Connecting Knowledge Management and Experiential Learning to Gain New Insights and Research Perspectives

There is a growing sense that knowledge management, to be most effective, must address questions of knowledge creation and innovation in organisational contexts. Therefore, knowledge management needs to develop more sophisticated and epistemological orientations towards knowledge, (1) realising how knowledge is socially embedded and constructed and (2) how individuals acquire this knowledge, i.e., how they learn. In short, we conceive the frontier of knowledge management, managing knowing, as the result of the dynamics of socially constructed environments. Our project calls for an interdisciplinary approach, bridging epistemologies, and for including insights from other fields into IS. We look at experiential learning, which has been studied in depth in the field of social psychology, as a way of enlarging our understanding of knowledge management. By connecting experiential learning and managing knowing, we see more clearly the conceptual issues at the frontiers of knowledge management. Finally, we describe a research agenda incorporating this methodology to explore the questions surrounding experiential learning in a world going digital. The fixed person for the fixed duties, who in older societies was such a godsend, in the future will be a public danger