Knowledge organization in information and communication sciences, a French Exception?

Abstract

The alliance between information and communication sciences is a French specificity that originated in the 1970s from the necessity of assembling a sufficient number of researchers in order to obtain institutional recognition. The theme of knowledge organization brings a reflexive view on a discipline under construction. Our position in this article is to try, through a review of works conducted by the discipline's pioneers, to perceive how they envisioned the link between information and communication through the proposals made to their research community. French researchers approach the theme of knowledge organization in a way that does not seem very different from foreign research. As in foreign research, technique and technologies play significant roles. The ISKO conferences are, in this respect, very important. Knowledge organization also suffers from its interdisciplinarity, which deprives it of methodologies, theories, and concepts of its own. Its position at the heart of a discipline that is, itself, an interdiscipline, seems to authorize it not to consider its own fundamentals together with common theoretical foundations.