanced orientation, in which the agency imports knowledge from outside and also respects and rewards internal knowledge creation that is a product of direct application of discoveries organizational members derive from efforts to continuously examine, evaluate, and improve their practices. The knowledge base of such an organization is likely to be highly explicit and possess high levels of coherence. Another type of organization may not value this kind of knowledge system. Its culture may not support attaining such a high level of coherence. And, its knowledge system may be designed to accept and include contradiction, paradoxes, incoherence, and multiple points of view. At times the practices and procedures of such an agency may seem so ill defined that the agency’s activities appear haphazard and chaotic. This type of agency is usually found in new and emergent domains of practice, and the knowledge bases of these kinds of organizations are often nascent as well. Indeed, such an agency may see and promote itself as a pioneering organization that is establishing and extending what is known in an important area of social welfare, knowledge that previously did not exist or was not recognized as important. When three organizations: (1) a clinic for people with HIV and AIDS, (2) a self-help network that offers peer-support and housing, and (3) a prevention service that uses an educational approach, decided to merge, they sought some semblance of wholeness and coherence by undertaking the integration of their diverse cultures. This resulted in a combined organization with a complex structure, a diverse staff, and a variety of points of view about what constituted “good practice”. The new organization’s leadership had to deal with considerable controversy over the parameters and content of legitimate knowledge. But, instead of fearing that the new organization would collapse into anarchy or fragment into its component parts, the organization’s leadership saw the lack of coherence as an opportunity for creative practice and as a chance for a new schema to emerge from the development and utilization of tools that facilitated the formation of a feasible new paradigm of service. The organization’s leader focused early on creating an organizational knowledge system that would identify areas of core competence. All personnel were involved in developing the knowledge system. Staff members were asked to formulate their knowledge in four areas: (1) provision of

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high quality ongoing ambulatory health care; (2) engagement of recipients in self-help and mutual support; (3) undertaking friendly outreach and prevention; and (4) developing housing, employment, educational, and socialization opportunities for recipients. The resulting knowledge system helped the agency expand its mission from merely providing a diversity of services to helping people coping with HIV and AIDS achieve a quality of life that brought them satisfaction and personal fulfillment. Despite the merger, conflict and controversy about the nature of the organization’s knowledge base persisted. At first, this conflict led to debates about how to best provide new leading-edge services. Later, it shifted to how best to fulfill the agency’s commitment to consumer involvement, recruitment of recipients as personnel, the creation of alternative career lines, and the involvement of highly educated health and human service personnel. On the surface, some of these aims appear contradictory or paradoxical (such as recruiting staff members from both recipients of service who lacked formal credentials but who nonetheless possessed firsthand experience in the management of HIV, and from highly trained credentialed professionals), but the leadership of the agency framed these apparent contradictions as expressions of the diverse knowledge and competencies the new agency would require. The leadership never cut off debate in an effort to force coherence into the knowledge system. Instead, the agency used controversy over what constituted good practice as a tactic to promote continuous revitalization. The many-voiced and polysemous nature of many nascent organizations reflects the diverse cultures and origins of the component individuals and organizations, which may draw together to extend the leading edges of social welfare practice (Sparrow, 1998). The challenge for many organizations in emerging areas of practice lies in the development of a knowledge system that encompasses all voices and accepts a variety of meanings and levels of value for different types of knowledge. However, it is also important to recognize that knowledge is linked to environmental challenges, reflects the culture that emerges within organizations to cope with these challenges, and supports use of technology that is fashioned to facilitate performance in the face of the challenges within a particular environment (Douglas & Wildavsky, 1983). It is difficult to document or prescribe what kind of knowledge base any organization requires until its environment, culture, and technology are well understood, and until the context in which it operates and the challenges it faces also are well understood.

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Breadth Breadth characterizes the extent to which the scope of the agency’s knowledge is adequate to the scope of its mission. Breadth incorporates a number of different schema required to produce the ultimate outcome the agency’s mission requires. For example, consider the case of a social service agency dedicated to advancing the quality of life of people coping with serious mental illness. This agency has linked its ultimate outcome to the subjective quality of life experienced by the people it serves, even though the quality of life of these individuals is easily jeopardized by even minor changes in social policy, laws, service systems, basic living conditions, and the social and physical environments in which they live. The agency had a reputation for engaging in innovation and for adopting a consumer-driven ethos and paradigm of service. Annually, the agency invested in consumer forums, in which people coping with mental illness and their families would define what quality of life meant to them personally. This created a number of knowledge challenges for the agency and for the way it organized its services. One year the forums resulted in the identification of three areas in which the agency did not possess much substantive knowledge but, nonetheless, which were compatible with the agency’s overarching paradigm and technology: (1) creation of employment opportunities, (2) the development of careers, and (3) success in higher education. The board of the agency played an important role in mediating the legitimacy of the knowledge required to address these issues and quickly affirmed these opportunities as being within the scope of the agency’s mission. The immediate challenge in the forthcoming year was for the agency to increase the breadth of its knowledge base by adding knowledge in the new areas to its existing expertise in housing, clinical management of psychiatric conditions, case management, and social and community support. Clearly, the knowledge management challenge for the agency was to increase the breadth of its knowledge base in the designated areas. But, obviously, this was not enough, since expanding breadth of knowledge soon creates depth issues and raises questions about the development of organizational capacities, professional expertise, and administrative competencies to engage in the acquisition, refinement, and incorporation of the new knowledge, as well as developing knowledge about how to implement services in the new areas of practice.

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Depth Depth as a dimension of the organizational knowledge system requires extending the understanding of what the agency knows about a particular domain of practice beyond superficialities to illuminate its essence and core characteristics. For a particular psychiatric rehabilitation agency, depth of knowledge meant deepening the agency’s knowledge and insight into state of the art services in the relevant areas defined by the new foci of the agency’s practice, examining models of practice in those areas, and learning how to develop and implement specific programs and procedures, staffing configurations, and alternative patterns of service provision in the new substantive areas of service. This kind of deepening of knowledge creates other challenges, including the possible fragmentation of the technology of the agency and the inherent tension between breadth and depth of knowledge, especially when resources are limited. Therefore, implementing services in new areas of practice requires even more in-depth knowledge about the integration of these new domains with the more traditional and familiar areas of agency practice. When undertaking the provision of new services, broadening and deepening the requisite knowledge base of the agency is both necessary and inevitable. It is not surprising that breadth and depth go hand-in-hand as aspects of knowledge relevant to social welfare and human service agencies, since both this knowledge and agency practices are broad and encompassing and also deep and multi-layered. While some agencies may sacrifice one for the other by being too general in their knowledge or too narrowly focused, the goal should be a more balanced approach that integrates breadth and depth in a knowledge system designed to pursue both.

Competencies of Organizational Knowledge Management in the Human Services Human service agencies increasingly address knowledge management, but perhaps not in as systematic or explicit ways as other organizations, such as manufacturing, health care, scientific, or industrial concerns. The necessity for knowledge management in human service agencies can be seen in six competencies that often remain tacit in the minds of organizational actors. These competencies are likely to emerge from an agency’s response to environmental demands, which press the organization to define what is

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right (ethical commitments), what is beautiful (aesthetic values), and what is responsible behavior (civic duty). These competencies often are explicated as imperatives that emerge from an organization’s mission and vision, and are recognized and reinforced by the societal mandates that give the organization legitimacy, define what is to do, and foster a sense of accountability and obligation. Fulfilling such mandates often is a consequence and cost of taking public or private funds. Knowledge management competencies that enable an organization to fulfill its mandate do not emerge in a vacuum, nor does an organization merely embrace them without good reason. Rather, knowledge management competencies are likely to be formed through purposeful actions the agency takes to respond to its mandate and master the environmental demands of doing so. Knowledge management is relevant to those agencies which assign it a high degree of functional utility and which come to see it as a basic strategy for achieving the organizations aims, mission, and vision through the expression of its ethics, aesthetics, civic duty, and societal mandate. Six competencies that continuously drive knowledge management by human service agencies are to: 1. Continuously identify and adopt best practices and transform and refine them through specific applications. 2. Continuously improve the scope, range, and usefulness of human services. 3. Continuously innovate by creating new approaches to address enduring and emergent social issues, and thereby increase the knowledge base of models and best practices in a particular domain of practice. 4. Continuously demonstrate and judge the effectiveness of service approaches, interventions, and programs, while experimenting with requisite changes to ensure and/or achieve continual improvement in this effectiveness. 5. Continuously teach what the organization comes to know as effective practice. 6. Continuously foster inter-organizational exchanges of knowledge to advance the quality and effectiveness of practice within a specific domain.

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Recognizing the legitimacy of these aims and addressing them in practice require human service agencies to embrace knowledge management and to involve their workers in the knowledge management enterprise. We can invoke the idea of enterprise to underscore those effective human service organizations, like any effective organization, that prize innovation as one strategy for returning value to the greater society (Handy, 1996; McMaster, 1996). Social enterprises practice innovation continuously and recognize that innovation not only requires knowledge but that knowledge also is a product of innovation (Kim, 1997). These six competencies are formed and sharpened through practice and, therefore, undertaking them on a continuous basis suggests that the enterprise of knowledge management has no fixed completion point. Knowledge can continue to evolve as the organization evolves in its sophistication and its ability to create and use knowledge. There is a strong connection between knowledge management and organizational learning. Knowledge management, to invoke Carse’s (1994) concept of games, is infinite—it is unbounded, has no specific ends. The process of playing the game itself creates rewards and benefits that perpetuate the motivation of the players. The game never stops. There is always something new for the social service agency to learn. The work of knowledge management goes on continuously, since the creation of knowledge yields new knowledge and reveals new horizons for the advancement of human service practice. The knowledge worker extends the boundaries of knowledge through applications that facilitate the effectiveness of the worker’s host organization. The knowledge organization fosters the conditions under which knowledge is actively created, applied, judged, modified and even discarded or destroyed. Thus, knowledge management requires a full system response on part of the agency, which means that the knowledge management process eventually becomes embedded within the agency’s organizational structure and culture. When this happens, individual practitioners, groups of practitioners, discrete programs, and the organization as a whole all participate in the agency’s full system response in important and essential ways. The agency cannot afford to ignore any form of involvement by staff in the knowledge enterprise that could promote, broaden and deepen its knowledge and its system for managing and utilizing that knowledge. The following discussion examines the six competencies in greater detail.

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Continuously Identify, Adopt, and Transform Best Practices The idea of best practices has captured the attention of human service professionals in many different fields of practice. This is an indication of the movement of the profession to embrace knowledge development and management (Manela & Moxley, 2002). Increasingly those entities that fund innovation in social welfare and human service, whether foundations, government, or federated funding systems, such as the United Way, are requiring human service organizations to identify their best practices and to demonstrate the use of these practices in their everyday activities. These stakeholders also want those who apply for funds to ensure that their proposals for program or organizational change make use of what is considered to be “best” in a particular field or domain of practice. Unfortunately, there is no one definition of best practice, but practitioners often look to researchers within a given field, particularly to those who undertake demonstration projects that are systematically evaluated, for their cues about those practices that can be considered the state of the art. Certainly, there are other sources of best practices: consensus of professionals, exhortations of practitioners, testimonials and ratings of service by recipients, and deeply held traditions to name a few. Nonetheless, most human service organizations expend considerable energy in the process of search and retrieval to identify and adapt best practices to the requirements of their programs and the needs of their clients. This process is most productive if it is undertaken on a continuous rather than on a one-shot or occasional basis, since a continuous process facilitates the emergence of active and purposeful learning of those abilities and practices that are discovered and adopted to meet the knowledge management requirements of the human service organization (Manela & Moxley, 2002). A continuous organizational process involving the codification of best practices can help a human service organization create a knowledge system that is useful in organizational knowledge development, supports continuous organizational improvement, guides resource development, fosters innovation, and adapts to and informs organizational change. Perhaps what is most important, however, is that an organization’s search for best practices heightens internal dialogue about what the organization needs to know, what qualifies as essential knowledge relative to the organization’s mission, and what constitutes “best” in a particular domain of practice (Lesser & Prusak, 1999; Spinello, 1998).

