By
Leonard J. Ponzi
Doctoral Candidate, College of Information and
Computer Science, Long Island University, New York, USA
Michael Koenig
Professor & Dean, Palmer School of Library and
Information Science, Long Island University, New York, USA
The two authors Misters Ponzi and
Koenig main objective is to analyze knowledge management if its another
management fad in an analytical framework using bibliometric techniques where article
retrieved from Science Citation Index, Social Science Citation Index, and ABI
Inform referring to three previous recognized management fad.
A management fad can be considered
an innovative concept or technique that is promoted as the forefront of
management progress and then diffuses very rapidly among early adopters eager
to gain a competitive advantage.
Examples of management fad:
Quality Circles
Total Quality Management
Business Process Reengineering
The authors presented empirical
evidence that management fads generally, peak in approximately five years. See comparing Figures 2, 3, and 4, each
management fashion peaked from four to six years after some momentum had
started. ( see full version: http://InformationR.net/ir/8-1/paper145.html )
The
case of knowledge management
To a large extent, knowledge
management is being considered by many as an emerging multidisciplinary field
associated with the likes of system engineering, organizational learning, and
decision support, to mention a few. Skeptics,
on the other hand, are claiming that knowledge management is just another fad like Total Quality
Management or Business Process Reengineering.
The article-counting technique is applied to the concept of knowledge
management in order to illuminate its current state of development.
Using the same approach employed in
the earlier cases, article counts were retrieved from the three DIALOG files
i.e., Science Citation Index (File 34), Social Science Citation Index (File 7),
and ABI Inform (File 15). The retrieved
counts were articles that included the phrase 'knowledge management' in its
title, abstract, or descriptor fields. The assumption made is that
retrieved records that included 'knowledge management' in these fields
represent writings focused on knowledge management.
See Figure 5, suggest that knowledge management has weathered the five-year mark and perhaps is becoming an addition to the
management practice. The diagram illustrates that the popularity of
Knowledge Management expanded rapidly from 1997 through 1999, contracted in
2000, and then rebounded in 2001. To explore the growth period of the knowledge
management lifecycle further, an additional bibliometric technique was used to
reveal of Interdisciplinary Activity. Interdisciplinary activity indicates the exportation and integration of theories or
methods to other disciplines (Pierce, 1999;
Klein, 1996), in our case, to the
development of the emerging field of knowledge management. The method ranks
journal names of knowledge management source articles from above and then
assigns an ISI's Subject Category Code. ISI's codes have been operationalized
by ISI and have been assumed as indicators of disciplines (White, 1996). This study assumed a threshold count
of three or greater. In other words, three or more sources articles in
ISI-assigned journals needed to occur in order to be included in the analysis.
This threshold reduces the number of random occurrences in journals and
indicates the concentration of publication activity
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