Dr Neil Béchervaise

NB Consulting (Australasia) Pty Ltd

Intellectual capital and the knowledge organisation: transformation, communication and the social reconstruction of reality

Scott Bourke & Neil E. Béchervaise

Abstract

The creation of a knowledge organisation requires a transformation of its social reality. Such enormous change implies a significant threat to every stakeholder. Consequently, successful transition to 'an organisation that has the creation, access, transfer and application of knowledge at the heart of its vision and strategy' - requires reconceptualisation in which communication and language constitute and then reconstitute organisational reality. This paper reports findings from a multi-site case study of mid-sized Australian corporations in which organisational communication linked vision with knowledge management concepts to facilitate transformation into a knowledge organisation by leveraging intellectual capital. The research foregrounds Ford's (1999) conversational shifts for grounding vision and strategy within the intellectual capital of the organisation to argue that organisations are socially constructed realities in which leadership generates transformational performance change through the reconstruction of existing realities. While most organisational transformations fail, this paper argues that the establishment of a knowledge organisation requires reframing language towards effective communication to generate vision and strategy of sufficient energy to achieve a reconstruction of the organisation.

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