Introduction to the Special Issue on Managing Knowledge in Organizations: Creating, Retaining, and Transferring Knowledge

Interest in the issues of organizational learning and knowledge management on the part of academics and practitioners increased dramatically in recent years. On the practical side, changes in technology and modes of organizing work, globalization, and increased competition brought the issues of organizational learning and knowledge management to center stage for organizations. New developments in computing and information technology enabled the retention and transfer of information in organizations on a larger scale than was once possible. Shifts to more distributed modes of organizing work made knowledge transfer a priority for firms. The greater prevalence of the multiunit organizational form, such as a franchise or chain (Baum and Greve 2001), and the greater frequency of interorganizational relationships (Powell et al. 1996) also increased the importance of knowledge transfer for firms. Parallel to the surge in interest among practitioners, academic interest in organizational learning and knowledge management also grew considerably, as evidenced by the proliferation of books and articles recently published on the subject.1 In addition, a