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INTRODUCTION 9

• Originating ‘ba’ – the place where individuals develop empathy, share feelings,
emotions, experiences and mental models. This is essential to socialization. It
relies on face-to-face contact and is where knowledge creation is seen as start-
ing. An example is an informal exchange around a shared problem or issue.
• Interacting ‘ba’ – a more consciously constructed place where peers get
together to engage in dialogue, challenge ideas and reflect on their own ideas
in the light of others’ idea. This is essential to externalization. An example is
assembling a project team and plan to resolve an issue.
• Cyber ‘ba’ – the virtual place where new knowledge can be combined with
existing information and made available throughout the organization. This is
enabled by information communication technology (ICT) and is essential to
combination. An example is adding project findings to an Internet database.
• Exercising ‘ba’ – the place where formal explicit knowledge can be applied through
on the job training and active participation. This is essential to internalization. An
example is developing training or ‘peer assist’ schemes to put results into practice.

The SECI model of Nonaka and his colleagues is not without critics. Not least,
and despite the notion of ‘ba’, it presents an overly individualized view of knowl-
edge and is a bit ‘slippery’ in how it treats knowledge. For example, on the one
hand, knowledge separated from ‘ba’ is not knowledge but information. At the
same time, the model continues to classify knowledge as either tacit or explicit,
leaving open the question of what explicit knowledge actually is. The SECI
model also significantly downplays the differences of interests, power and political
dynamics that knowledge creation processes in organizational contexts inevitably
encounter. Instead the ‘knowledge spiral’ – the movement of knowledge from
being the possession of an individual to becoming an organizational resource – is
depicted as rather smooth, linear, uncontested and unproblematic. These criti-
cisms aside, the model has been very influential and has played an important part
in channeling attention, not just to the cognitive, information processing aspects
of knowledge creation in organizations, but also to the importance of values and
the enabling context in which such values are shared, acquired and played out.

Spender’s framework (1996, 1998)
Spender’s framework, pictured in Figure 1.3, differs from Nonaka’s because it is
built on the principle that, in order to understand where organizational knowl-
edge comes from, we need to be concerned with not only types of knowledge
(i.e. epistemology), but also where it resides (i.e. ontology). So, as well as incor-
porating tacit and explicit knowledge, his framework also makes a distinction
between individual and social (or collective) knowledge. Combining concerns
about what knowledge is (i.e. tacit or explicit) and where it resides (individual
or social) means that the four, rather than two, different types of knowledge can
be identified: (i) individual/explicit (conscious); (ii) individual/implicit (auto-
matic); (iii) social/explicit (objectified) and (iv) social/implicit (collective).

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