Is Knowledge Management (Finally) Extractive? – Fuller’s Argument Revisited in the Age of AI
Authors: A Mooradian Norman 
Published: August 2024

Aim/Purpose: The rise of modern artificial intelligence (AI), in particular, machine learning (ML), has provided new opportunities and directions for knowledge management (KM). A central question for the future of KM is whether it will be dominated by an automation strategy that replaces knowledge work or whether it will support a knowledge-enablement strategy that enhances knowledge work and uplifts knowledge workers. This paper addresses this question by re-examining and updating a critical argument against KM by the sociologist of science Steve Fuller (2002), who held that KM was extractive and exploitative from its origins.

Background: This paper re-examines Fuller’s argument in light of current developments in artificial intelligence and knowledge management technologies. It reviews Fuller’s arguments in its original context wherein expert systems and knowledge engineering were influential paradigms in KM, and it then considers how the arguments put forward are given new life in light of current developments in AI and efforts to incorporate AI in the KM technical stack. The paper shows that conceptions of tacit knowledge play a key role in answering the question of whether an automating or enabling strategy will dominate. It shows that a better understanding of tacit knowledge, as reflected in more recent literature, supports an enabling vision.

Methodology: The paper uses a conceptual analysis methodology grounded in epistemology and knowledge studies. It reviews a set of historically important works in the field of knowledge management and identifies and analyzes their core concepts and conceptual structure.

Contribution: The paper shows that KM has had a faulty conception of tacit knowledge from its origins and that this conception lends credibility to an extractive vision supportive of replacement automation strategies. The paper then shows that recent scholarship on tacit knowledge and related forms of reasoning, in particular, abduction, provide a more theoretically robust conception of tacit knowledge that supports the centrality of human knowledge and knowledge workers against replacement automation strategies. The paper provides new insights into tacit knowledge and human reasoning vis-à-vis knowledge work. It lays the foundation for KM as a field with an independent, ethically defensible approach to technology-based business strategies that can leverage AI without becoming a merely supporting field for AI.

Findings: Fuller’s argument is forceful when updated with examples from current AI technologies such as deep learning (DL) (e.g., image recognition algorithms) and large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT.

Fuller’s view that KM presupposed a specific epistemology in which knowledge can be extracted into embodied (computerized) but disembedded (decontextualized) information applies to current forms of AI, such as machine learning, as much as it does to expert systems.

Fuller’s concept of expertise is narrower than necessary for the context of KM but can be expanded to other forms of knowledge work. His account of the social dynamics of expertise as professionalism can be expanded as well and fits more plausibly in corporate contexts.

The concept of tacit knowledge that has dominated the KM literature from its origins is overly simplistic and outdated. As such, it supports an extractive view of KM. More recent scholarship on tacit knowledge shows it is a complex and variegated concept. In particular, current work on tacit knowledge is developing a more theoretically robust and detailed conception of human knowledge that shows its centrality in organizations as a driver of innovation and higher-order thinking. These new understandings of tacit knowledge support a non-extractive, human enabling view of KM in relation to AI.

Recommendations for Practitioners: Practitioners can use the findings of the paper to consider ways to implement KM technologies in ways that do not neglect the importance of tacit knowledge in automation projects (which neglect often leads to failure). They should also consider how to enhance and fully leverage tacit knowledge through AI technologies and augment human knowledge.

Recommendation for Researchers: Researchers can use these findings as a conceptual framework in research concerning the impact of AI on knowledge work. In particular, the distinction between replacement and enabling technologies, and the analysis of tacit knowledge as a structural concept, can be used to categorize and analyze AI technologies relative to KM research objectives.

Impact on Society: The potential of AI on employment in the knowledge economy is a major issue in the ethics of AI literature and is widely recognized in the popular press as one of the pressing societal risks created by AI and specific types such as generative AI. This paper shows that KM, as a field of research and practice, does not need to and should not add to the risks created by automation-replacement strategies. Rather, KM has the conceptual resources to pursue a (human) knowledge enablement approach that can stand as a viable alternative to the automation-replacement vision.

Future Research: The findings of the paper suggest a number of research trajectories. They include:

Further study of tacit knowledge and its underlying cognitive mechanisms and structures in relation to knowledge work and KM objectives.

Research into different types of knowledge work and knowledge processes and the role that tacit and explicit knowledge play.

Research into the relation between KM and automation in terms of KM’s history and current technical developments.

Research into how AI arguments knowledge works and how KM can provide an enabling framework.