Managing Knowledge Management: Managing the Manifold of Epistemic Objectives in Professional Health Care Organizations

Abstract

This chapter explores how health care professionals engage in multiple knowledge management practices with diverse epistemic objectives that are mediated through diverse objects. The chapter identifies a huge repertoire of knowledge management activities that can be grouped into four sets of knowledge management practices, which are directed at distinct epistemic objectives and mediated by distinct epistemic objects: normative knowledge management, formative knowledge management, reflexive knowledge management and emotive knowledge management. The types of knowledge management practices stipulated in the typology are ‘ideal types’ and should be understood as over-determinate and overlapping. Knowledge management activities, then, are not fixed or given practices, but are, rather, constituted in the ongoing and situated practices of the participants.