Causes and Consequences of the Migration of Scientists and Students from the Brics Countries to Developed Economies

One of the major problems in the relationship between the Global South and the Global North is the the drain of intellectual capital from the economies and education systems of the most developed countries of the Global South, which bothers both developing countries and some European ones. The purpose of the study is to reveal the reasons for the migration of scientists and students from Brazil, the Russian Federation, India, China, South Africa (BRICS countries) and identify the consequences of the process through the example of a Russian university by studying the characteristics of personal experience and motivation of students and teachers. The research is devoted to the study of academic activity abroad and the attitude of 360 four- and five-year students and 321 teachers at Novosibirsk State University (Novosibirsk, the Russian Federation) towards the practice. The survey results revealed that a relatively small number of respondents (31.07% of teachers and 9.03% of students) have experience of foreign academic activity; the large majority of participants highly assessed the possibility of studying and working abroad (4.87 and 3.48 on a 5-point Likert scale among teachers and students, respectively). The results of the study are in line with the findings of similar studies on academic migration in other BRICS countries; therefore, they can be extrapolated in a broader context. In particular, according to all respondents, the possibility of repeated or circular migration is extremely low (0.88 and 1.61). The research results can help to manage international research and exchange programs, as well as to regulate university training programs and academic migration. The novelty of the study lies in the analysis of the motivation of scientists and students on academic migrating and their assessment of migration intentions based on an example of a single educational institution and region.

Why People Keep Using Knowledge Management Systems: A Causal Analysis of Continuance Behavior

This study examines the factors that cause a person to become a continuous user of a knowledge management system by examining continuance behavior. Continuance behavior is the decision to continue using a product after initial use. The data for this study were obtained using an online survey. The results were analyzed using partial least squares structural equation modeling. Six main hypotheses were developed which resulted in the evaluation of fourteen hypotheses. The results show that the technological features of a knowledge management system positively influence a user’s evaluation with limited influence from the system’s community features. The results produced a 58% coefficient of determination for knowledge management systems continuance intention and 37% for knowledge management systems continuance behavior. This investigation serves as a foundation for further research on the continuance usage of knowledge management systems. It addresses the needs of practitioners by examining which conditions they can manage to increase the purposeful use of their organizations’ knowledge management systems. The study also addresses the needs of academia by expanding the literature on continuance behavior of knowledge management systems.

Editorial for the Special Issue of EJKM 2021

Guest EditorAlexeis Garcia-Perez, Centre for Business in Society, Coventry University, UK Supported byAnitha Chinnaswamy, Aston Business School, Aston University, UKVahid Jafari-Sadeghi, Aston Business School, Aston University, UK

Analysing the Communication Process Between Middle and top Managers Through the Concept of 'Ba'

In the last few decades the relevance of knowledge management to organizations has become increasingly apparent. However, there are varying levels of emphasis on researching different aspects of this multidimensional construct. One such dimension is knowledge sharing, which is extensively researched from an impact perspective but with limited research on understand dynamic interactions of actors. In this research, we aim to explore factors influencing knowledge sharing among top and middle managers during the strategy communication process. We further draw on the concept of ‘ba’ as an alternative interpretive tool for understanding managerial interaction dynamics. Adopting a qualitative approach, 32 semi-structured interviews were conducted across a single case Kuwaiti public sector ministry and collated data presented as a thematic narrative to capture managerial perspectives. The findings indicate that organizations benefit more from aligning heterogenous groups within common collective spaces, and that social spaces or contexts are critically important for sharing knowledge pertinent to successful execution of strategies. Furthermore, the propensity to share knowledge was found to be dependent on the tribal affiliations of individual actors, and knowledge sharing dispositions was impacted by prejudices and social stereotypes. The research proposes practical considerations for organization management to foster knowledge exchange among the workforce.

Making Knowledge Management Research more Scientific, Relevant, and Engaged: A Comparative Study of Academic ECKM Papers