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From a knowledge management perspective, this aim is achieved by those organizations that continuously search for best practices, identify and evaluate them, examine their technical merits closely, actively plan for their utilization, and undertake programs to adopt and further develop these practices, or, after evaluating and perhaps trying them, judge that they are not what the organization seeks and so discards them. Success in the use of this process assumes that there are organizational members who have the skills to engage in best practice identification, assessment, adaptation, promulgation, and implementation. Knowledge workers who can successfully conduct this knowledge management process are indispensable. The sources of best practices are not always external to the agency. Internal organizational members also are potential engineers of best practices, but unfortunately many of these practices are not made explicit by the particular organizational actors who create and use a best practice. In addition these members of the organization may hold little power and have only narrow visibility within the agency. As a consequence, their work may go unrecognized (O’Dell & Grayson, 1998). While the choice and use of some best practices may be stipulated or technically prescribed, the selection and implementation of many best practices is not, and the imaginative adaptation and application of an existing best practice that was designed for another purpose may create a new practice within a particular agency that may or may not be recognized and widely implemented. The value of best practices can be eviscerated if they are merely stated as general principles or ideas. The real utility of best practices lies in their specification and in the illumination of how they work under specific practice conditions. Thus, best practices that are broken down into easily learned procedures and then taught to those in the agency who are expected to use them are likely to become concrete tools that are actually used, and they will be amenable to testing, evaluation, adaptation and continued use or rejection by the staff and the clients they serve. Those best practices that are accepted, can expand the practical knowledge and applicable techniques relevant to specific organizational applications. Placing a best practice into a particular context can heighten the insight gained from implementing and differentiating a particular procedure from others practices that are less applicable to the specific context and application being considered. Because relevant knowledge often is highly contextualized or situated, the specification of a best practice as relevant to and especially effective in

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a certain context must codify the conditions under which it should be used, the resources needed to effectively implement it, the dynamics of correct application, and the prohibitions that surround its specialized application (Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995). Some best practices will have general applicability and broad utility. Others are particularly adapted to specialized uses in specific situations and with certain client populations. This gestalt of knowledge about best practices and where, how, and with whom to use them highlights the scope, breadth, and depth of knowledge about those practices the agency may require to determine what it takes to successfully implement a particular best practice. Success in this process of knowledge management goes to the root functionality of an organization’s knowledge system and speaks volumes about the organization’s culture and character. Does the organization have the imagination to even think of best practices in novel or creative ways? Does it see itself as being on or wanting to be on the so-called “cutting edge” of service delivery in its domain of practice? Does it empower organizational members at all levels of the agency to seek out and work on refining and implementing best practices? Fulfillment of this approach to best practices amplifies the strategic value of knowledge management, since it is knowledge management helps positions the organization to advance its effectiveness in a particular domain or area of practice. Doing so requires the organization to align the energy of its people in order to find, use, and transform those practices that can make it a distinctive provider of service within its chosen field of activity (Zack, 1999). Some critics may view this approach solely from the perspective of cost, focusing only on the resource requirements for pursuing best practices, but the successful discovery and implementation of best practices can create various kinds of value for the agency that could justify undertaking efforts to expand the use of best practices. Even if the value of such a program initially may seem to some to be abstract or minimal, the discovery, testing, refinement, and institutionalization of best practices are likely to augment an organization’s success and help the agency promote, enhance, and increase its reputation, expand its funding, increase its success recruiting and retaining highly qualified staff, expand its client base, form alliances with academic institutions and with other service delivery agencies, and increase the likelihood of its selection as a demonstration site for exciting and highly visible new programs (Sakaiya, 1985).

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Continuously Improve the Scope, Range, Usefulness and Quality of Human Services Quality management focuses on improving the core technologies of an organization. It orients organizational members to think about and act to improve the quality of what is central to the achievement of the organization’s mission (Creech, 1994). It is an activity that draws on and also provides input to organization’s knowledge management systems. In the United States, the idea and practice of quality management gained momentum during the late 1970s and early 1980s when many organizations, particularly manufacturing ones, found themselves in competitive crises, and as a consequence, they invested considerable energy and resources establishing and refining their infrastructures to implement programs of quality management. Fostering the development of organizational cultures to support this technology became a popular goal for a broad range of organizations. The early literature on quality management suggested that it was the principal strategy leaders of organizations believed they could use to move out of the competitive crises they were facing. Quality management required an organization to integrate all of its major systems and coordinate their efforts to increase quality (Deming, 2000; Walton & Deming, 1988). Quality management that had begun in manufacturing under headings such as “Total Quality” and “Zero Defect Production” quickly expanded from the manufacturing sector to health, education, and human services, particularly as government at all levels increasingly demanded improvements in the outcomes achieved by publicly funded services (Gunther & Hawkins, 1996; Kennedy, 1991). The quality management movement resulted in the formulation of new evaluation and certification systems that encoded the essential properties of approaches to quality management and facilitated their implementation and application to improve organizational actions and outcomes. Quality management systems amplified the importance of organizational knowledge and highlighted the need for workers skilled at diagnosing the causes of quality problems using statistical techniques to analyze the activities and processes organizations performed, conduct experiments in process improvement, and more effectively integrate the activities of different organizational units and sectors to meet the requirements of quality management programs and produce higher levels of quality in products and services (Appelbaum & Batt, 1994).

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For many workers who had suffered decades of regimentation and deskilling found that the norms quality management introduced expanded their autonomy in decision-making and provided opportunities to learn and use new analytic skills to better understand operations and identify the root causes of quality problems (Hirschhorn, 1986). The convergence of cultural change, work redesign, and role expansion that occurred with the implementation of quality management created organizational environments that fostered innovations and organizational changes necessary to successfully implement the new quality management programs. The basic tools of quality management are scientific in nature. The Deming Cycle, for example, requires workers to move through the analysis of quality, the identification of what reduces quality, the formulation of plans to improve quality, the implementation and evaluation of these plans, and the institutionalization of what works to improve quality within the context of work processes and key organizational activities (Walton & Deming, 1988). The so-called P-D-C-A cycle, standing for a scientifically inspired problem solving process of Planning, Doing, Checking, and Acting requires individuals not only to assess and act on the quality of their own practice, but also to think through and act to institutionalize their knowledge and best practices within a process, system, or whole organization. The P-D-C-A cycle is a variant of action research and action learning. Organizations gain knowledge through action, the appraisal of that action, valuing knowledge gained through action, and the implementation of additional actions based on that knowledge (Stringer, 1999). Like other forms of knowledge management, quality improvement is not a one-shot undertaking. If it is to work effectively within an organization, it must support a process of continuous improvement. The reason improvement must be continuous is that systems, processes, and products degrade in the absence of vigilant analysis, oversight, and action to maintain and advance their quality. To institutionalize continuous quality management as part of their organizational culture, organizations must be prepared to focus on quality, employ the analytic and improvement tools quality management requires, reward discrete improvements in quality, and, most importantly, collect and use the knowledge gained through quality improvement on an on-going basis to advance and expand quality improvement (Creech, 1994). The tools of research and evaluation are quite relevant to quality improvement as a form of knowledge management. Both qualitative and quantitative analytic tools can be used. And, specific research designs,

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including single subject, quasi-experimental, experimental, and survey approaches are also useful. These designs can be nested within quality management cycles and yield the data necessary to facilitate and guide analysis and action. However, these approaches are not likely to be useful, or even used, unless members of human service organizations are attuned to the interpersonal, group, and cultural dynamics of knowledge acquisition and utilization. Quality management may require workers to employ scientific methods within the context of their work and employ a rational way of appraising quality and acting to improve a process and the products resulting from it. Effective quality management does not stand apart from organizational actions, and those actions that facilitate or inhibit the use of the knowledge agency personnel gain from their quality improvement activities are especially important to examine and understand. Today, quality is both expected and assumed. Quality management is an accepted and necessary part of organizations’ operations and is no longer at the cutting edge of organizational development and innovation. Some human service and social welfare organizations may need to catch up in their implementation of quality management, but there is little argument about the importance of doing so. And, today an increasing number of human service and social welfare organizations, whether private, public, or nonprofit, possess or will soon implement quality management programs that will become integrated into their cultures and the daily work lives of their members. The epistemology of quality management systems requires human service organizations to think differently about quality and consider it, at least in part, as a subjective judgment, expressed as a discrepancy between what one expects of a product or service and how one experiences that product or service, using one’s expectations as the reference points for one’s judgment. Paradoxically, contemporary approaches to quality require a dynamic interplay between subjective and objective methods of evaluation and decision making, as well as an appreciation that, ultimately, quality is an expression of values deeply situated in the ethics and aesthetics of a culture and embraced to varying degrees by different populations within that culture. It is these values and the extent they are embraced by different populations that must be made explicit and measured in a structured and systematic manner in order to truly understand and appreciate the nuances of the demand for quality.

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With the passage of time, the strengths and limitations of quality management systems have become more visible. Perhaps the experience with quality management will lead to improvements in the design and use of new processes and the development and provision of improved products and services. Innovations in quality management and the spread of its use have ushered in new ideas about organizational learning and transformation, reinvigorated thinking about the benefits of collaboration and teamwork, reinforced the importance of consultative forms of leadership, and certainly legitimized many of the ideas that are now organized within a framework of knowledge management. However, in some settings quality management only has resulted in the incremental refinement of existing products. It has not lead to breakthroughs in the development of new products nor has it promoted shifts in paradigms that have led to whole new approaches to providing services. For example, while some companies in the cell phone industry have focused primarily on improving the quality of specific communication products, so they function more reliably and more efficiently as phones, these companies have not addressed underlying ideas about cellular communication. Other have focused on developing new applications for cellular communication technology. They saw the cell phone itself only as a tool that opened a door to the new applications they conceived and developed. Innovations that expand the application and uses of existing technologies are likely to produce more benefit than just improving the quality of existing products based on those technologies. However, innovations in the application of an existing technology, no matter how creative, are likely only to produce incremental advances in society’s underlying technological infrastructure and knowledge base. It takes “game changing” scientific discoveries and new inventions that provide a basis for completely new technologies to produce dramatic advances in society’s underlying technological infrastructure. These are these kinds of discoveries that lead to paradigm shifts and produce dramatic leaps forward for society, and they expand the content and importance of a variety of knowledge bases. Discoveries and inventions can lead to the development of new fields of human activity, expand the potential for positive change in many sectors of society, and significantly increase human well-being and quality of life. Such paradigm changing developments have important impacts on knowledge development and management, requiring the development of new areas of knowledge that must be examined, understood, and applied.

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Continuously Innovate Human Service Models and Best Practices Imagination and its purposeful use to create new products, services, programs, or practices to meet human needs and/or to resolve challenging issues within a particular field is conceivably one of the most valuable resources a human service agency possesses. In many organizations, this capacity for imagination is institutionalized in research and development infrastructures or in program development structures made up of complements of people who are charged with the task of developing new procedures, activities and processes as well as new ideas and insights that can be translated into technologies to address particular challenges and/or to bring about desired outcomes. The group effects of long-term product or program development work can foster inter-subjectivity or shared understanding among group members and foster a critical base of shared indigenous and interpersonal knowledge that facilitates a kind of shorthand communication and creates an environment which fosters and supports innovation. There are several models of research and development within the human services. These often are stage-oriented portrayals of how to bring about discrete product-oriented innovation, and they do not always identify the requisite organizational processes that innovation requires (Thomas, 1984). Case studies show how innovation can at times be the result of rational and purposeful activity and at other times the result of accidental discovery. There is a misconception that breakthrough advances in knowledge and scientific discoveries can happen by accident to anyone in the right place at the right time. It is doubtful that an apple falling on the head of anyone but Newton would have been an event of such gravity. It is important to recognize that when a person devotes continuous effort to meeting specific challenges in the search for knowledge, understanding, and discovery and pursues investigation over a long period, that person is likely to become especially cognitively prepared and attuned to recognize and take advantage of revelations in the wake of accidental occurrences or deviations from the expected. While some may think of discoveries in the wake of unexpected and unintended events as serendipity defined as “a happy accident”, it is probably more appropriate to think of serendipity as “the reward for a prepared mind”. Innovation within many human service organizations may occur during activities aimed at resource development or refinement, including much of the work an agency invests in the preparation of grant proposals and

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funding applications. While this activity may seem opportunistic and fragmented, seeking and applying for funding can be organized and rationalized as an integral and important organizational activity. However, this requires the allocation of resources and the purposeful design and implementation of such activities. Many human service organizations do not possess strategic innovation plans that organize what they know about the existing or emergent social problems they face within their chosen domains of service. Therefore, they do not organize ways to identify and implement the various strategies they can undertake to create innovations that have a positive impact on solving the problems they face. Some agencies do stand as innovative exemplars and have knowledge management systems that further the aim of innovation and imaginative and creative problem solving. These are the agencies that invest considerable energy and resources in identifying areas and activities which are ripe for innovation and sensing or recognizing the value and applicability of innovations. Taken together, the innovations these organizations develop or discover can help them to define whole new models within a particular field of practice. Such new models and approaches to practice often lead to the development of best practices useful to the organization that developed them and to other organizations working in the same field. These new and effective practices can help redefine how the work of human services agencies can be carried out in new and improved ways in a particular domain. Purposeful and conscious employment of knowledge management, tracking emergent challenges and responses to them, and documentation of the dynamics of social and human issues that must be resolved in order to advance the agency’s mission by implementing innovative and effective new practices can become an important part of the culture of human service organizations. In this area of innovation, one can again witness the interplay between the development of knowledge and the importance of its management and application within a particular organizational context. Innovation requires an organization to identify or perceive a specific problem or need, and rather than becoming overwhelmed with the scope of the problem, successful organizations bring about useful outcomes for the people they serve by developing innovative ways to deal with and resolve the problem. Of course, there are varying degrees of innovation. Some organizations create technologies that only address the surface manifestations of a problem, while other organizations develop innovations that address the deep

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root causes of serious problems, perhaps creating new paradigms that redefine practice within particular domains. Both strategies are expressions of the knowledge management aim of promoting and supporting innovation, although they each have different implications for the development of organizational culture. Knowledge management that focuses on innovations to address deep root causes of problems will probably focus on developing innovative approaches that have significant long term impacts and may lead to the long term resolution or eradication of the problem and could even result in new models and practices that perhaps will re-invent or restructure existing fields of practice or establish new ones. Through their success with this knowledge management aim, these organizations can become exemplary expressions of practice that stand as models to be emulated by others in a field or profession. The organizations that do much to define new paradigms of human service and social welfare practice are likely to be the source of best practices that others adopt or adapt and restructure for their own purposes. For example, the founding of Fountain House came at a time in the history of serious mental illness when people were literally being dumped onto the streets of New York City as a result of the introduction of medication technologies, changes to the provision and funding of inpatient care, and the devalued status of people labeled as mentally ill. The self-help and mutual support resources that emerged from WANA, the predecessor to Fountain House, were revolutionary at the time. They subsequently instigated a whole new field of social practice and created a model of innovation that offers continuously new practices for addressing the negative social consequences people with serious mental illness experience in their daily lives (Moxley & Mowbray, 1997). Achieving this kind of innovation often is a goal of organizations that are passionately committed to the resolution of a serious social problem. In fact, achieving such a goal may be the reason for the formation and continuation of such an organization. These kinds of organizations are likely to possess high levels of organizational self-efficacy which reinforce their belief and strengthen their resolve to succeed. With a clear sense of mission and a zeal for transformation and even transcendence, they strive for a central position within their field of practice and form networks that support the formation of innovative new concepts and ideas for dealing with and solving the problems they address.

