Uninterrupted Knowledge Creation

Humankind today is in the midst of great change, a situation that Thurow (2003) calls the third industrial revolution. It is a shift towards a knowledge-based economy, in which knowledge is the most important resource, superseding the traditional resources of land, capital and labour (Drucker 1993).

In the period since the Second World War, systems theory has experienced a series of scientific revolutions or fundamental reorientations of its research perspective. This means that its research findings have thoroughly changed the concept of a system itself. Contemporary systems theory is founded on the distinction between systems and environment.

The progenitor of this metaphysical tradition was Heracleitus. For him, reality is not a constellation of things at all but one of processes. The fundamental ‘stuff’ of the world is not material substance but volatile flux, namely ‘fire’, and all things are versions thereof. Process is fundamental: the river is not an object but a continuing of flow; the sun is not a thing but an enduring fire. Everything is a matter of process, of activity, of change. It is not stable things but fundamental forces and the varied and fluctuating activities that they manifest that constitute the world (e.g. Rescher 2000).

The recent interest in the role of knowledge in working life and the discussion that this has triggered have largely avoided the epistemological question; that is, what is knowledge? Even the pragmatic question concerning the meaning that people in the West attach to the concept has been avoided. On the other hand, many dichotomies have been suggested. Most commonly, a distinction is made between practical and theoretical knowledge. One variant distinguishes between experiential knowledge and reported knowledge. Another refers to intimate knowledge as opposed to declared knowledge. Tacit knowledge as opposed to codified knowledge is another dichotomy, which often appears in discourse. Distinctions of this kind are useful for practical purposes, but they are also risky, since they tempt people to make radical simplifications of a multi-faceted reality (Wikström et al. 1994).

Autopoiesis is the process whereby a system produces itself. This chapter provides a broad account of the developed form of autopoiesis theory. The account seeks to describe, in relatively straightforward terms, the various components and aspects of autopoiesis theory. Some of the key factors are the following.

Niklas Luhmann developed an elaborate theory of social and cognitive systems, which combines Maturana and Varela’s notion of cognition with Husserlian phenomenology (Arnoldi 2006, p. 117). That is, Luhmann developed the idea of autopoiesis of social systems and recognized that this use of autopoiesis could be problematic (Luhmann 1986, p. 172). As humans are central elements of social systems, it follows that, to be considered as an autopoietic system, a social system must be self-reproducing in terms of humans (Bednarz 1988, p. 61). How could this be possible? Luhmann proposed a very intelligent solution to this paradox. He redefined social systems as being realized in a domain of communication. In other words, the constituent elements of a social system are communications. Therefore, the social system is understood as a network of communication that emerges over time (Nassehi 2005, p. 181). Subsequently, the conditions for autopoiesis have to be evaluated in terms of the self-production of communication (Teubner 1991, p. 235). In fact, Luhmann understands communication not as a diffusion of meaning or information from one person to another but as an autopoietic system that appears out of the doubly dependent meeting of subjects (Arnoldi 2006, p. 116). As a corollary, we can consider that Luhmann’s theory is an autopoietic theory of communication (Mingers 2010, p. 158).

From a mainstream perspective, knowledge creation is basically a process of transmission between individuals in which data are converted into information through the medium of knowledge, which may be explicit but, far more importantly, may be tacit. The transmission of knowledge between people is a process of conversion between tacit and explicit forms based on mimicry in tacit–tacit transfers, group dialogue and discussion in metaphorical and analogical language in tacit–explicit transfers, formalization and codification in explicit–explicit transfers and internalization in explicit–tacit transfers. Knowledge is understood to move in this way through the interplay of individual and group/systemic/social levels (Nonaka and Takeuchi 1995; Stacey 2001).