Knowledge Programs and the Elusive Nature of Organizational Goals

The problem of how to create and transfer knowledge in organizations has given rise to a rich and stimulating discourse between and within organizational studies and practitioners. This paper focuses on a still relatively unexplored aspect of this issue. This is the dilemma of setting up goals for and evaluating the outcomes of programs designed to stimulate the creation and transfer of knowledge in corporations. It does this by reviewing a number of possible such goals and placing these against the backdrop of evaluation theory and specific epistemological concerns. It is argued that the evaluation of programs for the creation and transfer of knowledge is a complex task for a number of reasons, one of the most important of which is the constitutive character of knowledge. Given this, the paper recommends a constructivist and goal-free framework for knowledge program evaluation praxis. The paper concludes with a number of suggestions as to how this may be achieved.