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Knowledge is a term most frequently used but hard to define. While everyone agrees that knowledge of an organization is critical to an organization's competitive success, there are differences regarding where knowledge exists and how to manage knowledge. In the literature of organizational knowledge and learning exist different knowledge models. First, many scholars make distinction between information and knowledge. For instance, information is considered as existing within the larger environment of a collectively held body of knowledge, in other words, information as "the building block of knowledge" (Allee, 1997). Machlup (1993) argued that information is a component part but not the whole of knowledge. Earl (1994) posited a three-level hierarchical model of knowledge. According to him, the lowest level is data coming from transactions, history and observation. The middle level takes the form of information which gives more structure to data. This level is termed as workable knowledge including policy rules, probabilistic parameters and heuristics. The highest level is science including accepted law, theory and procedure. Earl took the three levels of knowledge as strategic sources which requires different level of investment in firms. However, Earl's model only addresses codified knowledge but leaves out the so-called tacit knowledge, the knowledge without being codified or articulated.

Most of other models in the literature (Prusak, 1997; Polanyi, 1966; Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995; Dretske, 1981) share a general classification of organizational knowledge, which are the explicit knowledge and tacit knowledge. Explicit knowledge includes codified theories, rules, and procedure. Tacit knowledge is the practical knowledge without being codified or articulated. It is related to people's action. Dretske (1981) considered that tacit knowledge incorporates the concept of beliefs, understanding and commitment in individuals. Tacit knowledge is also associated with context. It is argued that "knowledge only has meaning when it is in the context of a process or capacity to act" (Gore, 1999, pS554). These models of knowledge all agree upon the essential role of tacit knowledge, which has become the focus of research.

A metaphor of organizational knowledge is iceberg (Allee, 1997). The tip of the iceberg above the ocean is the explicit knowledge. This set of knowledge includes codified intellectual assets such patent, copyrights, trademark and technological know-how. Cohen and Bacdayan (1994) called this kind of knowledge declarative knowledge, which is the knowledge of facts and propositions. However, the larger set of knowledge is hiding below the sea level, the tacit knowledge, which is the real knowledge that determines the fate of a firm, supports the explicit knowledge and generates a firm's competitive advantages. It is taken as "a reservoir of wisdom" that a firm strives to articulate and by which the firm avoids imitation. Two features of tacit knowledge have been agreed upon. One is the multimorphism of tacit knowledge. That is, it takes on various forms, such as the working solution to a practical problem, unarticulated expertise, webs of relationships, and daily experience. The other feature of tacit knowledge is its dynamism. Rather than being taken as objects, tacit knowledge is regarded as a process in which knowledge gets created, acquired, changed, exchanged and applied.

Because of the elusive but essential role of tacit knowledge, it has been the focus of research. From the very beginning, the understanding of tacit knowledge and its transition to explicit knowledge in organizations has been heavily influenced by a cognitive approach. One of the most influential sources on this line of research came from Michel Polanyi. His discussion of tacit knowledge started from "the fact" that "we can know more than we can tell" (1966, p.136). Tacit knowledge, thus, exists within an individual, centering around "mental models" which can be either concepts, images and values or skills and expertise. An example he used to illustrate his point is that we know a person's face and can recognize it among millions of people. However, we cannot tell in words what we know in our mind. Focusing on the cognitive dimension, research (Sparrow, 1998; Morgan, 1993; Schank, 1982) has been to explore the forms of mental materials and their representation and elicitation.

Karl Weick's (1979) work on sensemaking also exerts great influence on organizational learning. Working within a cognitive frame, Weick constructed his three-phase learning loop--enactment, selection and retention. In response to the stimuli from environment, organizational members first enact the environment by defining the situation. According to him, it is stimuli that equivocality exists. Defining the situation removes some of equivocality. By selection, some alternatives are rejected. By retention, certain information or knowledge is retained or learned for future use. Learning and sensemaking of organizational members are achieved through these loops.

Another influential line of research on tacit knowledge is conducted around analyzing organizational routines. The importance of routine in organizations has been noticed by scholars for long (Cohen and Bacdayan, 1994; Allison, 1971; Cyert & March, 1963; Gersick & Hackman, 1990; Levitt & March, 1988; March & Simon, 1958; Nelson & Winter, 1982). It is acknowledged that the vast organizational knowledge resides in routines. The efficiency of firms relies on routines, although routines can bring bad effect in certain occasions (Cohen & Bacdayan, 1994). Other that efficiency, another reason that draws attention from researchers is that organizational routines are closely related to a firm's competitive advantages--a source of capabilities that cannot be imitated by competitors. According to Cohen and Bacdayan (1994), organizational routine means "patterned sequences of learned behavior involving multiple actors who are linked by relations of communication and/or authority." In Cohen and Bacdayan's research, they applied the psychological notion of procedural memory, which is "the form that stores the components of individual skilled actions--for both motor and cognitive skills" (p.409). The researchers are assuming the existence of a rational model behind routines,

Pursuing a rational model of routinization and tacit knowledge in a cognitive way has been a dominant approach among scholars. However, they have met challenges. First, things such as routines have their "emergent quality." They are more experiential than explicit decision making. Routines are highly contextual entangled with histories.