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They understand the limitations of their given field of practice and are willing to create new visionary alternatives of more positive outcomes and futures and take the actions necessary to realize their vision (Moxley, 2003). Such organizations have an uncanny ability to step out of the current paradigm that structures the cognition and perceptions of people working in other agencies, and they literally reformulate how they engage in practice by transcending established practices and models and finding the resources they need to move beyond the current knowledge base, if that base of knowledge represents and reinforces a restrictive envelope that limits innovation which other organizations in their field will not or cannot budge. Continuously Demonstrate and Judge Practice Within many organizations, knowledge is created through efforts to undertake or experiment with a particular application of knowledge to the development or improvement of a service to be provided to people dealing with a particular issue or problem. The development and implementation of services that successful address and resolve the problems faced by the people the agency serves is a measure of the agency’s effectiveness. Knowledge about the development and provision of effective services adds to the knowledge base of the organization. Coding this knowledge and presenting it to others in the organization in a form they can easily use is an important function of the knowledge management system. The application and successful use of this knowledge by others is a measure of the utility and success of the organization’s knowledge management system (O’Dell & Grayson, 1998). Commitment to the identification and use of best practices, quality improvement, the advancement of effective intervention models, and the promotion of innovation define the capacity of an organization to demonstrate and judge the worth and merit of what it does to successful manage knowledge. Purposeful demonstrations of effective practices can be a principal route for organizational learning and a way of staging the continuous development of practice knowledge. The participation of the human service professional in a service delivery organization is essential. Participation yields added information. It taps into the cognition that people may not share with others without participation (Shirky, 2010). The success of this activity requires that providers of service are open to and participate in the documentation of what they do when they provide services to their clients

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and the results and consequences of their actions and the services they provide. Judging the effectiveness of their actions and the services they provide will result in decisions about continuation of particular services, whether or not to modify and improve them, training others to provide those services, or reducing and perhaps ceasing and abandoning their use. Practitioners who engage in these activities are likely to look for additional opportunities to examine their activities in order to identify effective practices and demonstrate them to colleagues. The identification and demonstration of effective practices is a fundamental aim and aspect of knowledge management. Organizational knowledge management requires real-time tests of practices and innovations in those practices and in the ways they are provided. Members of the organization must gather this knowledge under the exigencies of actual practice. When organizations establish the capacity to identify best practices, engage in quality improvement, support innovation, demonstrate effectiveness in ways that illuminate the extent to which particular practices work under different conditions and with different populations, they are in a position to fill their knowledge base with a rich collection of knowledge that can be drawn upon to improve the effectiveness of their organization in providing services to successfully meet the needs of the people it serves. Organizational knowledge management differs from practice research. Research is usually conducted under tight controls by investigators who try to measure and manage the impact of the variables they study. This enables them to maximize internal validity and fulfill the rigorous requirements of the investigative model they employ. Organizational knowledge management does not employ the same kinds of rigorous experimental approaches, although human service organizations sometimes do conduct controlled experiments. For the most part, knowledge development in human service organizations is pursued under the real world conditions that prevail in the provision of social welfare and human services. Knowledge workers facing the constraints and realities of service delivery are seeking to expand their understanding of what services are effective, which recipient they benefit most, and what factors increase or limit their success. In many instances the knowledge they gain is anecdotal and impressionistic, but it still is useful and does provide a basis for judgments about the effectiveness of services and about ways to increase their effectiveness. Usually, this knowledge provides service delivery organizations with a better basis for making judgments and decisions about their activities than they had previously. In addition, because this kind of knowledge

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is not limited by rigid controls over what to examine, it provides a more full and useful picture of the environment and of the conditions under which services are usually provided and of the characteristics, conditions, and full array of the issues and problems of the recipients serviced. This kind of rich, dense, descriptive information, often presented in narrative form, is particularly valuable and useful to service delivery organizations in judging the effectiveness of services and weighing the impact of both intended and unintended consequences. Still, the demonstration of the effectiveness of practices in the delivery of human services should also be as systematic as possible and should be undertaken in a manner that explicitly describes and documents the procedures followed, in order to enable the evaluation and replication of those procedures. Knowledge management in the human services does not necessarily require summative evaluation that seeks to confirm or disconfirm a particular practice or intervention. Often, it is sufficient to provide information that helps practitioners gain insight into the aims and techniques employed in providing a service so that they themselves can learn to provide the service. This is an area where demonstrations of effective practices are especially useful, and especially when they are accompanied by learning activities that provide opportunities for practitioners to develop increasingly higher levels of understanding and trust in the utility, feasibility, practicality, and power of a particular set of practices. If some practitioners question the applicability or utility of a new practice, it provides an opportunity for a productive dialogue and that could lead to reframing and refinement of the new practice and the development of a better understanding of how it can be implemented under different conditions (Brown, 1995; Stringer, 1999). Knowledge management seeks to create a culture of learning within a particular organization through the processes of individual, group, and/ or collective illumination, reflection, and enlightenment focused on the activities members of the organization carry out (Garvin, 2000). Knowledge management cannot thrive in stagnant organizational environments. It requires an environment that supports the planning, implementation, and evaluation of continuous processes of organizational learning. Such learning supports dynamic organizational development and can lead to the renewal, revitalization, and re-envisioning of organizational structure, properties, activities, goals, and values (Halpern, 1991). Judgment of the worth and merit of demonstrations of new practices is indispensable to continuous organizational learning and may be one of the

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most important capacities an organization can develop to support and use its knowledge management system. While evaluation in human service organizations may focus on judging the services and practices demonstrated to members of the organization, it also may include a broad examination of the human service agency itself and the array of tools and technologies it uses to implement and recycle its practices. Looking at how an organization makes decisions about the knowledge it gathers, develops, retains, or abandons also is important and can reveal much about how an organization views and utilizes knowledge and its management. Flexible, continuous, and systematic judgment can add to the dynamic character of an organization, infusing it with energy and creating an atmosphere and culture that supports on-going professional development and revitalization. Evaluation entails making judgments about the merit and worth of what is being evaluated. Merit and worth represent two different value sets. Merit prizes the technical effectiveness of particular practices and likely focuses on the extent to which a particular organizational product or program is effective. Its emphasis is on utility and applicability. Worth taps into whether a person, group or society actually values something and the extent to which it is valued. The commitment of resources, including time and energy, to something is one indicator of its value. It is important to differentiate between merit and worth. One may assume that something that has merit will automatically be supported. When merit and worth both occur, this is usually the case. But when something that has merit is not considered to have worth because it is not valued by those who allocate resources, it is not likely to be endorsed or supported, even though it is recognized as being effective. In some cases, something considered to have worth because it is congruent with a set of values and beliefs, or is supported by a deeply rooted ideology, resources will be allocated to it even if it is shown to have little merit or utility. While decisions about merit are likely to be technical, decisions about worth are likely to be political, cultural, or ideological. Understanding the distinction between merit and worth helps explain the positions taken and decisions made in organizations, especially when they are not based on technical criteria of evaluation and supported by well researched and clearly demonstrated evidence. In such instances, considerations of worth, shaped by values, beliefs, and culture predominate. The idea of worth suggests that knowledge management itself is not merely a technical activity. Social welfare and human service organizations may make judgments

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based on values and criteria of ethics, aesthetics, civic duty, and societal mandate. While these kinds of decisions may be idiosyncratic and reflect the unique stance of a particular organization, they also may be characteristic of other organizations in a domain or field of practice. Continuously Teach What the Organization Comes to Know as Effective Practice Organizational culture, according to Schein (1998), crystallizes from learning, which is a product of conscious or unconscious efforts an organization undertakes to perpetuate itself within a particular environment. Schein’s conception involves the passing on of knowledge that has proven itself valid in facilitating an organization’s adaptation and effectiveness in a particular environment or context. When organizations and their members do not have sufficient knowledge about the nuances of the environments and contexts in which they operate, it can be difficult for them to operate effectively in those environments, and especially difficult for them to adapt to changes in those environments. Organizations that do not document and maintain knowledge about how they have successfully adapted in the past are at a disadvantage when faced with new situations and challenges to which they have to adapt. Knowledge of the constituent elements of an organization’s adaptations, particularly its assumptions about the external world, and the internal adaptations it made in response to events in the external world is an important part of organizational knowledge and can have significant implications for an organization’s success and survival in the turbulent environments, such as in the domain of social welfare and human services, in which they operate. Some of the ways human service organizations can learn from their experience and capture knowledge of what they have successfully accomplished involves tapping into the memories, knowledge, and experience of people who have worked at the organization long-term. This is especially useful in organizations that had faced and successfully resolved crisis in the past, and the only information about what occurred resides in the memories of those who were there at the time. Models of organizational development, such as appreciative inquiry, search conferencing, and organizational learning, can be used to unlock what organizational members know about the ways the organization successfully resolved issues and problems it faced in the past. In addition, the

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knowledge and experience of workers at all levels of the organization is important for documenting the current practices of the organization and for helping extend the knowledge and understanding of the environments and context in which the organization works and the characteristics and issues faced by the populations the organization serves. This knowledge is essential to documenting the details of what the organization does, how it does what it does, who it serves, the services it provides, who provides them, other organizations and agencies it collaborate or works with, and the barriers it must overcome to successfully provide its services. The nature of human services and their provision to populations in need are central foci of knowledge management in social welfare and human service organizations. Key components of this kind of knowledge include information about quality management, product development and improvement, managerial programs to promote innovations, increase the knowledge of the organizations members about the organization’s critical processes, their constituent properties, their dynamics, and their consequences for the organization, its members, stakeholders, and clients. Accomplishing this requires a commitment to and support of expanded organizational learning. Schein (1988) points out that all organizations face challenges in socializing newcomers. What he calls “the problem of socialization” highlights a critical challenge for those social service agencies undertaking knowledge management: deciding what to teach members of the organization. Clearly, knowledge management systems need to be good at collecting information, refining it, packaging it, disseminating it, archiving it, or even discarding it. However, while these are necessary aspects of knowledge management, they are not sufficient to ensure the purposeful utilization of knowledge, which presents a different kind of knowledge management challenge: the challenge of creating and supporting organizational learning and knowledge utilization. Deciding what to teach organizational members is not primarily about methods or mechanisms of pedagogy. Many organizations sponsor staff development training and create other internal and external professional development opportunities for their members. They even may develop formal curricula that encode core competencies, and they may require members to master this knowledge. However, determining what to teach requires deeper consideration of what the organization decides has merit and value. It also entails thinking about issues that are deeply rooted in the organization’s values, ethics, aesthetics, and epistemology. But,

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unfortunately, these are issues and questions that many social welfare and human service organizations do not see as relevant or may as only academic and with no practical value. Effective organizational learning systems assign importance and legitimacy to basic questions about the values and beliefs that inform the organization’s mission, as well as focusing on providing technical information about how to do a particular task. Designing and constructing an effective organizational learning system entails establishing what ought to be taught and learned. This has great importance for social welfare and human service organizations because it goes a long toward identifying the issues and information that will tie the commitment of the members of the organization closely to the organization’s vision and the mission. It will underline the rationale and importance of the actions the organization takes to provide services to the people in the populations it serves in order to help them resolve the problems they face, fulfill their needs, and improve the quality of their lives. Human service practitioners are involved in both knowing and doing. For many, their emphasis is on doing: taking actions to provide services, helping clients, solving problems. Knowledge management in the human services ultimately exists to support such actions. However, knowledge management also emphasizes the importance of knowing and reflecting on actions and their consequences before acting. Organizational learning in social welfare and human service must establish a balance that supports both action and reflection. In doing so, it also must balance merit and worth. If what is taught does not have merit it will not be useful or effective. However, if it does not have worth, it is unlikely that it will be utilized, and it certainly will not be supported long-term. Organizational learning in the human services also must address, and to some extent satisfy, established criteria and expectations about the characteristics knowledge should possess. These include accuracy, objectivity versus subjectivity, validity, certainty, relevance, measurability, specificity or generality, currency, and weight of evidence. Given the action orientation of organizational mandates and the action orientation of practitioners in the human services, even learning that focuses on reflection should link the importance and value of reflection to the support of effective and successful action. The design criteria for organizational learning in social welfare and human service organizations should include practicality, linkage to the organizational mission, and ultimately enhancing benefit for the recipients of service.

