The Knowing Organization: : How Organizations Use Information to Construct Meaning, Create Knowledge, and Make Decisions

Citation

Varey, R.J. (1999), "The Knowing Organization: : How Organizations Use Information to Construct Meaning, Create Knowledge, and Make Decisions", Corporate Communications: An International Journal, Vol. 4 No. 2, pp. 106-107. https://doi.org/10.1108/ccij.1999.4.2.106.2

Because this book examines system design and knowledge management by treating the corporation as an information‐seeking, creating, and using community, it has direct relevance to scholars of communication in the corporate context.

Choo builds a framework that shows the corporation as an organised intelligent seeker, creator, and user of information and knowledge for the construction of meaning and decision‐making. He incorporates Karl Weick’s theory of sensemaking in the sharing of meanings and the use of rules and routines to reduce complexity and uncertainty.

The text is well crafted and detailed, requiring some effort to navigate through the many concepts and levels of integration that Choo attempts in building his framework. The book will appeal to information systems specialists, and should be attentively visited by communication specialists, too.

It is precisely because this book does not explicitly discuss communication that scholars and educators should read it and recognise the problems of understanding information as the raw material for knowledge, expertise, and wisdom that can only be realised through communication. The book, when taken from the point of view of human interaction in relationships oriented towards purposive co‐ordinated action, does more to raise questions than it does in answering (relevant) questions. A systemic perspective on spontaneous and planned formal and informal personal and impersonal human interaction is a necessity. The challenge is to draw together the concepts of information and knowledge with communication and relationships.

While making the understanding of life in the corporate social system much more taxing, this is certain to contribute to the fulfilment of many people’s aspirations. Adequate inquiry is needed to put communication back into centrality ‐ then people’s intellectual work will be treated as the primary strategic requirement in the communication age, while technology is re‐identified as the servant and not the master.