Introduction

The topic of business knowledge has emerged in full force over the last few years. This success can be perceived in most of the structures of production and outlets of diffusion of the different management genres. These range from the academic quarters of the social sciences, such as sociology, where abundant research on the topic is both carried out and published; to business schools, the institutions that generate most of the applied business knowledge, especially on the management of knowledge in operations to foster productivity and creativity; and also to the more ‘faddish’ channel of consultants, who are developing products aimed at diffusing the organizational practice of the management of knowledge and promoting those products in their professional role. A revealing point is that some of the applied business knowledge pieces — see Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995) and von Krogh and Roos (1995) for two splendid cases in point — are built directly and explicitly upon classic sociological work on knowledge, such as Karl Polanyi’s traditional and well-known distinction between explicit and tacit knowledge. Not so long ago, very few practitioners would have thought that the systematic management of knowledge would have been one of their new managerial tasks in post bureaucratic organizations, and very few scholars would have thought that a classic sociologist of knowledge would have been used to conceptualize, operationalize and implement new organizational practices.