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10 MANAGING KNOWLEDGE WORK AND INNOVATION

Explicit Conscious Objectified
Type of knowledge

Implicit Automatic Collective

Individual Social
Locus of knowledge
Figure 1.3 Forms of knowledge – Spender’s framework

Spender’s framework makes a very important additional point, which is that
forms of social knowledge can exist beyond the individual. Hence it is possible
to make a ‘contrast between the explicit knowledge that individuals feel they
possess and the collective knowledge on which this explicit knowledge actually
stands, and the interaction of the two’ (Spender, 1998, p. 238). For exam-
ple, the culture of an organization is a form of social knowledge that survives
beyond the contribution of particular individuals. Spender also saw the creation
of organizational knowledge as resulting from interactions between all four
types of knowledge. What this framework does not highlight, however, which
the SECI model makes explicit, are the processes that allow different types of
knowledge to be created in the first place.
Thinking strategically, Spender argues that collective (social/implicit) knowl-
edge is actually the most valuable to organizations because this is a type of
knowledge that other firms find difficult to understand and imitate. As we shall
see in Chapter 2, if a firm can develop a culture (collective knowledge) that sup-
ports knowledge creation then this can be very hard to imitate, even if individu-
als leave and try to replicate this new culture elsewhere. This idea very much
supports the view, still held strongly today, that a firm’s ‘core competencies’ are
a crucial strategic resource.

Blackler’s framework (1995)
Blackler’s framework (depicted in Figure 1.4) was built from a review of existing
studies of organizational knowledge at the time. It identifies knowledge types –
embrained, embodied, encultured, embedded and encoded:

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