Knowledge & Technology Utilization
In pragmatic philosophy is knowledge understood as something that facilitates living and acting. Knowledge is not understood in abstraction from its utility. Knowledge is produced more or less directly in order to be applied. If no direct application is thought of in the production phase, knowledge is often termed "theoretical" or "fundamental" or "basic". Knowledge produced directly aiming at some application is correspondingly termed "applied". Often are the borders between basic and applied research extremely difficult to draw: Two researchers in the same research project may conceive the project as respectively basic and applied. In the same way both research aiming at basic and at applied purposes show-up to be of purely practical value, of purely theoretical value, a combination or of no value at all.
Project hindsight (Sherwin & Isenson, 1967) found that "Science and technology funds deliberately invested and managed for defense purposes have been about one order of magnitude more efficient in producing useful events than the same amount of funds invested without specific concern for defense needs".
Documented knowledge may have greater or lesser
potentials for utilization.
Some documents may contain errors or be based on wrong premises, why they turn
out to be useless. Other documents can be obsolete of various reasons. They may,
for example, be based on obsolete research methods
or they may have aimed to support forms of human activities, that are no longer
actual. (Often such knowledge is said to be "only of historical interest" which
is important to consider as an indication that documents may serve other ends than the ones they were
originally intended for). Some documents may be perceived as being "not
relevant", a judgment that may or may not be true and which may be related to
different theoretical perspectives or "paradigms".
There exist many kinds of barriers which may lead to less than optimal
utilization of existing documented knowledge. Such barriers may be of an
economic nature,
legal (copyright), physical (document-delivery), psychological, educational,
sociological, linguistic or bibliographical nature. The bibliographical
barriers are about documents visibility and retrievability in libraries and
databases. The field of
knowledge organization is about how to reduce this kind of barriers for
optimal knowledge utilization.
Around the 1970s began some people to speak of knowledge utilization as a new
academic field of study, e.g. Havelock (1968, 1973, 1975) and Schmuck (1968). In
1980 was established the journal
Knowledge: Creation, Diffusion, Utilization, A recent guide to the field is Bzdel, Wither & Graham (2004).
Literature:
Alestalo, M. (1991). Science and the Politico-Economic System. Helsinki: VAPK-Publishing. (Dissertation).
Bzdel, L.; Wither, C. & Graham, P. (2004). Knowledge Utilization Resource Guide. http://www.nursing.ualberta.ca/kusp/Resources/KU%20Resource%20Guide/KUResourceGuide.pdf
Gibb, J. M. & Nicolay, D. (Eds.). (1982). Transfer and Exploitation of Scientific and Technical Information. Proceedings of the symposium held by the Commission of the European Communities, Directorate-General Information Market and Innovation in Luxemburg, 10 to 12 June 1981. Brussels: Commission of the European Communities. (EUR 7716).
Havelock, R. G. (1973). Planning for innovation through dissemination and utilization of
knowledge. Ann Arbor: Center for Research on Utilization of Scientific
Knowledge, University of Michigan.
Havelock, R.G. (1975). Research on the utilization of
knowledge. In Manfred Kochen (Ed.), Information for action: from knowledge
to wisdom (pp. 87-107). (Library and Information Science). New York, NY:
Academic Press.
Havelock, R. G. (1968). Bibliography on knowledge utilization and dissemination. Ann Arbor, Center for Research on Utilization of Scientific Knowledge, University of Michigan.
Schmuck, R.
(1968). Social psychological factors in knowledge utilization.
IN: T. L. Eidell & Kitchel, J. M. (eds.). Knowledge production and utilization in
educational administration. Oregon: University of Oregon, (Pp.143-173).
Sherwin, C. W. & Isenson, R. S. (1967). Project Hindsight. A
Defense
Department study of the utility of research. Science, 156,
1571-1577.
Smith, R. (2002). Reflections of an editor of research and practice? Granada. PowerPoint presentation. http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/talks/reflections/sld001.htm
Wilson, P. (1993). Communication Efficiency in Research
and Development. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 44(7),
376-382.
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Birger Hjørland
Last edited: 02-04-2007