Infusing Ethical Considerations in Knowledge Management Scholarship: Toward a Research Agenda

The authors of this paper believe that scholarly work on knowledge management (KM) has largely overlooked ethical considerations. As such, this paper argues for the infusion of ethical considerations into knowledge management (KM) research. Using the lens of the classical ethical theories in philosophy, this paper revisits key areas of KM—knowledge creation, storage and access, transfer, and application—and generates relevant research questions in each of these areas. The paper highlights the importance of examining ethical issues related to KM, and offers an illustrative set of ethically-informed research themes and questions that can potentially be investigated by future studies.