The Durability of Culture and the Stories We Tell Narrative in Long-term Knowledge Management

Culture, considered both cognitively and socially, is among the most durable of human creations. This applies to individual communities of practice, as much as to larger ethnic or national groups. Consequently, designers of long-term knowledge management [KM] systems should pay close attention to the role of culture in creating, sustaining, and interpreting knowledge. This position paper looks at the interplay of two activities that are essential to understanding culture for purposes of design: ethnographic field work and the interpretation of stories people tell us about their work, goals, and community. It argues that, when interpreted in the context of a broader field effort, the stories people tell us are valuable clues to the community’s cultural invariants. Introduction: Culture and knowledge management Knowledge is irreducibly a quality of human beings, implicit in their actions, utterances, and relationships. In practice, and possibly in principle, it cannot be formalized in any operational sense: the syntactic structures stored in a knowledge management system must be interpreted and acted upon by people. Indeed, we could express the frequently mentioned distinction between knowledge and information in exactly these terms. If a symbolic structure can support meaningful algorithmic manipulation, then it is information. If it must be interpreted by a human being before being meaningfully applied, than its role is in supporting knowledge. The roots of this view lie in embodied and situated models of cognition. Embodied theories (Damasio 1994; Deacon 1997; Lakoff 1987; Lakoff and Johnson 1999;