In addition, there exist problems inherent in the cognitive way of research on organizational routines and on organizational learning in general. For example, as indicated by Cook and Yanow (1993), researchers are applying to organizations cognitive models of individuals derived from behavioral psychology. They argued that

In other words, taking organizations as cognitive entities is granting an ontological status to organizations, that is, taking organizations as individuals. Apparently, such an assumption is problematic.

Furthermore, Deetz's (1998) critique on Weick's sense making applies well to the cognitive approach to organizational knowledge and learning in general. First, the cognitive frames ignore their social and political origin. Deetz argued that the cognitive approach only focuses the individual's immediate experience and learning history. However, for an individual, the social precedes his/her individual experience. Second, the cognitive processes are inferences based on the researchers' observation of talk and action. Deetz further explained that,

Finally, Deetz indicated that the learning model based on individuals has limitations in terms of assisting developing intervention strategies. As a matter of fact, learning in organizations takes place more holistically than individually. The effectiveness of intervention strategies based on individual learning model should be doubted.

Starting from a decade ago, the cognitive approach began to be contested and lost some central ground in the study of organizational knowledge and learning. Getting more and more spotlight are the new approaches such as socialcultural and interpretive research. An question that can be posed is why this happened. There could be innumerable reasons, such as the rise of culture studies and linguistic approach in social sciences that started to influence the field of management. However, one of the alternative explanation is that for firms to main its efficiency, control strategies have to be adjusted to adapt to the changed social configurations around individuals. Foucault explained how psychological science emerged hand in hand with the emergence of the "carceral society" operated through disciplinary power. Individual-based psychological science served well to build the "technologies of the body" in the context of direct control and technological control in the 18^th, 19^th and early 20^th century. The development of organizational learning as many other management theories started by searching for ways to enhance performance through controlling the body. However, as mentioned at the beginning of this paper, technology has gradually transformed the power relations which are far more complex today, so are the social practices around which the power relations operate.

Hence, the explanation could be that the socialcultural and interpretive approach to organizational learning and knowledge represent a search for a novel form of control. However, different from the cognitive approach, the new approaches being adopted inherently possess a deconstructive power toward control and discipline. This search simultaneously opens up a possibility for dialogue and empowerment in their authentic sense. The next section will discuss the socialcultural and interpretive approaches to organizational learning and knowledge.

Schultz's words laid down the ground for the notion of social construction of reality which was developed by Berger and Lukemann. Within this theoretical frame, knowledge is a social product. It gets created and transmitted through interaction in specific contexts. Knowledge is inseparable from the time and place where action takes place.

The social nature of tacit knowledge has been demonstrated in Orr's (1990; also cited in Spender, 1996) ethnographic studies on organizational learning. In his research, he studied the knowledge creation and diffusion process of copier repairmen. First he showed that the explicit knowledge about fixing a copy machine relies on the tacit knowledge gained from the practical knowledge about how to fix a customer. Second the practical knowledge is highly contextualized in how the machine user used the machine rather than the way the machine was designed. Third, by socializing with the repairmen, the researcher discovered that the practical knowledge was generated and stored in the stories shared by repairmen. Story-telling among repairmen functions as a way to create knowledge and share knowledge.

Cook and Yanow (1993) introduced organizational culture to study learning. They argued that, in a cultural frame,

They studied three flute-making companies. They produce the world finest flutes. Each of them is using the same kind of tools and manufacturing process. However, each produces flutes with its uniqueness that can be distinguished instantly by flutists. The study showed that, like a symphony, the know-how of manufacturing the best flute with its uniqueness doesn't reside in any single individual but in the group as a whole. Their analysis posited that the interaction of a group of people with a joint history and action constitutes and creates meaning-bearing objects, language and acts as cultural artifacts. The tacit knowledge or know-how is transmitted through these cultural artifacts.

Following the socialcultural approach is one that I would call interpretive approach represented by Wenger's communities of practice. I called it interpretive approach because of its emphasis on meaning, interpretation of meaning and experience. The first issue of Harvard Business Review of this century celebrated this new practice of organizational learning, communities of practice, as "the organizational frontier." This notion and its practice were actually started in the early 90's by Lave and Wenger (1990). The concept was further theorized in Wenger's book Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity (1998). Communities of practice as a concept is defined as "groups of people informally bound together by shared expertise and passion for a joint enterprise" (Wenger & Snyder, 2000, p.139). For example, in an insurance company, people with the expertise in claim processing are drawn together across market segments, project teams and functions to solve a problem. This informal grouping is called communities of practice. In this model, learning is redefined at three levels. At the individual level, learning is "an issue of engaging in and contributing to the practices of their communities." At the community level, learning is to refine the practice as a group and generate new members. At the organizational level, learning becomes a practice which connects different communities of learning through which an organization learns what it knows. As is shown here, learning is taken as a social practice. According to Wenger,

In addition, Wenger also emphasized how learning is related to identity. According to him, identity is a nexus of the past/present and social/individual. The process of identity formation is the very process of negotiating the present in the trajectory of the past and future and individual and social. How an individual can learn depends on the location where she or he is in these trajectories. Thus by engaging in the practice of learning, as in any other social practices, an individual is caught up in a series of social configurations, meaning, power, identity, collectivity and subjectivity.

