The Knowing Organization: How Organizations Use Information to Construct Meaning, Create Knowledge, and Make Decisions

By Chun Wei Choo

Book Overview

The Knowing Organization is the first text that links the broad areas of organizational behavior and information management. It looks at how organizations behave as information-seeking, information-creating, and information-using communities, and offers models of how organizations behave and how information participates in that behavior. Choo pursues three main objectives throughout the text. First, he analyzes and compares the principal modes by which an organization uses information strategically to make sense of its changing environment, create knowledge, and make decisions. Second, he examines the structure and dynamics of how information is sought and used in each of these modes: sensemaking through the development of shared meanings; knowledge creation through the conversion and sharing of different forms of organizational knowledge; and decision making through the use of rules and routines that reduce complexity and uncertainty. Lastly, the author proposes a new framework of the knowing organization in which sensemaking, knowledge-creating, and decision-making are linked as a continuum of nested activities that invigorates an organization with the information and knowledge to act intelligently. Knowing how to manage information effectively within the organization is key to the success of the modern firm, a failure of which can cause a breakdown of organizational purpose. The Knowing Organization is essential for students of organizational behavior and information management courses, and serves equally well as a guide for researchers studying organizations and information use.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195110129
• ISBN13: 9780195110128
• Release Date: January 1998
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 6.0" x 0.7" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

An invaluable introduction for HR and IT professionals.

"This book brings together", Chun Wei Choo writes, "the insight developed from research in organization theory and information science into a generel framework for understanding the richness and complexity of information use in organizations. Research in organization theory suggests that organizations create and use information in three strategic arenas. First, organizations interpret information about the environment in order to construct meaning about what is happening to the organization and what the organization is doing. Second, they create new knowledge by converting and combining the expertise and know-how of their members in order to learn and innovate. Finally, they process and analyze information in order to select and commit to appropriate courses of action...The book has the following objectives. First, it analyzes and compares the principal modes by which an organization uses information strategically to make sense of its changing environment, create new knowledge for innovation, and make decisions that reflect past learning and ongoing adaptation. Second, it examines the structure and dynamics of information seeking...Third, it proposes a new framework of the knowing organization (from the Preface)."In this context, Chun Wei Choo divides his book into seven chapters, and he:* introduces the theories of organizations as sense-making communities, knowledge-creating enterprises, and decision-making systems, and show how the three modes of information as sense making, knowledge creating, and decision making use complement each other by supplying some of the missing pieces necessary for each mode to function.* identifies and relates the major elements that influence the behavior of the individual when seeking (starting, chaining, browsing, differentiating, monitoring, extracting, verifying, and ending) and using (selection and processing of information) information.* shows how organizations, as social systems of people, structures, and processes, use information to make sense of the environment, create new knowledge for learning and innovation, and make decisions that enable action.* examines the theory and process underlying the knowing organization.* describes the tensions as tensions in sense making, tensions in knowledge creating, and tensions in decision making that are inherent in the knowing processes, and how the dynamics of balancing these tensions enable the knowing organization to be effective in the short term, and adaptive over the long term.This book is highly recommended for HR and IT professionals.

An informative, information-packed book!

A highly informative examination of a type of organization that is successful by using information strategically to make sense of its changing environment, creating new knowledge for innovation, and making decisions that reflect past learning and adaptation. Provides a general model for understanding information use and many other models. Filled with references to research and other publications. This is an informative, information-packed book! Excellent.

one of the original works on organizations

It mainly focuses on information systems as a core of living organizations. I liked and I recommend this work to everybody who likes original works on organizations.