Home > Research > Publications & Outputs > Stretching tacit knowledge beyond a local fix? ...

Electronic data

Links

Text available via DOI:

View graph of relations

Stretching tacit knowledge beyond a local fix? Global spaces of learning in advertising professional service firms.

Research output: Contribution to Journal/MagazineJournal articlepeer-review

Published
<mark>Journal publication date</mark>21/04/2006
<mark>Journal</mark>Journal of Economic Geography
Issue number4
Volume6
Number of pages24
Pages (from-to)517-540
Publication StatusPublished
<mark>Original language</mark>English

Abstract

The �knowledge economy� is now widely debated and economic geographers have made a significant contribution to understanding of the influences upon the production and dissemination of tacit knowledge within and between firms. However, the continued association of tacit knowledge with practices rooted at the local scale and suggestions of territorially sticky knowledges has proven controversial. Through examination of empirical material exploring the stretching of learning in advertising professional service firms, the paper argues that we need to recognise the use of two different epistemologies of organizational knowledge leverage - �knowledge transfer� in the form of best practice and �the social production of new knowledge� - and their complementary yet differentiated roles in organizations and differing spatial reaches. This highlights the existence of multiple geographies of tacit knowledge and the need to be more subtle in our arguments about its geographies. In particular, the paper reveals that tacit knowledge can have global geographies when knowledge management practices focus on reproducing rather than transferring knowledge across space.

Bibliographic note

This is a pre-copy-editing, author-produced PDF of an article accepted for publication in the Journal of Economic Geography following peer review. The definitive publisher-authenticated version was published in the Journal of Economic Geography 2006 Volume 6 (4) pp. 517-540 and is available online at: http://joeg.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/6/4/517