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Agencies that invest considerable energy uncovering what they know and how to apply what they know are taking steps to actively construct effective and useful knowledge management systems which will be able to offer agency members a relatively high degree of certainty about what works, what newcomers should learn and master, and how individuals and groups should be socialized into agency culture and values. In human service organizations, learning likely is mediated by numerous informal mechanisms and by the organizational architecture itself. Formal teaching aside, organizational members are likely to learn quickly about what the agency values and what forms of knowing and doing it rewards. In group meetings, supervisory sessions, and informal interactions among peers, organizational members receive and encode complex information about the reality of working in and for the organization and which ways of thinking, knowing, and doing are functional and rewarded or are dysfunctional and negatively sanctioned (Hirschhorn, 2002). Some agencies have strong mentoring systems in which newcomers spend considerable time observing and interacting with experienced practitioners in action settings. They see mentors as powerful role models who can provide uncertain and anxious newcomers someone with whom to identify who can answer questions and teach basic lessons about the agency and how it operates. Agencies that provide mentors recognize the value and utility of the vicarious learning members obtain through first hand observation of “how things are done” (Bandura, 1986). Other agencies may be more formal in teaching and orienting new staff. They may offer a core curriculum that codifies and presents what is known, making it the responsibility of organizational members, especially new hires, to master this curriculum. In this case, the agency uses the curriculum both symbolically and pragmatically. Symbolically, the curriculum stands for the integrity of the agency—it makes explicit how things should be done and establishes standards for using the agency’s knowledge base in action. Pragmatically, whatever approach to teaching and learning the agency takes, its job is to establish a training system that reinforces and otherwise strengthens performance, assures quality, and promotes innovation. Perhaps each agency’s solution is the best for its own particular niche, indicating that there is no one best solution for socializing human service personnel into the culture of an agency. Each agency will select its own strategy, methods, and structures for socializing its members into its knowledge system, and ultimately into the culture, of the agency. Thus, there is likely to be considerable variation in how agencies translate

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knowledge and in how they configure socialization processes. But, social service agencies, like any other type of organization, share several exigencies in this process. They must figure out how to transform relatively static knowledge into dynamic intervention technologies, place these technologies into an organizational context, and pass on this knowledge in ways that ensure the ability of organizational members (particularly newcomers) to implement and utilize the organization’s technologies. A challenge in the pre-service education of human service professionals is how does the profession prepares its students for knowledge utilization, which requires them to transform what they come to know from a variety of sources and experiences into knowledge they can share with others in an organization and work with them to enhance and improve. The sources of their knowledge and experience include every day practice, interactions with other professionals, and organizational learning experiences, including professional development activities. Collating information and experiences from these sources and reducing it to a finite set of easily applied techniques and then assessing these techniques in terms of what is known about “best practices” so they can be refined, improved, or discarded can be a daunting task. However, completing this task will help advance the person who accomplishes it as well as the agency along the path of continuous improvement. What Certainties Does the Profession Pass on to Others Within Organized Practice Settings? Professional knowledge and practice are linked to organizational life and organizational culture, both of which may be open to tremendous pressure from environmental influences that shape the worldviews of agencies and their members. The building blocks of organizational culture consist of beliefs and certainties that organizations arrange into explanations about what creates human problems and how to resolve these problems. Human service organizations then translate these beliefs and certainties into practices and routines that are implemented to serve client needs. Paradoxically, knowledge management systems can create considerable confidence in action but they can also create uncertainty when new knowledge undermines what were held as sacred forms of knowing. Learning in human service organizations must equip organization members for practice within this dynamic world in which the interplay between certainty and uncertainty creates an organizational and cultural

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dynamism requiring a form of learning that Carse (1994) refers to as the infinite game. In addition, the possibility (probability?) of environmental change reinforces the likelihood that the assumed certainty and stability of professional knowledge is a shaky assumption, and acting on that knowledge always will be paradoxical, since human service professionals are well aware of the legitimate challenges to the assumptions on which the knowledge that informs their actions is based. Even though we may assign some certainty to the practice knowledge of organizational members, it remains imperfect and precarious and, therefore, practice knowledge always must be open to changes resulting from shifting values, new perspectives, and judgments that emanate from critical reflection, transformative innovations, and transcendent paradigms. The mind of the professional human service worker can remain supple, flexible, and playful as qualities that favor invention. Continuously Foster Inter-Organizational Exchanges of Knowledge Knowledge in social welfare and human service is not unitary and is not developed or maintained in insulated specific organizations. Instead it is networked among organizations that provide social welfare and human services and is contributed to by the members, stakeholders, and clients of these organizations. Human service organizations, like organizations in other fields, industries, and sectors, increasingly are joining into larger multi-organizational networks for the purposes of undertaking collaborative projects, meshing the services they provide to better manage those services and avoid providing redundant or overlapping services to the same clients, forming federated networks in which a supra-ordinate administrative structure offers organizational management services to all members. Paradox often drives the formation of these large networks that encompass once bitter enemies, antithetical ideologies and belief systems, members of disparate social strata, and populations facing a variety of different social, psychological, economic, legal, and personal challenges. And, paradox often emerges from the activities undertaken and supported by these networks. Forces that set social policy may shape the selection and combination of the organizations involved in of large-scale multi-organization human service entities, such as managed care. Other social priorities and policies, such as deregulation may lead to the consolidation of human

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service organizations to achieve economies of scale from sharing core competencies and competitive advantage in certain domains and niches of practice. Networks often are formed through the dynamic influences of centripetal and centrifugal influences that promote centralization, dispersion, or dissolution (Bergquist, 1993). The evolution of human service organizations suggests that multi-­ organizational federated systems of care will provide social services in the near future. These kinds of federated systems have been operating within health care for almost 20 years and increasingly are found providing mental health services, substance abuse treatment child welfare services, and rehabilitation services. Nonprofit organizations are joining together in ways that may allow them to maintain their unique identities, while taking advantage of economies of scale, particularly in relationship to administrative functions, such as billing, information management, quality management, and centralized services functions, such as call centers, intake, and scheduling. Some human service organizations may position themselves within these networks as providers of knowledge management or other services essential to the performance of the network as a whole. Human service organizations become net providers of services by providing more of a service to other agencies than they obtain from them. This may enable them to augment their power and position relative to the agencies to which they provide services. Developing a strong and effective knowledge management system could enable some human service agencies to become net providers of knowledge management. Knowledge is power, especially when some organizations depend on accessing and using the knowledge base of another. An organization that becomes a specialist in knowledge management probably will develop and extend the roles of staff serving as knowledge workers and may even provide incentives for others to assume such roles. As they are called on to provide increasingly more sophisticated knowledge management services, these agencies may expand the range of services they provide by employing specially trained staff. An agency called on to conduct research may hire staff trained to perform research tasks that include study design, data collection, coding, and statistical data analysis. As an agency that specializes in knowledge management develops an extensive database of innovative practices developed by others that can be implemented at other human service agencies, it may launch its own efforts to develop such innovative practices in-house, not so much for its

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own use but as products to provide to other human service agencies. It even may launch a program of innovation diffusion, targeting other organizations within and outside its own niche that can benefit from access to knowledge about the variety of best practices and innovations it has either identified or developed. If its models of service delivery and its demonstration programs are in high demand, the agency may allocate a greater proportion of its resources to its knowledge development, management, and diffusion activities. It even may seek to collaborate or partner with other agencies that have particularly effective or extensive knowledge management and research and development operations. Eventually, the agency may become less of a provider of social welfare and human services to its former client populations and more of a provider of knowledge services to other agencies. Human service professionals in such organizations are likely to find themselves in new roles as system change agents, knowledge transfer specialists, consultants, and utilization specialists. If their educations and experience have prepared them for such roles and if they are interested in this kind of work, they will adapt to their new roles and may enjoy the change. If they still want to provide direct services to the kinds of clients the agency had focused on before it extended its knowledge management activities, they may seek other employment. Within inter-organizational networks, knowledge can easily become an end product, and its development and management can initiate new cycles of innovation that generate new products and services. Extensions of innovations in knowledge collection, development, packaging diffusion, and utilization may enable organizations that increasingly specialize in knowledge management to become leaders their new area of practice, where previously they may have struggled in the arena of directly providing social welfare and human services. However, success at knowledge management, either as a primary function in an organization or as a support to the organizations primary function providing direct services, requires new areas of organizational learning, mastery of new technologies, and dealing with a new set of complexities that involve the management of knowledge and, perhaps, its transfer across organizational boundaries. Organizations that specialize in providing knowledge management services to other may be expected to help with the implementation and successful utilization of innovations, new practices, and new services at other organizations, where they may be expected to work with the comprehensive systems of service in their

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client’s organization over which the knowledge management organization has no control. Success at this task is likely to be especially important when knowledge and innovative practices are transferred to organizations that are part of a network or federation of organizations. In such multi-­ organization networks or confederations, shared knowledge is an integral part of the fabric that binds these organizations together. Without useful shared knowledge, this fabric that supports their common purpose, provides economies of scale, and knits their alliances together may unravel. Shared knowledge is of such critical importance in these multi-organization entities because each component usually maintains a deep commitment to its own culture and finds that its own organizational culture continues to reinforce its beliefs and values and provides a familiar zone of comfort. Any sense of common culture across organizations is a recent system construct of the network or federation and commitment to or involvement in it is probably tenuous at best. Glitches in or the erosion of the utility of the common knowledge system can easily lead to fragmentation and dissolution of the network. This can be a risk when the organizations in the network contract out for knowledge management.

Action for Knowledge Management Moving further in the development of an organizational knowledge system, the following are relevant actions for advancing organizational knowledge: 1. Respect personal experience among organizational members as expressions of knowledge. As the organization builds narratives of knowing, allow individuals or their groups to narrate their own experience and what they know from this experience. 2. Respect the strong possibility that there are multiple forms of knowing. Do not assume that there is a unitary form of knowledge, and do not assume that those who hold formal power actually have a monopoly on knowing. 3. Free encapsulated knowledge that operates within units of the organization. Share this knowledge broadly and assess its usefulness for creating coherent ways of knowing across the organization. 4. Make a commitment to an organizational system of knowledge management, which may start with humble aims, such as understanding what is known within various units of the organization.

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Start with appreciating what is known at base levels of practice, and encode this knowledge into narratives that can influence organizational policy, practice, and procedure. 5. Invest in the knowledge system as a strategic capability. Advance the system as a strategic organizational asset. 6. Create linkages within the knowledge system with human resources, teams, learning, evaluation, and resource development. 7. Report periodically on the status of the knowledge system and its merit and worth.

References Appelbaum, E., & Batt, R. (1994). The new American workplace: Transforming work systems in the United States. Cornell University Press. Bandura, A. (1986). Social foundations of thought and action: A social cognitive theory. Prentice-Hall. Bergquist, W. (1993). The postmodern organization: Mastering the art of irreversible change. Jossey-Bass. Brown, J. (1995). Dialogue: Capacities and stories. In S. Chawla & J. Renesch (Eds.), Learning organizations: Developing tomorrow’s workplace (pp. 153–164). Productivity Press. Carse, J. (1994). Finite and infinite games. Ballantine. Creech, B. (1994). The five pillars of TQM. Dutton. Deming, W. E. (2000). Out of the crisis. MIT Press. Douglas, M. (1986). How institutions think. Syracuse University Press. Douglas, M., & Wildavsky, A. (1983). Risk and culture. University of California Press. Garvin, D. A. (2000). Learning in action. Harvard Business School Press. Gunther, J., & Hawkins, F. (1996). Total quality management in human service organizations. Springer. Halpern, E. S. (1991). Evaluating and ensuring high-tech product development. In C. L. Larson & H. Preskill (Eds.), Organizations in transition: Opportunities and challenges for evaluation. New Directions for Program Evaluation, 49, 27–39. Handy, C. (1996). Beyond certainty: The changing world of organizations. Harvard Business School Press. Hirschhorn, L. (1986). Beyond mechanization. MIT Press. Hirschhorn, L. (2002). Managing in the new team environment: Skills, tools, and methods. Addison Wesley. Kennedy, L. W. (1991). Quality management in the nonprofit world. Jossey- Bass.