The purpose is to analyse and compare all the academic papers in the proceedings of the European Conference on Knowledge Management (ECKM) in 2017 (Barcelona), 2018 (Padua), 2019 (Lisbon), and the digital conference in 2020 (Coventry). The methodology is to code and classify 440 papers and use five contemporary science frameworks to describe and analyse the papers. The theoretical implication of contemporary KM is a research field without common paradigms, domains, and perspectives without accumulating knowledge. The KM researchers do not understand the nature of knowledge management as a field where the research cannot be replicated, synthesized, or theorized. Knowledge management needs to move along from the empirical research paradigm to a clarified subjectivity and action-basedresearch. The criticism implying acceptable/unacceptable solutions and constructed adequate/inadequate solutions for corporations and societies have strengthened their place, offering new paradigms and perspectives. The way to do this is to let in controversial, greener, and sustainable studies, whatever objectivity or subjectivity the studies have. We need more actual problem focused and less knowledge and instrument focused studies. KM will have a higher responsibility for sustainability and greener corporations and the possibility of accumulating knowledge into replication and synthesizing for general knowledge. The rate of tested and replicated studies is for the four conferences zero. The tested part, but not replicated, is 80%. The rate of untheorized untheorizable concepts is zero, the rate of theorized but not synthesized studies is zero, while the number of synthesized, theorized, and conceptual studies is around 20%. To become a discipline or research domain KM needs to replicate both empirical and conceptual studies. The only way to accumulate knowledge is through replication giving paradigms for verification and falsification. To move ahead for better quality in the research, we must break free from the empirical and materialistic paradigms and move into the clarified subjectivity and action paradigm. Paradigmatic ecumenism will tend to a fiercer but idea-generating debate. This pluralistic approach will give more engaged practical research representing more sustainable societies and businesses. ECKM is on the road to include more pluralistic perspectives upon sustainability, value creation, gender issues, and the design of future knowledge work. There is a critical openness toward these issues making ECKM 2020 a more relevant conference than the ECKM conferences in 2017, 2018, and 2019. The 2020 conference more open up for reflections, dialogues, and criticism upon existing problems and knowledge asking about what is the adequate actual KM solutions.

Impact of COVID-19 Crisis on Knowledge Management Practices in Sultanate of Oman

This research was conducted with the aim of identifying various changes made to knowledge management (KM) practices implemented by organizations in the Sultanate of Oman following the onset of the COVID-19 crisis. Further, the study focused on identifying the impact of those changes on various aspects of human resources management. Snowball and purposive sampling techniques were used to collect relevant data from 110 line managers in various organizations in the Sultanate of Oman. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and Chi-squared and post-hoc tests. The Bonferroni correction method was adopted to reduce the risk of Type I error. The findings indicated that organizations started utilizing an inside-out approach to KM after the COVID-19 crisis began, shifted KM process from manual to computer-based and spending from conventional to e-KM activities. Key finding is that the organizations demonstrated an increased dependency on internal knowledge sources. In addition, line managers began measuring the effectiveness of KM practices, a metric which had been mostly neglected in the pre-pandemic period. Perceived benefits of these changes included increased employee motivation and engagement, increased employee learning and job-related skill, along with an enhanced knowledge-sharing culture across the organization. Important measures taken to mitigate the perceived negative impact of these changes, or enhance the perceived positive impact, included consistent persuasive communication with employees and identifying alternate financial resources to support KM activities. This research contributes to the field of KM and projects it as a supportive discipline to effective crisis management. Findings of this research can help in identifying the areas of training and improvements in the KM framework. This research is global and topical in nature as it relates to the e-KM practices during the ongoing global COVID-19 crisis and portrays the changing e-learning scenario in the organizations in Oman, one of the prominent countries in the middle east and represents the middle east regional culture and economy.

New Collaboration through Artefact-Mediated Interaction with a Joint Knowledge Base

Collaboration is changing and increasingly emerging as what we call “New Collaboration”, a knowledge-based and community-oriented way of working together (especially digital, online collaboration). Unfortunately, organisations use only a small percentage of the potential of New Collaboration. One main reason for this is that they do not understand that New Collaboration is based on knowledge sharing and requires the individual knowledge of the collaborators to be integrated into a shared knowledge structure, a so-called Joint Knowledge Base (JKB). This concept of a Joint Knowledge Base as the tacit knowledge structure which is constructed, shared and maintained during collaboration, emerged during the course of our previous work and became more and more prominent as a key to collaboration. When a group interacts, the JKB functions as an interaction bridge, and this is why it is a key to collaboration. In this paper, we will revise and elaborate in more detail our concept of a JKB and explain its role in artefact-mediated interaction. First, we will explain the main characteristics of New Collaboration and summarise them based on a concise definition. Secondly, we will introduce the concept of a Joint Knowledge Base, explore the role of social negotiation in constructing it, define the JKB as a distributed knowledge structure, discuss the problem of obstacles which hinder its development and suggest how to solve it by means of gaining deeper insight into the complexity of the involved processes (communication, interaction). And next we will further develop this solution by introducing the concept of boundary artefacts and describing their implementation as tools for artefact-mediated interaction by means of a systematic approach. Finally, we will explain this systematic approach and show how boundary artefacts and artefact-mediated interaction work in practice during meetings performed on a commercially available collaboration platform where they contribute to the construction of a JKB.

