From Fit to Knowing Approaches to Strategizing HRM Practices: an Empirical Research on ICT Corporations

Page In the knowing approach, rather than study knowledge as something that people have, the authors focus the process of knowing regarded as something that people do. The social dimension of knowing, enhanced the tacitness of collective knowledge instead of individual mastery within communities of practices and communities of knowing. The assumption of a coherent research perspective based on knowing and communities approaches could offer several insights to face some open problems in the current debate on the integration between strategic management and human resource management [HRM]. We contend that a complete integration between strategic management and HRM philosophies, policies and practices requires a double conceptual shift, firstly from “fit approaches” to “dynamic knowledge-based approaches”, then from these to a “knowing communities approach”, able to offer a deep understanding of casually ambiguous, socially complex, historically evolved processes underlying the complex links between individual knowledge, organizational knowledge, HRM policies, competitive advantage. In order to give a contribution to the need for an operazionalization of this theoretical framework we propose the concept of Knowing Community of HRM Practices as Cognitive