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Kim, L. (1997). Imitation to innovation: The dynamics of Korea’s technological learning. Harvard Business School Press. Lesser, E., & Prusak, L. (1999). Communities of practice, social capital, and organizational knowledge. Information Systems Review, 1(1), 3–10. Manela, R. W., & Moxley, D. P. (2002). Best practices as agency-based knowledge in social welfare. Administration in Social Work, 26, 1–24. McMaster, M. D. (1996). The intelligence advantage: Organizing for complexity. Butterworth-Heinemann. Moxley, D. (2003). Factors influencing the successful use of vision-based strategic planning by non-profit human service organizations. International Journal of Organization Theory and Behavior, 7(1), 107–132. Moxley, D. P., & Mowbray, C. T. (1997). Consumers as providers: Social forces and factors legitimizing role innovation in psychiatric rehabilitation. In C. T. Mowbray, D. Moxley, C. Jasper, & L. Davis (Eds.), Consumers as providers in psychiatric rehabilitation. International Association of Psychosocial Rehabilitation Services. Nonaka, I., & Takeuchi, H. (1995). The knowledge-creating company: How Japanese companies create the dynamics of innovation. Oxford University Press. O’Dell, C., & Grayson, C. J. (1998). If only we knew what we know: The transfer of internal knowledge and best practice. Free Press. Sakaiya, T. (1985). The knowledge-value revolution. Kodansha International. Schein, E. (1988). Organizational socialization and the profession of management. Sloan Management Review, 30(Fall), 53–64. Schein, E. (1998). Organizational culture and leadership (2nd ed.). Jossey-Bass. Shirky, C. (2010). Cognitive surplus: Creativity and generosity in a connected age. Penguin. Sparrow, J. (1998). Knowledge in organizations: Access to thinking at work. Sage. Spinello, R. A. (1998). The knowledge chain. Business Horizons. Indiana University Kelley School of Business. Stringer, E. T. (1999). Action research. Sage. Thomas, E. J. (1984). Designing interventions for the helping professions. Sage. Walton, M., & Deming, W. E. (1988). The Deming management method. Perigee. Zack, M. (1999). Knowledge and strategy. Butterworth-Heinemann.

CHAPTER 6

Capacities for Knowledge Management in the Human Services

Abstract  Capacity-building involves structures and processes for engaging in knowledge management. A principal capacity is appreciation, in which the human service organization appraises and otherwise evaluates the knowledge operative within the organization, or that knowledge stored within external structures, such as journals, experts, and prescribed procedures. Identifying what the organization knows and what it should teach its members can be highly structured or informal. Another principal capacity involves translation in which the organization transforms knowledge for use in practice. Enactment is yet a third capacity in which the organization routinizes the use of knowledge in ways the influence the provision of human services. Confirmation includes formal and informal processes for determining the value, merit and ultimate worth of knowledge the organization deems necessary and useful. Keywords  Capacities • Capacity-building • Organizational learning • Organizational culture

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. P. Moxley, Releasing Knowledge for Practice in Human and Social Service Organizations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16098-1_6

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The Importance of Capacity-Building in Organizational Knowledge Management The author has not posited the multiple competencies to portray human service practice as complex, but to highlight that human services will become increasingly committed to the successful search for and application of knowledge to extend and enhance the practice of providing relevant assistance to the populations that need them. As the demand for knowledge in human services and social welfare increases in response to expanded regulatory requirements and pressure for simplified, low-cost, standardized service and common models of practices, social welfare and human service agencies are likely to increasingly depend on their knowledge management systems to help them describe and justify their calls for the allocation of sufficient resources to enable them to do their jobs and adequately address the complex issues, serious problems, and deep needs of their clients. Efforts by some who allocate resources to social welfare and human service aim at simplifying the characterization of the needs of the populations to be served so as to simplify the nature of the services to be provided and justify lowering the allocation of resources to them. However, the more social welfare and human service organizations learn about the populations they serve the more they realize and understand the complexity and seriousness of the problems people in those populations face. And, the more those who provide services to meet the needs of the people they serve expand their knowledge of what it takes to provide adequate and effective services, the more they appreciate the need to expand the allocation of resources to social welfare and human services. The incongruity between the perspectives and purposes of funders and providers of social welfare and human services, makes it incumbent on knowledge systems in social welfare and human services to provide the broad and deep knowledge necessary to support arguments and campaigns for expansion of the resources needed to effectively provide needed services. Given the variety of human service organizations, the range of populations they serve, the breadth and depth of the problems people in these populations face, the extent their need for service, and the multi-faceted services that must be provided, the demand for knowledge and knowledge management in the human services is tremendous. To even be able to begin to satisfy the need for knowledge service in this domain requires innovative designs of knowledge management

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systems. The knowledge function in human service organizations often provides knowledge for the purposes of competitive advantage and strategic positioning as well as for the improvement of services. Some aspects of this knowledge will have to address how social welfare and human services fulfill their civic duty and satisfy societal mandates for human services. Human service professionals who become entrepreneurs in this domain of practice will need to find or develop knowledge that fosters the kind of innovations they will need to make. Changes in regulatory and entrepreneurial cultures and the requirement of new organizational forms and models are likely to influence knowledge management of the near future, and the human service professions will find themselves increasingly dealing with organizationally based knowledge systems that are distributed and accessible throughout the organizations in which they work, rather than being centralized and having their access overseen and regulated. These knowledge systems will have to integrate a diversity of perspectives, respond to a variety demands, meet a range of challenges, operate in an environment of uncertainty complicated by social and political changes that will fuel an ongoing series of controversies over basic parameters and models of human service, agency practices, and underlying views of human need and how to best satisfy such needs. The human service organization of the near future will not be in a stable state in which “certainties” go unchallenged or unquestioned. But, what does seem clear is that highly structured knowledge will still need to find a home in organizational knowledge systems, and so will many other forms of knowledge, including narratives, graphic representations of information, knowledge developed by and for use by emergent technologies and technologies that do not yet exist. Many contemporary human service organizations are negotiating for their survival in domains, environments, and contexts in which constant and significant change is the defining factor. Dealing with the complexity and changing texture of these kinds of environments will increasingly become the norm. The velocity of activity required for human service delivery will increase and transform performance expectations for human service providers who must respond to emergencies, crises, and disasters (Huston, 2007). The demand for immediate solutions to complicated long-standing problems will escalate. In response the provision of palliatives rather than deep lasting solutions will increase and may have to suffice. Living and working in these kinds of environments likely will foster cognitive

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uncertainty among professionals who may actually witness the crumbling of the assumptions on which they base their practices on a frequent basis. Skepticism may become a requirement for effective practice. Tried and true courses of action will be shelved in favor of ad hoc creative solutions developed on the fly. Human service personnel of the near future will likely practice in the face of great ambiguities and will experience tremendous challenges regarding not only what they know, but also how to translate this knowledge into action that “fits” their host organization’s sense of ethics, aesthetics, civic duty, and societal mandates, while doing so in ever-changing environments, rapidly shifting social contexts, and competing pressures from increasingly vocal stakeholders who can instantly post messages on ubiquitous social media that can place significant pressure on service providers and the organizations in which they work. Burn out is an ongoing hazard for human service professionals working in such an environment. How do human service agencies begin to think of the core competencies they will require for organizational capacity building to prepare for survival and success in such an environment? Organization capacity building is a way of thinking about the development and progression of organizational knowledge. Most agencies are not prepared for conceiving and implementing a complete program of knowledge management. Nonetheless, the agency and its personnel can undertake knowledge management through progressive steps and concerted action that can result in the development and realization of specific organizational capacities for knowledge management, capacities that are able to rapidly adapt to change and that need to become well situated in the culture of human service organizations. Knowledge management in the human service agency of the future may not be able to incorporate well developed and carefully implemented research programs. The press for immediate and applicable results probably will be too great. Advances in technology may shorten the time essential research activities take, and methods of inquiry in human service agencies are likely to increasingly rely on new technologies that can rapidly collect and analyze data and broadly distribute results in a form that supports immediate application. Glimmers of the impact such technologies can have may be found in medical testing applications designed to measure and analyze health indicators through a phone application that also immediately transfers findings to physicians and records them in a person’s individual health database for future analysis of changes and trends over

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time. It is likely that similar applications will be developed to support the provision of social welfare and other human services. The principal challenge for human service agencies is to integrate knowledge management into the organization as a whole, rather than in a piecemeal haphazard manner as add on to agency programs. Unless a knowledge management system is implemented for the whole organization at the same time, personnel who do not yet appreciate the value of knowledge management will see using it as arduous and requiring heroic effort to make difficult and uncomfortable changes in how they do their jobs. However, if everyone in an organization is required to start using the knowledge management system at the same time, and there are no alternatives for accomplishing necessary tasks than using the knowledge management system, everyone in the organization is likely to learn to use it and actually use it. Acceptance of an innovation will come when people actually use it in their everyday activity work (Stockdill et al., 2002). From the perspective of capacity building, if something as complex as knowledge management is seen organizationally as too demanding to be used frequently and to good purpose by organizational members, it will simply fall to the wayside rather quickly (Stockdill et al., 2002). Therefore, building the capacity for a knowledge management system that actually will be used must address implementing it in a way that will ensure its acceptance and utility. This requires that the new system is easy to learn to use and easy and comfortable to actually use. The agency administration should support the use of the system and provide incentives for using it. Its use should be a functional and organizational necessity.

Capacities for Knowledge Management Capacity for Appreciation It is likely that any human service organization, particularly if it has undertaken sustained practice in a particular field for some time, knows a great deal about its practice. Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons, the knowledge these agencies possess about issues, practices, consequences, and challenges often simply goes unappreciated internally. However, organizations that embrace knowledge management start surfacing what they know and what they should teach their members, particularly newcomers, since this is an important part of the knowledge base of the organization and provides a good starting point for any capacity building. Organizations

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that recognize and appreciate the value of knowledge that is pent up in the minds of individuals and groups within the organization and recognizes that unleashing this knowledge will empower the organization as a whole, particularly if some entities—whether individuals, informal groups, teams, or programs—possess considerable knowledge that can be considered innovative. Appreciative capacity building involves the development of the social architecture of the organization and using methods, such as retreats, journal clubs, inquiry groups, dialogues, and approaches to staff development that encourage organizational members to share information with each other, implement internal publishing programs, and hold brain storming sessions as effective ways to solve problems. These are basic methods organizations can use to identify what is known. They are not random activities but are designed to fulfill the specific purpose of promoting the discovery and use of the knowledge that exists in the organization but may be hidden or not recognized as important. These activities require organizations to purposefully implement them, so that the resulting knowledge can be shared and put to use for a variety of purposes that may include developing annual and other plans, strategy formulation, developing budgets, and preparing proposals to raise funds. These mechanisms also can uncover knowledge that helps frame organizational ends, produce breakthroughs to meet difficult challenges, or develop innovative practices, Using previously hidden or unrecognized and underappreciated organizational knowledge gives the activities that utilize this knowledge particularly high relevance and can underscore a successful launch of the organization’s knowledge management system. Knowledge management that is not seen within the organization’s culture as highly salient and is not used regularly to help achieve important outcomes probably will not flourish or become an important asset of the organization. To underline the importance and utility of its knowledge system and build support for using it, one scientific organization, for example, convenes meetings of its personnel several times a year for the purposes of identifying accomplishments that otherwise might be unreported agency-wide. The organization maintains a comprehensive map of accomplishments, inter-relates them, and identifies their importance to achieving the organization’s mission. Personnel value these sessions since they enable them to translate their tacit knowledge into explicit forms that can be shared and can win widespread appreciation among colleagues. These sharing and recognition meetings produce a deep knowledge,

