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Journal of Information Science
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Article

The quality of evidence in knowledge management research: Practitioner versus scholarly literature

Hamid R. Ekbia* and Noriko Hara

Indiana University, USA

* To whom correspondence should be addressed.


  Abstract

The viability of KM partly rests on how researchers garner empirical support for their purported theories. One aspect of this would involve the evaluation of the evidence provided in KM research. This paper presents a comparative study of the evidence that is presented in scholarly and professional literature on KM. For this purpose, the paper introduces a typology of evidence to analyze the data obtained from the survey of the literature. The classification based on this typology reveals quantitative differences between the types of evidence put forth in the scholarly and practitioner literature. More interestingly, however, our analysis reveals differences in terms of the questions they ask, the perspective they adopt, and the methods they follow to convince others of the validity of their claims. We explain these differences in terms of the notions of ‘blackboxing’ and ‘performance’ borrowed from actor-network theory.

Key Words: knowledge management; evidence; actor-network theory; social informatics

First published on September 26, 2007, doi:10.1177/0165551507080412

Journal of Information Science 2008;34:110.

A more recent version of this article appeared on February 1, 2008

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