A Review of Literature on Human Behaviour and Artificial Intelligence: Contributions Towards Knowledge Management

The main purpose of this research paper is to understand how artificial intelligence and machine learning applied to human behaviour has been treated, both theoretically and empirically, over the last twenty years, regarding predictive analytics and human organizational behaviour analysis. To achieve this goal, the authors performed a systematic literature review, as proposed by Tranfield, Denyer and Smart (2003), on selected databases and followed the PRISMA framework (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses). The method is particularly suited for assessing emerging trends within multiple disciplines and therefore deemed the most suitable method for the purposes of this paper, which intends to survey and select papers according to their contribute towards theory building. By mapping what is known, this review will lay the groundwork, providing a timely insight into the current state of research on human organisational behaviour and its applications. A total of 17795 papers resulted from the application of the search equations. The papers’ abstracts were screened according to the inclusion / exclusion criterions which resulted in 199 papers for analysis. The authors have analysed the papers through VOSviewer software and R programming statistical computing software. This review showed that 60% of the research undertaken in the field has been done in the last three and a half years and there is no prominent author or academic journal, showing the emergence and the novelty of this research. The other key finds of the research relate to the evolution of the concept, from data-driven (hard) towards emotions-driven (soft) organisations.

Digital Transformation Designed to Succeed: Fit the Change into the Business Strategy and People

Digital transformation has become a necessity in our volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) world. In their 2019 report, APQC found that 75% of organizations are undergoing digital transformation. Successful digital transformation requires a strong foundation of people, process, technology and content. Selection of the right combination of strategies and deep stakeholder engagement is important in early phases of change when transformation initiatives inform leaders and users why change is needed. Top drivers for digital transformation have business (e.g., increased efficiency and productivity) and people (e.g., optimize user experience with knowledge discovery) facets. This paper illustrates an example of digital transformation in practice led by Knowledge Management, within Alberta Health Services (AHS). AHS is Canada’s first and largest province-wide, fully integrated health system with more than 102,700 employees. Employees need a platform for collaboration on projects, as well as documents and idea generation to meet business needs and enable them to become more efficient and effective in their daily jobs. The design, development, and implementation of a collaborative platform within this large organization required close orchestration of strategies, stakeholders’ commitments and engagement, represented by a continuum of stakeholders’ engagement formats, relationship and trust-building. Setting the stage for successful implementation and post implementation required a preview of technological and workforce trends to anticipate the future of work and worker. Fitting the change into overall business strategy, developing the knowledge of how change would affect the workers, and setting up a mechanism to inform leaders about adoption and user engagement were added as overarching strategies to better align with the line of sight in digital transformation. The platform was implemented with 23 business areas that expressed interest; it has demonstrated the potential to enable system transformation if implemented organization-wide. Business value was demonstrated with an ROI calculation on time savings.

Three-Dimensional Assessment of the Knowledge Production System: Region-City-Organization

Conceptualization of the region as an integral territorial system of knowledge production has formed a widely used research strategy for innovation studies within regional boundaries. Regional level studies are supported by detailed innovation statistics, which is unavailable for smaller administrative-territorial units, such as municipalities or settlements. The development of spatial scientometrics gave impetus for a new round of research on knowledge and innovation geography with a closer approximation in the context of cities and urban agglomerations. The scope of recent research also includes individual organizations that generate new knowledge or innovation. Despite the topic prominence, the entire array of studies is fragmented, and connections between different levels are not established: region – city – organization. Whereas this is critically important for the implementation of an effective innovation policy. In this regard, in this study, we test the hypothesis that the aggregate data obscures a wide variety of knowledge nodes, which are represented by a dominant knowledge centre. In the case of the region, such centres are often the largest cities, and in the case of cities – the largest organizations. The research design is focused on assessing the knowledge production at a multiscale level – organization, city and region, using the method of spatial scientometrics. The example of the Russian Federation illustrates well the territorial and institutional diversity in the distribution of knowledge production centres of different levels due to its great length and complexity of the structure of the national innovation system. This fact determines the high degree of heterogeneity of the Russian innovation space at the interregional, intercity and inter-organizational levels. The research results show a strong correlation between the knowledge profiles of regions and their primary knowledge-generating cities (KGCs). In cases of a strong central-peripheral structure of the regional knowledge production system, the regional profile completely coincides with the profile of its primary KGC. The knowledge capacity of second-tier cities remains hidden. At the city level, the identified trend is exacerbated. The absence of a pronounced leader among knowledge-intensive organizations (KIOs) against organizational diversity leads to a strong blur of the effectiveness of the knowledge production capabilities of a city. The example of Khabarovsk shows that the research profile of a city in a given situation may not repeat the most productive KIO, but, on the contrary, a weak one. Thus, the three-dimensional region-city-organization approach captures local specifics and organizational diversity, encompassing the entire set of elements of a regional knowledge production system. The study concludes with recommendations for a knowledge management policy at a tiered level.