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understanding, and appreciation among organizational members for what is being accomplished throughout the organization. An additional benefit is that organizational members may discover that others in the organization are working on projects or possess knowledge that is relevant to their own work, or that they have knowledge that is relevant to the work of others within the organization. For social service agencies, facilitating appreciation makes it possible to highlight internal best practices and ways specific practices are improved, support emergent innovations, judge effectiveness, and orient members and newcomers to the work that is being done (Manela & Moxley, 2002). In other words, appreciative capacity building can stimulate the development of knowledge management competencies, and it can facilitate the development of a culture that supports the explication and utilization of the organizational knowledge. Capacity for Translation and Generative Inquiry Another assumption made by organizations that embrace knowledge management is that considerable knowledge exists outside of their boundaries, and to fully explore and exploit this knowledge they must purposefully identify, retrieve, and translate it, so that it can be incorporated into and blended with their own processes of knowledge generation. This form of capacity building can start with asking and answering basic questions about what the organization needs to know and what it does not know in relationship to its domain of practice and service. For example, a substance abuse treatment agency that is constantly addressing relapse among people it treats may want to know about the dynamics of relapse and its prevention at other agencies. To gather this and other relevant information it can investigate the state of the art in the field of relapse prevention and examine models of intervention other agencies have found to be effective. It can track the literature, undertake site visits to other agencies, interview experts, and attend relevant conferences, presentations, and “webinars” on the subject of relapse prevention. Assigning staff or teams of staff responsibility to identify and retrieve relevant knowledge helps assure these actions will be taken. The resulting information can be used to create a database on relapse and its prevention which then may support efforts to develop state of the art best practices the agency can incorporate into its own service

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programs, offering an internal agenda of change for the agency as a whole to better address the problem of relapse. The identification, retrieval, and translation processes themselves can create new knowledge that, in turn, can be fed into the generative processes of the agency. Here agency personnel may focus on what Thomas (1984) refers to as developmental objectives, the fulfillment of which will create a new practice that can be incorporated into the agency, tested, and refined internally. Capacity for translation and generation demands much of an agency, and requires the formation of considerable skill, as well as maintaining specific formal and informal support for this activity. Time is of the essence within most social and human service organizations, and finding time for the identification, retrieval, codification, translation, and generation of knowledge is not easy. It may require the agency to think through what is important and how the work of committees, teams, and individuals can be structured so that these activities can become part of the day-to-day commerce and activities in which the organization engages. Personnel who oversee quality management may incorporate the identification of best practices in the priorities of their work, while supervisors may implement informal study groups that track research in a substantive area of practice and translate it into new agency-based procedures and guidelines for practice. Capacity for Enactment Enactment builds on the capacities for appreciation and translation and generation. The term enactment describes steps an agency takes to use the knowledge it has acquired through appreciation and translation-­generation to undertake actions to introduce and use that knowledge. It is an activity that empowers knowledge management. Enactment usually occurs in organizations that have developed the self-efficacy and skills necessary to take concerted action to utilize new knowledge. The capacity for enactment means that the agency can act on its ideas and knowledge and test them out under the real conditions of actual practice. Enactment suggests that the agency can make its knowledge explicit, make it well understood by those who must use it, and implement it under the vicissitudes of actual practice so that the knowledge is translated into practices that can be tested in action. To succeed at this, the agency must possess the critical perspective essential for judging the consequences of the particular practices and models it implements.

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Enactment requires organizational abilities in the formation of substantive practices and models and in the establishment of administrative structures for their testing and evaluation. Any new form of practice that is being enacted is likely to require the formation or reformation of an administrative unit or program to oversee establishment of procedures to guide and perhaps direct the implementation of the innovation, establish protocols for capturing data, monitoring the enactment activities, and preparing and training staff who will be involved in the enactment. Enacting an innovation will require resources, particularly flexible ones, which the agency will have to identify and allocate. Management of information will be essential, as will be the capacity for evaluation. Enactment is a complex capacity of knowledge management, since it demands a broad range of abilities and skills from a variety of organizational systems and from the agency as a whole. Capacity for Confirmation Organizations experience a tension between certainty and uncertainty. A flexible, supple, and robust organizational culture is necessary to facilitate the integration of what may appear to be these polar opposites. The nature of human service work is uncertain and, no matter what progress is made in research, human service professionals and the organizations in which they work must find productive ways of coping with, if not managing, uncertainty, especially since uncertainty is a dynamic attribute of the system of social welfare itself. And, that continual given shifts in culture, changes in values, and changes in both social structure and technology are likely to continue, uncertainty will continue as well. A capacity for confirmation, however, suggests that it is possible to submit organizational knowledge to tests of certainty and to subject it to rigorous judgment of merit and worth. Certainly, most agencies want insight into “what works” within their domains of practice, and they want confidence in the effectiveness, safety, and applicability of the services and interventions they offer the public. They also want confidence in the long-­ term effects and continued relevance and utility of the services they provide. The search for these kinds of certainty requires a strong capacity for product evaluation, as well as for the testing of program and intervention theories in systematic ways. The capacity for confirmation can readily build on those appraisal and process evaluation practices the agency puts into place for judging the enactment of innovation, and for undertaking the improvement and development of nascent models and practices.

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The capacity for confirmation may demand as much or more of the agency than enactment requires, but confirmation likely will depend more on the degree of certainty the agency seeks. Confirmation of whether or not a practice or model produces desired results and outcomes is different from the confirmation of its effectiveness, compared to other established and more traditional practices, or whether it is more effective than rival new alternative interventions. In addition, confirmation may incorporate a broad appraisal of benefits in light of the cost of an intervention. Establishing standard of certainty and measuring confirmation in terms of them is an essential part of confirmation. Levels of certainty an agency finds acceptable reflect its culture and world view. The degree to which an agency values enlightenment, understanding, and accountability, and its ability to accept and manage risk, help define its acceptable levels of certainty. For example, establishing certainty can be important enough for some agencies to devote considerable resources to expanding knowledge to assure certainty because the agency is seen as a “cutting edge” organization that implements practices and provides services with a high degree of certainty about their effectiveness, safety, appropriateness, and cost. Perhaps some of the most important benefits of this form of capacity building lie in helping an agency clarify what it sees as important in terms of values, evidence, or standards of performance. Capacity building for confirmation will require an agency to concretely establish what it knows, clarify its beliefs, be clear about what it values, and establish the various metrics it trusts as measures of effectiveness. Developing these metrics is itself an undertaking that draws on and builds the culture of an organization, since choice of measurements is likely to rely on and reflect what the agency sees as its most important values. Capacity building facilitates clarification of evidence for establishing effectiveness. Forms and quality of evidence should be the thresholds an agency incorporates in its efforts to establish and label something as effective. Establishing standards of performance for personnel, for example, will build on what the agency is certain about in measuring the performance of personnel, and the capacity for confirmation of these standards may express itself in the ability to establish performance benchmarks in areas that once may have been seen as diffuse or “unknowable.” Capacity for confirmation will influence what the agency chooses to teach its members and newcomers about what it sees as effective practice. Other aspects of capacity building indicate what organizational members

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need to know about the agency’s activities, structure, and evaluation and assessment practices. This information will be both implicit in the minds of individuals, groups, and teams, as well as explicit in the agency’s formal statements of procedures and practices. In the case of translation and generation, it is important to know what knowledge is imported from the outside. And, in the case of enactment, knowing why and how to do something is important. While all of the aspects of capacity building are important for organizational members to know, certainty is a much bolder and deeper form of knowing and carries the risk of hubris, leading to relaxation of oversight, inappropriate generalization, misapplication of information, and the creation of a status quo that is impervious to change, self-reinforcing, and supporting a dangerous level of self-satisfaction. To minimize this risk, a capacity for confirmation may need to embrace a form of organizational self-appraisal that can result in the purposeful destruction of what is “too certain” as a counterbalance to and check on overconfidence in certainty.

Interplay Among Capacities There is interplay among the forms of capacity, since they link together to define a comprehensive system of knowledge management. As indicated by Fig.  6.1, the four forms of capacity can create a continuous cycle of inquiry within the agency, a disciplined form of work, the implementation of well-considered practices, and the support of innovation guided by the insight of organizational members into what they want to bring about. This cycle is interdependent with the organization’s clarity of vision, purpose, and aims and will be especially relevant to achieving the ends the agency pursues. The four capacities influence the formation of the six organizational competencies, and they, in turn, facilitate the emergence of critical organizational properties and attributes that come to define the agency. These involve conversion, generation, experimentation, and dissemination and utilization. Such properties emerge out of the organizational cycles of appreciation, translation, enactment, and confirmation. Certain cultural assumptions, as Fig. 6.1 indicates, establish the context within which knowledge management capacities form and take root. The knowledge management system operates under the assumption that the knowledge the organization collects, translates, and adapts for its own needs is “good” knowledge. In general, such knowledge is a product of action that supports the basis of organization learning encapsulated in the

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Cultural Assumption: Knowledge Needs a Receptive Audience

Cultural Assumption: Good Knowledge is that which the organization adapts to its own needs

Property: Conversion

Capacity for Appreciation

Capacity for Translation

Identity Clarity of Organizational Vision, Purpose, and Aims, Strategy

Property: Dissemination and Utilization

Core Knowledge Management Competencies: Continuous Practice--Manipulation of Best Practices, Improvement of Practice, Innovation of Models, Demonstration and Judgment of Practice, Teaching What is Effective, Interorganizatinoal Exchange of Knowledge

Capacity for Confirmation

Property: Generation

Capacity for Enactment

Property: Experimentation Cultural Assumption: We teach what we know

Cultural Assumption: What is Known is a product of action

Fig. 6.1 Competencies, capacities, and properties of knowledge management

idea “we teach what we know.” The cultural assumption influencing appreciation is that understanding and using knowledge requires a receptive audience. It is these cultural assumptions and their integration that provide the driving force for knowledge management within any given human service agency. Figure 6.2 offers a schema for how knowledge management progresses and ultimately influences organizational identity. Core knowledge

Capacities for Knowledge Management Expand

Core Knowledge Management Competencies Take Root in the Identity of the HSO

Knowledge Management Properties of the HSO Become Increasingly Visible

Property is a defining attribute of the HSO

Fig. 6.2  Organizational emergence of knowledge management

Capacity involves the ability of the HSO to receive or absorb the knowledge it deems significant

Competence involves a discrete area that makes the HSO suitable for knowledgement management

Identity of HSO Solidifies Around Knowledge Management

Knowledge Management Culture Increases Action

Identity involves how organization comes to define itself as a productive of its properties, capacities, and competencies

Culture involves the various levels of organizational awareness of what constitutes knowledge that imbue the organization wihti coherence and intergrity so that it can act witheffectiveness within a particular environmental niche

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management capacities take root in the identity of the human service organization. Each competency involves discrete areas that make the organization suitable for knowledge management. As these competencies take root, the capacities for knowledge management expand. These capacities themselves are indicative of the ability of the human service organization to receive and absorb the knowledge it deems significant and necessary. As competencies and capacities form knowledge management properties, they become increasingly visible and serve as defining attributes of the human service organization. It is the visibility of these properties that will enable the organization to realize the most benefits from its application of knowledge. The orchestration of competencies, capacities, and properties strengthens the agency’s knowledge management culture. This culture involves the various levels of organizational awareness of what constitutes the knowledge that imbues the organization with coherence and integrity, so that the agency can act with effectiveness within a particular domain and context of practice. From this ability to act within a given context, an agency’s identity solidifies around its knowledge and activities. An organization’s identity emerges as a product of its competencies, capacities, properties, and culture and involves how the organization defines and sees itself in light of these key attributes and characteristics. One should not prescribe where in the cycle an agency should undertake knowledge management. For some, appreciation of tacit and implicit knowledge may be the most relevant starting point, whereas for others, beginning with enactment may make the most sense. Through organizational learning and continuous development, action, innovation, and refinement, organizations can complete iterations of the knowledge management cycle and, as result, create powerful gestalts of knowledge within and upon which organizational members gain insights into practice derived from interactions with each other (appreciation), engagement with bodies of knowledge that come from outside of the agency, the use of this knowledge to generate innovative ideas (translation and generation), the use of what is known in action (enactment) and learning from the consequences of action, and the confirmation of what members find to be relative certainty about practice. The test of certainty comes when members teach what the organization finds essential to newcomers, a tactic of organizational socialization of those newcomers. Building capacity in each of these areas, and completing cycles of appreciation, translation and generation, enactment, and confirmation is an

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essential part of knowledge management, particularly when this form of organizational practice results in the expansion and development of the six fundamental competencies of knowledge management. By linking competencies and capacities, the human service agency increases the likelihood that it will realize substantial gains in what it knows about human problems and social issues and about how to better intervene into those social issues in ways that infuse meaning and purpose into the activities of the organizations in the realm of social welfare and human service. Gaining the properties of knowledge management and building a culture that supports knowledge creation and development will help human service agencies craft identities as organizations that not only serve but also advance their practice, and perhaps even create breakthrough knowledge.

Organizational Learning, Culture and Diversity in Knowledge Management Whether or not a human service organization finds that an organizational knowledge system is useful is likely to be a function of its culture, its basic beliefs about how useful the explication of knowledge is to the execution of its organizational mission, and the forces driving the need for organizational knowledge. Agencies assessing the relevance of an organizational knowledge system should reflect on the centrality of learning to their organizational mission and consider how open they are to inquiry and discovery. Valuing inquiry may be one of the most important determinants of whether and how an organization will invest in its knowledge system. Developing an effective knowledge system requires both willingness and ability for internal self-appraisal, coupled with the recognition that knowledge varies across groups and across the structure of the organization. The development of a knowledge system also requires the organization to recognize and reward inquiry as legitimate and important work. Effective knowledge systems do not necessarily dispel uncertainty, because they introduce and encourage multiple explanations about what works and about how things work. Surfacing multiple explanations, examining different models of practice, and being willing to explore different paradigms may prompt various individuals and groups in an organization to contest the validity and value of some types and aspects of knowledge. While this can result in rich dialogue and the emergence of new knowledge, it also can increase tension and conflict within an organization.

