Published Online:December 2025
Product Name:The IUP Journal of Effective Executive
Product Type:Article
Product Code:IJEE031225
DOI:10.71329/EffectiveExecutive/2025.28.4.47-63
Author Name:Saikat Chakraborty
Availability:YES
Subject/Domain:Management
Download Format:PDF
Pages:47-63
This paper takes a ‘power informed’ approach to discuss issues of knowledge in organizations that are increasingly adopting characteristics of distributed work, fragmented work-worker relationships, and individual representation in place of collective employee representation. It offers arguments towards visualizing how knowledge illuminates and continues to remain the basis of establishing work relations, creating individuals as objects and subjects, and controlling the workworker interfaces. Organizational attempts to manage knowledge considering power issues inevitably encounters fundamental questions of what knowledge is and what makes it valuable for an organization.
Knowledge in its crudest form is often referred to as a resource which leads to meanings like it can be generated, organized, shared, transferred and used by people and organizations (Schultze & Stabell, 2004). It is then quite spontaneous to also accept truisms such as ‘knowledge is power’ or ‘knowledge sharing is power’ as such dictums assume that since knowledge is a resource, the knowledgeowner must be powerful. The uncritical acceptance of this paradigm and/or discourse in knowledge management studies is quite prominent and though indirectly, majority of the extant literature corresponds to power as a resource.