Overview
Knowledge Management in Organizations: A Critical Introduction examines a deceptively difficult question: what does it mean to manage knowledge when knowledge is interpreted, embodied, and used by people? Donald Hislop places technical systems alongside strategy, organizational structure, culture, human resources, learning, and day-to-day practice.
The book contrasts an objectivist view—knowledge as something that can be captured, codified, stored, and transferred—with a practice-based view in which knowing is inseparable from activity, relationships, and context. Both perspectives are useful, but they lead to different interventions. A repository may work well for stable explicit information; judgment formed through participation may require conversation, observation, and practice.
Hislop also gives serious attention to subjects that optimistic KM programs often underplay: motivation, power, politics, conflict, professional identity, and boundaries between communities. People do not automatically share what they know because a platform exists. Knowledge can confer status, expose mistakes, create additional work, or be difficult to explain outside the setting where it makes sense.
Key ideas
- Knowledge is heterogeneous. Facts, procedures, interpretations, relationships, and embodied skills cannot all be managed in the same way.
- Sharing is a social process. Trust, identity, incentives, and existing relationships influence whether knowledge actually moves.
- Practice supplies meaning. Documents travel more easily than the context needed to interpret them, so transfer often requires participation and discussion.
- Boundaries matter. Teams and professions develop their own language and assumptions; moving knowledge across those boundaries requires translation.
- Power is part of KM. Managers should expect competing interests and uneven willingness to disclose expertise rather than treating resistance as a purely technical defect.
Why it matters for handovers
The book is a useful corrective to the idea that a complete form automatically creates a successful handover. A document can contain accurate sentences and still be unusable if the successor lacks the relationships, examples, authority, or practical experience needed to interpret them.
For Flamekeeper, this supports a mixed approach. Capture explicit facts in a structured record, but use quality review to uncover assumptions, ambiguous language, stakeholder dependencies, and claims that need a walkthrough or supervised practice. Managers should also create enough psychological safety for a leaver to discuss failures, workarounds, and political realities without turning the handover into a performance evaluation.
Questions to carry into a handover
- Which parts of the role can be codified reliably, and which only make sense through examples or practice?
- What language, assumptions, or relationships will be unfamiliar to the successor?
- What might make the departing employee reluctant to share a difficult lesson or informal workaround?
About the author
Donald Hislop is a scholar of organizational knowledge, work, and technology. His research and teaching connect knowledge management with organizational behavior and human resource management, which explains the book's multidisciplinary and critical approach. Later editions were developed with Rachelle Bosua and Remko Helms, but the Goodreads edition linked here is Hislop's second edition.