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Culturalists Vs Intellectual Capitalists

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Don Ledingham

Tuesday 12 September 2006

I've been invited to present a seminar on the emerging Multiple Metaphor Model at the Association of Directors of Education Scotlland (ADES) Conference due to be held in November.

I had occasion to day to go over the model with Shelagh Rae, the esrtwhile Director of Education for Renfrewshire. It's useful trying to explain a concept to someone from cold. In trying to set out the alternative to the traditional linear model of change management I referred to Peter Senge's work on mental models. I then picked up in something I'd been reading at the weekend about Knowledge Creating Companies. In that area Nonaka - who has influenced my thinking about the metaphor model - sets out what he reckons to the distinctive differences between Eastern and Western models of change management. Nonaka's basic premise is that Japanese and other Eastern countries rely much more upon tacit appreciation in the form of metaphor and analogies to capture the essence of their purpose, whereas Western companies have much more reliance upon explicit knowledge.

I've taken this slightly modified excerpt from Alastair Lomax's article about Knowledge Management which captures this quite neatly:

"Knowledge Management is often described in zealous and imperative tones in the literature. Broadly speaking, the research work in this important field falls into two divergent schools of thought.

On the one hand there are those more concerned with soft issues: finding means of analysing knowledge within a systemic context: culture, values, schema, belief systems, tacit norms, embedded routines In this study, this school has been called the Culturalists.

On the other hand, there are the empiricists, whose work is concerned with finding means of analysing knowledge as quantitative, discernible, explicit, measurable and strategic. In this study, this school has been called the intellectual capitalists.

Some researchers have inferred that such schismatic differences might be the result of cultural and national difference. The concept of the East-West divide is used here as an intellectual tool.

Nonaka & Takeuchi (1995) have developed this notion by differentiating between Japanese and Western models of knowledge. In Western firms knowledge is characterised in a reductionist mode as a commodity: something formal, controllable, quantifiable, explicit and systematic. In Japan the emphasis is on tacit, as opposed to explicit, knowledge: not visible or easily expressed, highly personal, hard to formalise or emulate, deeply embedded in individual subjective perception and experience, ideas, values, beliefs and emotions.

A dichotomous view of Knowledge emerges from the literature. Gathering the elements of this dichotomy into a model, a new theoretical model, which formed the basis of the quantitative analysis, was proposed. This is called the Knowledge Orientation model:

Culturalists	Versus	Intellectual Capitalists
Tacit	Versus	Explicit
Abstract	Versus	Quantifiable
Informal	Versus	Formal
Subjective	Versus	Objective
New Knowledge	Versus	Existing Knowledge
Holistic	Versus	Empirical
Values & Beliefs	Versus	Systemic
Proactive	Versus	Reactive

I hope to build the mutiple metaphor model upon the foundations of shared mental models (Senge) and Nonaka's culturalist model.

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