The Knowledge Governance Approach

An attempt is made to characterize a `knowledge governance approach' as a distinctive, emerging field that cuts across the fields of knowledge management, organisation studies, strategy and human resource management. Knowledge governance is taken up with how the deployment of administrative apparatus influences knowledge processes, such as sharing, retaining and creating knowledge. It insists on clear behavioural foundations, adopts an economizing perspective and examines efficient alignment between knowledge transactions with diverse characteristics and governance structures and mechanisms with diverse capabilities of handling these transactions. Various open research issues that a knowledge governance approach may illuminate are sketched. Although knowledge governance draws clear inspiration from organizational economics and `rational' organization theory, it recognizes that knowledge represents various challenges to more `closed' social science disciplines, notably economics.