In the frame of communities of practice, it is apparent that Wenger is making continuous effort to battle the relation between participation vs. bureaucratic structure and also to balance between design and practice in organizations. For example, Wenger indicated, "community of practice are about content -- about learning as living experience of negotiating meaning -- not about form" and "learning cannot be designed: it can only be designed for…" (p.229). Design should facilitate practice and respond to practice rather than confining practice.

From Orr's ethnographic analysis, to Cook and Yanow's cultural interpretation, and to Wenger's communities-of-practice, we can detect an enhanced awareness and in-depth understanding about social and experiential aspect of learning. Orr's thick description of organizational learning process evidenced the notion of social construction of organizational knowledge. Cook and Yanow's study from a cultural perspective suggested that knowledge does get created at the organizational level through cultural artifacts. Coming from a hermeneutic perspective and under the influence of Giddens' view on post-modernity, Wenger depicted a nice landscape for organizational learning as a social practice in the context of a knowledge-driven society.

However, in this line of research and practice, two central issues are missed or less focused. One is the attention and understanding of discourse in the production and reproduction of social order. The other is the attention to the notion of power.

First of all, both of the approaches acknowledge that people engage each other in the learning practices through communication. This engagement creates either a culture or a community. Thus, the culture and community is, to a large extend, linguistic constructions. Knowledge and discourse are inseparable. However, in the previous research, discourse was still taken as a representation of abstract knowledge, competence or the medium of experience. For example, story-telling is regarded as a medium to store knowledge and to "reflect the complex social web" (Brown and Duguid, 1991). Wenger took discourse as the glue that connects different communities of practice and mediates experience between the local and the global.

By making inferences beyond discourse to look for a community or abstract knowledge, we are sliding back to the mistake made by cognitive approach. As Deetz (1998) criticized, the inferred structure or concepts themselves are linguistic construction of researchers. The explanatory power obtained from inferences, thus, is deceptive. As Foucault (1972) argued,

Hence, the task for the research in organizational learning and knowledge is to focus on organizational discourse, not just as "a group of signs" of representation and contents, but as "practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak" (p. 49).

The other point that this line of research has missed is the issue of power. Although he acknowledged that the existence of power in terms of competing interests will constantly affect individual's identity and negotiability, Wenger did not analyze how power may take place in participation and affect communication in communities of learning. While he argued that the primary focus of learning is on the negotiation of meaning rather than the transmission of information, the negotiation of meaning will lack of its meaningfulness without understanding how power functions among the communities. In that case, voices could have been foreclosed in the negotiation of meaning due the asymmetrical power relationship. Communication would merely be the reproduction of a process of consent (Deetz, 1992, 1998b). In the case of the cultural approach, taking learning as the circulation of cultural artifacts, without seriously addressing the issues of power relations, learning will merely be cultural reproduction (Mumby, 1991).

This study reviewed the major management literature in the field of organizational knowledge and learning. Three approaches have been primary in this research area, cognitive, socialcultural and interpretive. Two major limitations have been identified. One is that all of the approaches neglect the role of discourse in organizational learning and knowledge. Cognitive approach looked for the cognitive mechanism prior to language through inferences. They failed to realize that the data that their inferences are based upon are linguistic constructions. The socialcultural and interpretive approach, though realizing the social nature of knowledge and learning and the role of experience, still takes discourse as representation and medium. This study suggests that research focus should be adjusted to the discursivity of a culture and community in organizations, analyzing how discourse regulates, categorizes and generates knowledge. Communication scholars should take the task because both sophisticated theories and methods on discourse have been generated in the past decades. The accumulated expertise on discourse may take the research in organizational learning a step further.

The other limitation discussed above in the research of organizational learning is the lack of a sophisticated analysis of power-knowledge in the learning process. As mentioned in the very beginning, the economic structure under transformation holds the potential of bringing about the new form of domination and control. Organizations, especially firms, as economic entities are part of the transformation. By aligning an analysis of power with knowledge, learning and discourse, research may generate theories, at this turning point of history, that not only are able to "show which space of freedom we can still enjoy and how many changes can still be made" (Foucault, 1988), but also help people in organizations open up this space to communicate in its authentic sense.

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