Barriers to the acceptance and utilisation of knowledge management systems: An exploratory study

Organisations entering the 21st Century arc exposed to an environment of continuous change, a challenge that requires a movement away from more predictable structures of the past, with hierarchies and formal chains of command. The emerging fluid and network like structures present new challenges for ensuring the development and dissemination of organisational knowledge. An area of considerable current debate involves the issue of harmony and balance between and organisation\u27s culture and its Knowledge Management (KM) systems. The focus of this study is on organisations that are recognising the implications of these changes and are responding by installing knowledge systems in an attempt to capture and distribute the organisation\u27s explicit knowledge. Such actions indicate the recognition of a need to move towards a managerial culture which is inclusive of knowledge development, and where managerial actions demonstrate a concern with capturing the tacit knowledge of all employees, creating open external interfaces. The success of the implementation of a knowledge management system depends upon full utilisation of the system by all potential users and the development of a culture which facilitates this inclusivity. Research and experience have indicated that KM systems are often not successfully adopted by the potential users. This study seeks to understand why users may choose not to participate in the use of knowledge management systems, which is the first critical step in ensuring that a knowledge management system may be fully utilised and provide maximum value to an organisation, creating a culture that provides a competitive edge. This study attempts to explore and model the relationships between factors that act as barriers for individuals when knowledge management systems are implemented, and to identify aspects of an organisation or a KMS which may facilitate improved uptake of a KMS.. The study focuses on a range of employees across three organisations which have given the research project considerable latitude in research opportunity and provided detailed in-depth interviews. This study is based on the findings of a pilot study, conducted by this researcher, that categorised the barriers into three broad areas: structure, culture and individual perceptions. That categorisation is used as a conceptual framework for this study. The qualitative data from the in-depth interviews and observation is analysed, categorised, and patterns of issues identified using a grounded theory approach. Industry experts have reviewed the results to identify and confirm possible issues in the data and give practitioner validity to the analysis. For practitioners the results provide a framework of the relationships that may act as barriers to employee participation, and an indication of those issues that appear the most critical when constructing an appropriate organisational culture for knowledge management systems. Academically the study identifies critical issues that should be the subject of more detailed cultural exploration in this developing field

The uneven impact of recession on the voluntary and community sectors:Bristol and Liverpool

There has been much debate about the impact of recession and austerity on the voluntary and community sector over recent years. Using secondary data from the 2008 National Survey of Third Sector Organisations, Clifford et al. (2013), writing in this journal, have argued that voluntary sector organisations located in more deprived local authorities are likely to suffer most due to the combined effect of cuts in government funding in these areas and their greater dependency on statutory funding. This paper develops this argument by exploring the sector’s changing relationship with the state through an empirical analysis of the differential impact of recession and austerity on voluntary and community organisations involved in public service delivery in the two English core cities of Bristol and Liverpool. This paper highlights how the scale and unevenness of public spending cuts, the levels of voluntary sector dependency on statutory funding and the rising demands for the sector’s services in a period of recession and austerity are being experienced locally. It portrays a sector whose resilience is being severely tested and one that is being forced rapidly to restructure and reposition itself in an increasingly challenging funding environment. </jats:p

Disciplinary neoliberalism: coercive commodification and the post-crisis welfare state

Fiona Dukelow and Patricia Kennett examine the post-2008 welfare states in Ireland, Britain, and the US. They explain how each of these countries experienced an acceleration in the operation of disciplinary neoliberalism - through punitive regimes of surveillance and sanctions - and consider the implications of these contemporary welfare policies

Discipline, debt and coercive commodification:Post-crisis neoliberalism and the welfare state in Ireland, the UK and the USA

Ireland, the UK and the USA are heterogeneous examples of liberal worlds of welfare capitalism yet all three countries were deeply implicated in the 2008 global financial crisis. Examining these three countries together provides the opportunity to further develop an international comparative political economy of instability in the context of the globalised and financialised dimensions of Anglo-liberal capitalism and disciplinary governance. Our analysis is guided by the concept of disciplinary neoliberalism (Gill, 1995) through which we explore: (i) the dynamics that have shaped the impacts of and responses to the Great Recession; (ii) the ways in which state-market relations, shaped by differentiated accommodations to market imperative or market discipline, have been used as disciplinary tools and how these have interacted with existing social divisions and iii) the implications for shaping conditions for resistance. We suggest that the neoliberal pathways of each country, whilst not uniform, mark a ‘step-change’ and acceleration in the operation of disciplinary neoliberalism, and is particularly evident in what we identify as the coercive commodification of social policy

The Beaker phenomenon and the genomic transformation of northwest Europe

From around 2750 to 2500 bc, Bell Beaker pottery became widespread across western and central Europe, before it disappeared between 2200 and 1800 bc. The forces that propelled its expansion are a matter of long-standing debate, and there is support for both cultural diffusion and migration having a role in this process. Here we present genome-wide data from 400 Neolithic, Copper Age and Bronze Age Europeans, including 226 individuals associated with Beaker-complex artefacts. We detected limited genetic affinity between Beaker-complex-associated individuals from Iberia and central Europe, and thus exclude migration as an important mechanism of spread between these two regions. However, migration had a key role in the further dissemination of the Beaker complex. We document this phenomenon most clearly in Britain, where the spread of the Beaker complex introduced high levels of steppe-related ancestry and was associated with the replacement of approximately 90% of Britain’s gene pool within a few hundred years, continuing the east-to-west expansion that had brought steppe-related ancestry into central and northern Europe over the previous centuries