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When an organization becomes defensive in the face of multiple explanations and applies administrative sanctions to those who introduce them, it undermines and invalidates efforts to fully appreciate and develop its organizational knowledge base, and it restricts the scope of organizational learning (Argyris, 1990). Commitment to a full and clear articulation of the organizational knowledge system can reduce defensiveness and drive organizational members toward the kind of mutual understanding that enables them to span the social and psychological boundaries that may keep them from working effectively and creatively together. But, the agency that wants to advance its organizational knowledge system must evaluate its willingness to engage in activities that support diversity, encourage controversy and debate, and recognize the value of multiplicity of method while promoting unity of mission. The reduction of interpersonal and organizational distance and the promotion of dialogue and discourse about the articulation of the organizational knowledge system can set in motion processes of analysis, reflection, and synthesis. And, analysis, reflection, and synthesis are unifying activities that focus on knowledge formation (Stringer, 1999). They can promote unity of purpose and coordination of effort, which encourage members of the organization to focus on gathering knowledge about internal challenges and about relevant solutions and the external forces that shape what knowledge is needed to address these challenges successfully. This focus can link the organizational knowledge system to processes of organizational development that enable members to analyze what is, identify contradictions, envision what could be, and use knowledge to synthesize ways useful to bridging the gap between knowing about current reality and realizing future potential.

Action for Knowledge Management Mindful of the content of this chapter and the previous ones, those interested in advancing an organizational knowledge system may consider the following: 1. Respect the complexity of knowledge management. The entry point and progression is up to each organization. Define it as a journey that is continuous and not without its own issues.

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2. One approach to knowledge management resides in the search for solutions to challenges. An organization may face a challenge in engaging people who do not like the helping process, but nonetheless they are at risk without it. What are a set of solutions to this challenge? How does the organization appreciate the challenge, translate knowledge into action for prototyping. For example, in undertaking innovations in outreach, how does it enact new procedures, and then assess and subsequently confirm these? 3. The search for solutions can follow a well-focused cycle of knowledge building involving appreciation, translation, enactment, and confirmation. Let’s refer to this cycle as ATEC. 4. Encode what the organization comes to know through action. Encoding can involve narratives of experience in working on a challenge, statistical information, reflections on process, and/or products that the organization has developed through ATEC cycles. 5. Bring the fruits and frustrations of knowledge building into the awareness of organizational participants and/or members. Educate those participants and members in findings, about successes, and in identifying pitfalls. Get members and participants thinking about experiments in advancing organizational knowledge. 6. Flag promising innovations so they continue in the knowledge management process of appreciation, translation, enactment, and confirmation. Define what the organization considers an innovation, particularly intrinsic ones, that is ones occurring through the action of organizational participants and members. The internal generation of promising innovations can strengthen the authority of an organization within its domain of practice. 7. Take what the organization knows seriously. Equip organizational members and participants with its use even though it may have limitations or flaws. Help organizational members and participants understand the benefits of certain knowledge and its flaws. Help members and participants weigh what it should enact and what it should further develop or even discard. Hold on to the knowledge products that the organization discards. Store such knowledge. It may prove useful in the future. 8. Practice courage. Recognize that the organization operates in uncertainty and that the members and participants are not likely to have certainty about action, especially when organizational environments are dynamic and/or threatening. Assess risk of knowing and not know-

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ing and embrace an agenda of advancing organizational knowledge to clarify intent, purpose, aims, processes, and products. 9. Search for internal animators of the knowledge development process. Typically, the animators are highly innovative individuals and teams or groups. Show the organization how these animators of knowledge management operate in their daily lives within the organization.

References Argyris, C. (1990). Overcoming organizational defenses: Facilitating organizational learning. Allyn & Bacon. Huston, T. (2007). Inside out: Stories and methods for generating collective will to create the future we want. SoL. Manela, R. W., & Moxley, D. P. (2002). Best practices as agency-based knowledge in social welfare. Administration in Social Work, 26, 1–24. Stockdill, S. H., & associates. (2002). Toward a definition of the ECB process: A conversation with the ECB literature. In D. W. Compton, M. Baizerman, & S.  Hueftle Stockdill (Eds.), The art, craft, and science of evaluation capacity building. New Directions for Evaluation, 93, 7–25. Stringer, E. T. (1999). Action research. Sage. Thomas, E. J. (1984). Designing interventions for the helping professions. Sage.

CHAPTER 7

Conclusion: Releasing Knowledge for Practice Advancement Through Transformative Action

Abstract  Practice in human services incorporates at least three principal ways of knowing. It is those three sources that I outline in this final chapter. Tacit, indigenous, and canonical are derivative of the practice in which human service professionals engage. Those three principal ways of knowing can stand as sources of practice knowledge that exist within the minds of individual practitioners, that operate within groups or teams, and that stand as official ways of knowing, what I call the canonical. Human service organizations can release the three sources of practice knowledge and then transform them into new if not novel ways of practicing. Release and transformation can serve as powerful tools, as I seek to show in this chapter by outlining very briefly the nine transformations human service organizations can make. Keywords  Tacit knowledge • Indigenous knowledge • Canonical knowledge • Translation or transformation of knowledge

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The Nature of Practice in Human Services and Its Implications for Releasing Knowledge That human services is knowledge intensive is an observation I have made throughout this monograph. And previously in this monograph I have asserted that human service professionals are knowledge workers, ones that use knowledge to practice in helping people improve their life circumstances or gain opportunities. Alternatively, human services professionals use knowledge as practice to help people cope with the consequences, many of them severe, of serious social issues, such as economic or social displacement. Practice in human services orients largely to contexts and situations in which people find themselves in life compromising circumstances. The isolated elder or the homeless person may experience numerous health compromising and debilitating consequences that take their toll ono their overall health status and may result in death, physical or social. Helpers must immerse themselves in this context, and manage themselves socially, culturally, emotionally and cognitively in addressing those situations often times inventing tools to reach people, form relationships, and build effective alliances with people who (because of their lived experience) may not readily trust those who say they will help. Tacit Practice Knowledge The knowledge tools that human service professionals use as part of their tool kit come in a variety of knowledge forms. For an experienced human service professional working daily in high demand situations can produce considerable knowledge of how people cope with, degrade, surmount, or master their life situations in the face of considerable environmental demand. In this sense, the human service professional’s fund of knowledge becomes what Polanyi (1998) calls personal knowledge. They build mental models and what cognitive psychologists refer to as schema in their quest to help others. I refer to this knowledge as tacit. It operates within the mind of the human service professional and they may not share it with others, not because they are resistant or opposed to doing so, but they may take their knowledge for granted as they go about their professional business and activities on a daily basis, sometimes routinely, or sometimes under difficult circumstances.

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Others observing the professional in action may come to appreciate what they are doing, and seek to replicate it within their own practice. Note that the observational processes others use to encode the professional’s activities constitute a social learning process, a powerful way of informal learning that occurs within human services at a high frequency. Those who observe likely orient to the human service professional as an innovator. The professional is demonstrating new forms of engagement of others. They may be able to break through into areas of performance that others cannot since they may simply lack the motivation, fortitude, courage, practice experience, and experimentation with practice that the typical professional may simply lack or resist. Indigenous Practice Knowledge Now imagine that the professional in our spotlight does not work alone. Rather, she works within a team, and it is the members of the team that collectively engage in practice, gain considerable experience, and form knowledge as let’s say “that what we do defines who we are as a group or team.” The formation of team-based knowledge occurs quite frequently in human services work. Carefully designed teams composed of members from diverse backgrounds and diverse social attachments (such as differences in gender identity) may come to form powerful knowledge sets that they organize as practice within their particular teams. These knowledge sets can surmount disciplinary boundaries, meld practices into wholistic packages of action, and become part of the shared culture of a team. When members from diverse disciplinary/professional backgrounds work closely together in addressing a common challenge (such as helping people get and retain housing), a transdisciplinary or interprofessional knowledge can evolve. What I call indigenous knowledge can crystalize within a given team. The transdisciplinary or interprofessional knowledge base becomes bounded within a given team. As with tacit knowledge, the knowledge base operates at an informal level as a shared reality. Or, team members may create training materials to formalize the practices that they form within the team. Their intent here is not to share the knowledge with other teams or to disseminate it broadly within the organization, but to use it for the advancement of their own work. Cetina (1999) characterizes this kind of knowledge as epistemic. It exists as a form of culture that fuels members’ ways of seeing the world as

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it shapes and legitimizes action in that world. For Cetina, the institution of science operates socially in which actors create knowledge within given domains and the structures that hold those domains, such as laboratories. In the context of human services, epistemic culture may operate in situations in which professionals and those they help are seeking to find solutions to the social expression of a vexing social issue in a given context or situation. The resulting practice knowledge may be context- or situation-specific, and those who produce it may not view it as generalizable to similar situations in other geographic contexts. The knowledge, therefore, becomes what Stake (1995) calls intrinsic, an inherent expression of a given system, or what my colleagues and I would characterize as intrinsic innovation (Moxley et  al., 2013). Often times human service professionals do not seek to build generalizable models, leaving that aim up to researchers, but rather they build what works in a given situation in which they are an actor, i.e., a helper, who is assisting others to achieve something of value, such as improving the quality of their day. Canonical Practice Knowledge Still a third source of knowledge, and note that I say source. This is the canonical—it is what powerful forces specify what should be done under certain circumstances. Those powerful forces may represent a standard or structure within a profession, or a regulatory body, a commission that represents the authority of a political actor, such as a minister or president, or a financing entity. The canonical can be found in textbooks, journals, and the scientific literature. It can come from consensus or from empirical evidence that justifies the practice. It is the kind of knowledge professors pass on to their students, mostly at graduate levels when those students are preparing to enter a helping profession. Professionals may bring canonical practices to the organization in which they practice. The use of the canonical can be prescribed by protocol and standards or measures such as checklists or proficiency gauges. In training or advanced education, students as emerging professionals will have to embody the practices altering their cognition, emotion, beliefs and/or behavior in order to use the knowledge, now likely specified as procedure, in their practice. So, the canonical can be supervised, demonstrated, taught, embodied, measured. It can become part of what those in a

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profession, particularly senior professionals, may call the state of the art or best practices.

Transforming the Three Forms into Practice Knowledge You can orient to Fig. 7.1. It reveals what I mean by releasing and transforming. I derive this table from the work of Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995). They offer a more compact table with four alternatives formed by two types—tacit and explicit. I offer a table with nine possibilities built on practice knowledge that forms at the intersection of “from” tacit, indigenous, and canonical knowledge and “to” tacit, indigenous, and canonical knowledge. The nine kinds of practice knowledge I offer are:

Transformation To:

Transformation From:

Tacit Knowledge

Indigenous Knowledge

Canonical Knowledge

Tacit Knowledge

Indigenous Knowledge

Canonical Knowledge

Based on Individual Experience, Personal and Private

Based on Shared Group Experience, Embedded in Group Culture

Based on Published Rules and Procedures Reflecting Organizational Policies

Experiential Learning. Members Gain Knowledge By Working With Experts; Strong Vicarious Learning Processes

Individuals Teach Group Through Modeling and Demonstration; Strong Vicarious Learning Processes Within Groups or Teams.

Individuals Convert What They Know Into Explicit Protocol or Procedures and Demonstrate The Effectiveness of Procedural Knowledge

Group Members Mentor and Coach Individuals into the Knowledge Base of the Group

Situational Immersion and Team-Based Learning; Experimentation with Behaviors, Skills, and Norms and Rules

Groups Convert What They Know Into Explicit Protocol or Procedures and Demonstrate The Effectiveness of Procedural Knowledge

Strong Supervision in which Individuals Learn to Internalize Formal Rules and Procedures

Group Adapts or Modifies Formal Procedures and Practices, Adopting What Works, and Rejecting What Does Not Work

Formalized Training, Instruction and Practice of Procedures; Socialization into Standards of Performance

Fig. 7.1  Releasing knowledge through transformative action

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From tacit knowledge to: 1. Experiential formed through the release of tacit knowledge to those who embody the tacit knowledge for the purposes of mastering practice largely learned through informal transmission and practice. 2. Indigenous formed through the translation of tacit knowledge into group practice requiring the formation of a team culture. 3. Canonical formed by individuals with tacit knowledge releasing it in the form of protocol, standards, and required activities. From indigenous to: 4. Tacit when those who know socialize, train, and/or mentor those into the indigenous group model of practice. 5. Indigenous when the team itself evolves to embody new ways of practice largely based on the legitimization of a group model of practice by team members. 6. Canonical when the team converts what it knows as good practice into explicit protocol or procedures and demonstrates their relevance or effectiveness (and limitations) of proceduralized knowledge. From canonical to: 7. Tacit when strong supervision enable individuals to internalize the formalized procedural practice knowledge. 8. Indigenous when the group adapts or modifies the canonical procedures and practices, adapting what works for the group, and rejecting what does not work. 9. Canonical when the human service organization installs formalized training, procedures, and expectations of use and socializes its personnel into how best to perform in practice settings.

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Action for Knowledge Management 1. Assume that practitioners and recipients of human services possess considerable pent up knowledge about how best to practice. Use various methods, such as interviewing, to facilitate the expression of this knowledge. 2. Assume that group structures and/or teams within the organization possess their own cultures. Practice knowledge exists within those cultures, which organizational members can appreciate through participation and observation. 3. Harness tacit and indigenous knowledge for the purposes of generating good practice policies and procedures. Translation of tacit and indigenous knowledge into formal procedures of practice can foster the official practice knowledge base of the organization. 4. Use the official knowledge base to advance practice. Teach it. Facilitate learning among practitioners. And, build protocol. However, remain suspect of the official stance on good practice. Monitoring and evaluation of the organization’s canonical knowledge can yield insight into novel practices, a product of individuals and groups modifying official knowledge to meet their practice requirements. 5. Use the official knowledge to formulate best practices. But do treat the officially prescribed practices and best practices as tentative and provisional. 6. Bring the practice knowledge base into the ATEC cycle—appreciate it, translate it, enact it, and confirm it. 7. Empower practitioners and recipients as well as other stakeholders to critique the existing official knowledge base. Allow them to modify it to reflect their realities and then bring it into the ATEC cycle.

References Cetina, K. (1999). Epistemic culture. How the sciences make knowledge. Harvard University Press. Moxley, D., Deacon, Z., & Thompson, V. (2013). Action research and development for intrinsic innovation in social service administration. Action Learning and Action Research Journal, 18(2), 37–68.

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Nonaka, I., & Takeuchi, H. (1995). The knowledge-creating company: How Japanese companies create the dynamics of innovation. Oxford University Press. Polanyi, M. (1998). Personal knowledge: Towards a post-critical philosophy. Routledge. Stake, R. (1995). The art of case study research. Sage.

Index

A Accountability, vii, 16, 71, 108 Accreditation, vii, 28, 36, 47 Action, vii, 3, 5, 7, 10, 15, 17, 18, 22, 24, 27–33, 36–37, 42–44, 46, 47, 50, 53–55, 58–59, 71, 76–78, 83, 84, 89–92, 95–96, 102, 105, 106, 109, 112, 114–116, 118–123 Aesthetic values, 71 Allocation, 11, 12, 49, 81, 100 Appreciation, vii, viii, 7, 32, 44, 46, 78, 103–106, 109, 110, 112, 115 Appreciative inquiry, 87 Artificial intelligence, 22 Attitudes, 24 B Best practices, vii, 6, 18, 30, 42, 58, 64–66, 71, 73–75, 77, 80–84, 91, 94, 105, 106, 121, 123 institutionalization, 75

C Capabilities, viii, 2–4, 96 Capacity building, 100–105, 108, 109 Civic duty, 71, 87, 101, 102 Common good, 4, 7 Communities of practice, 5 Competence, 22, 34, 67 Confirmation, 107–109, 112, 115 Consequences, 11, 26, 33, 46, 48, 71, 74, 76, 82, 84, 85, 88, 89, 103, 106, 112, 118 Core curriculum, 90 Culture entrepreneurial, 101 regulatory, 101 Curriculum, 90 Cutting edge, 75, 78, 108 D Data, 18, 22–25, 33, 65, 66, 78, 93, 102, 107 Demonstration, 73, 75, 83, 94 of practices, 84, 85

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INDEX

Design, 5, 25–27, 34, 47, 48, 50–52, 54, 57, 65, 77–79, 81, 89, 93, 100 human-centered, 5 Design-driven, 28, 29 Dissemination, 25, 27, 33, 35, 53, 58, 109 Diversity, 3, 53–55, 57, 59, 68, 101, 113–114 Documentation, 64, 65, 81 Domain, vii, viii, 2–7, 10, 11, 13–15, 17, 25, 26, 28–31, 33, 35, 44, 45, 49, 50, 64, 67, 70, 71, 73, 75, 81, 82, 87, 93, 100, 101, 105, 107, 112, 115, 120 Drift negative, 46 positive, 46 E Enactment, 106–109, 112, 115 Encapsulation, 56–57 structural, 56–57 Encoding, 17, 58, 115 Ethical commitments, 71 Evaluation, 33, 34, 47, 48, 50, 58, 65, 74, 76–78, 85, 86, 96, 107, 109, 123 summative, 85 Evidence, 43, 86, 89, 108, 120 Explication, 10, 28, 33, 49, 105, 113 Exportation, 35 F Fields of practice, 10, 11, 25, 43, 49, 73, 82 Function/Functional, 3, 11, 12, 23, 27, 28, 30, 42–46, 52, 53, 58, 66, 71, 79, 90, 93, 94, 101, 103, 113

Functionality, 28, 51, 75 Funding, 3, 15, 16, 29, 33, 49, 73, 75, 81, 82 G Generative inquiry, 105–106 Greater good, see Common good H Human resources, 49, 51–52, 58, 96 Human services community based, 3 organizations, 43 social institution, vii, 2 I Impact, 3, 4, 17, 25, 53, 79, 81, 82, 84, 85, 102 Implementation, 5, 24, 42, 45, 48–50, 74–78, 81, 83, 85, 94, 107, 109 Importation, 35 Information, 5, 11, 15, 18, 22–25, 33, 34, 42, 45, 46, 50, 51, 54, 57, 58, 65, 66, 83, 85, 87–89, 91, 93, 101, 104, 105, 107, 109, 115 machine forms, 22 Infrastructure, 4, 23, 76, 79, 80 information, 23 Innovation, vii, 3–5, 7, 10, 22, 23, 25, 27–32, 35, 44–46, 48, 49, 52, 53, 69, 72, 73, 77–84, 88, 90, 92, 94, 101, 103, 105, 107, 109, 112, 115, 120 Innovators, 4, 7, 47, 119 Inquiry, 22, 24, 32, 48, 102, 104, 109, 113 Intelligence, 22, 23, 44, 49, 50, 55 Inter-organizational exchange, 71, 92–95

 INDEX 

Interprofessional ethics, 6 Interprofessional practice, 6–7 Isomorphism, 31 K Know how, 42, 50, 51 Knowledge actionable, 50 as asset, 35, 42–44, 96 development of, 24, 47, 55, 68, 81, 105, 113 dynamic, viii, 14, 15, 53, 78, 91 embodiment, 23, 57 fugitive, 46 functional, 42–43, 58 intensive, vii, 4, 10, 11, 118 local, 56 management, vii, viii, 2–7, 9–18, 22–37, 42–59, 63–96, 100–116, 123 management systems, vii, viii, 6, 10, 15, 16, 23–26, 42–59, 63–96, 100, 103, 104, 109 practice-oriented, 24 precarious, 16, 92 relevance, vii, 13, 15, 89, 104 shared, 95 socio-technical, 22–24, 50 validity, 13, 84, 89, 113 value, viii, 12–15, 22, 25, 26, 33, 42, 49, 57, 67, 103, 104, 113 workers, 22, 26, 51, 66, 72, 74, 84, 93, 118 Knowledge system breadth, 64, 70 centrality of, 44–48, 113 coherence, 64, 67, 68 depth, 64, 70 dimensions of, viii, 63–96 explicitness, 64 orientation, vii, 64, 67 relevance of, 113

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L Learning, vii, 24, 25, 28, 32, 34, 43, 46, 49, 53–54, 70, 72, 73, 77, 79, 83, 85, 87–92, 94, 96, 109, 112–114, 119, 123 culture of, 85 Legitimacy, 16, 69, 71, 72, 89 M Management information systems, 33 Marginalization, 2, 11 Mediating role, 57–58 Mentoring systems, 90 Mentors, 90, 122 Mission, viii, 3, 5, 6, 14, 15, 23, 25, 42–47, 50, 51, 58, 66, 68, 69, 71, 73, 76, 81, 82, 89, 104, 113, 114 Models, viii, 11, 13–15, 28–30, 35, 43, 44, 46, 48, 50, 65, 70, 71, 80–84, 87, 90, 94, 100, 101, 105–108, 113, 118, 120, 122 Multidisciplinary, 6 N Narrative forms, 17, 85 Narratives, 10, 18, 34, 36, 55, 58, 65, 95, 96, 101, 115 Need(s), 2–4, 7, 10–17, 24, 26, 28–33, 42, 44, 45, 47, 49, 53, 58, 73, 76, 78, 81, 83, 84, 88, 89, 91, 100–102, 105, 109, 113 human, 2–4, 7, 10–14, 16, 17, 27, 28, 30, 35, 50, 80, 101 O Ontologies, 5 Organizational competencies, 109 Organizational control, 27

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INDEX

Organizational culture, 23–27, 34, 57–59, 66, 76, 77, 82, 87, 91, 95, 107 Organizational design, 5, 26 Organizational effectiveness, 24–25 Organizational knowledge, viii, 5, 9–18, 24, 27, 32, 33, 36, 42–49, 51–58, 64, 65, 67, 70–95, 100–103, 105, 107, 113–116 multiple forms, 54–56 Organizational learning, 72, 79, 83, 85, 87–89, 91, 94, 112–114 Organizational policy, 34, 96 Organizational processes, 54, 73, 80 Organizational transformation, 25 Organizations/organizational, 57 adaptive, 28, 35 knowledge based, 22 nongovernmental, 3, 5 nonprofit, 42, 93 Outcomes, 3, 6, 17, 24, 33, 36, 48, 55, 56, 58, 65, 66, 69, 76, 80, 81, 83, 104, 108 P Paradigms, 5, 14, 15, 29–32, 35, 36, 46, 67, 69, 79, 82, 83, 92, 113 Paradox, 53, 58, 67, 92 Perspective, 6, 10, 14–16, 18, 25, 27, 31, 36, 43, 51, 53, 54, 74, 75, 92, 100, 101, 103, 106 Politicization, 13 Power, 6, 13, 16, 25, 26, 28, 35, 36, 74, 85, 93, 95 Practice, vii, 4, 23, 42, 64, 100, 118 Practitioners, viii, 6, 7, 10, 11, 14, 15, 17, 25, 44, 46, 53, 56, 65, 66, 72, 73, 84, 85, 89, 90, 123 Professional development, 34, 86, 88, 91 Prototyping, 5, 115 Public good, 5

Q Quality improvement, 34, 77, 78, 83, 84 Quality management, 22, 47, 58, 64, 76–79, 88, 93, 106 Quality management cycles, 78 Quality of life, 3, 5, 6, 68, 69, 79 R Readiness, 24 Research, 32–34, 43, 47, 50, 77, 84, 93, 102, 106, 107 Research and development, 5, 33, 47, 48, 50, 80, 94 Resource development, 34, 47, 49–52, 58, 73, 80, 96 Risk, 2, 55, 66, 95, 108, 109, 115 Root system, 47, 63 S Search conferencing, 87 Social development, 3 Social innovation, 5, 7, 49 Socialization, 2, 43, 68, 88, 91, 112 Social learning, vii, 25, 28, 32, 43, 119 Social marketing, 5, 35 Social provision, 12 Societal mandates, 71, 87, 101, 102 Stakeholders, 15–17, 44, 45, 49, 55, 58, 73, 88, 92, 102 Strategic value, 26, 75 Strategy, organizational, 4, 7 Structuring, viii, 5, 42–59 T Taxonomies, 5 Teaching, 27, 90 Teams, 7, 18, 23, 48, 49, 52–54, 58, 66, 96, 104–106, 109, 116, 119, 122, 123

 INDEX 

Technology, 22, 24, 33, 48–50, 56, 68–70, 76, 79, 102, 107 Templates, 5, 28–31, 35, 36 Templating, 31 Tools, viii, 5, 11, 24, 27, 32–34, 45, 65, 67, 74, 77, 79, 86, 118 Training, 11, 84, 88, 90, 107, 119, 120, 122 and education, 34 Transcendence, 30, 82 Transcendent, 28, 30, 31, 35, 92 Transcendent worldview, 30 Transdisciplinary, 6–7, 119 Transformative, 28, 29, 31, 35, 92, 118–123

Translation, 22, 34, 58, 105–106, 109, 112, 115, 122, 123 U Utilization, 5, 22, 24–25, 33, 35, 46, 52, 53, 58, 66, 67, 74, 78, 88, 91, 94, 105, 109 V Vision, viii, 5, 25, 55, 71, 83, 89, 109 Vulnerability, 2

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