Knowledge organization and its social parallels

Enhancing the Quality of Knowing through Integration of East-West metaphors (Part #8)

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It is intriguing that the simplest agricultural metaphor is at the base of the modern approach to knowledge -- namely the "field". Knowledge workers are each assumed to work in a field -- people are asked to identity themselves by their "field". Knowledge is organized into fields. A person may work in several fields, although this may be considered somewhat suspect. The field may be considered entirely their own, in the case of a specialist on some out of the way topic. It may however be a very broad field in which whole teams of people work. Knowledge workers in a particular field may well be organized into a 'profession' (often to be declared on visa applications).

In this light the parallel between the development from subsistence level agriculture to agribusiness may be usefully explored. The question is whether there are unsuspected carry overs from working in a field, as practiced in agriculture, to that of knowledge working. Clearly there are similarities between:

• the isolated knowledge worker at the origins of a new field of science versus the farmer with his own self-sustaining plot, as compared with
• a large laboratory team of an industrial enterprise versus agribusiness exploitation of an array of fields.

The metaphor is useful because it helps clarify some of the elusive challenges of future knowledge work in the light of the more obvious challenges to farming -- especially in the contrast between East and West:

(a) Fragmentation: In both farming and knowledge work, there is a major challenge of fragmentation. In the West, farms below a certain size are considered uneconomical. Intensive farming in the East is typically faced with the challenge of subdivision of plots amongst inheritors, leading again to nonviability. In both cases this may be termed unsustainability. Development of knowledge has also been characterized by rapid fragmentation of every field. Within any field there is increasing competition amongst knowledge workers, notably for recognition and funding, and there is a real question as to whether work in the increasingly smaller fields is sustainable -- in terms of relevance to any wider context. Within any field, workers quarrel over smaller and smaller territory. Disciples of aging pioneers form competing schools of thought subject to further schisms.

(b) Monoculture: In both farming and knowledge work, "monoculture" is a way of ensuring sustainability according to economic criteria -- concentrating effort on "cash crops". This is however extremely problematic in both cases. The radical consequences in the case of farming are well-recognized: destruction of biodiversity, degradation of soil, dependence on fertilizers, disassociation of the workforce from the land. The consequences in the case of knowledge work are similar but less well recognized: groupthink, infertility/uncreativity of knowledge workers, dubious science is response to sponsor constraints, dependence on stimulants, disassociation from the knowledge enterprise. These phenomena are the bane of large research institutions which are increasingly concerned with sustaining 'yield' in order to remain competitive.

(c) Integration: The previous phenomena pose the challenge of some form of integration. For agriculture this is expressed in terms of sustaining yield whilst mitigating against destructive effects on the ecosystem and the lifestyle of farmers. It requires a focus on an integrated distribution of specialized produce or the need for integrated farming methods (permaculture, etc). In the case of knowledge work, this is expressed in terms of the various flavours of interdisciplinarity and the challenge of integrating the perspectives of different disciplines in response to social issues. At one extreme this takes the form of "unity of science" and "Theories of Everything", or less ambitiously in 'knowledge organization', more recently defined in terms of 'knowledge management'.

The parallel between agriculture and knowledge work is valuable because it shows that the dramatic challenges of agriculture may be implicit in the challenges to the future of knowledge work. However it also points to the possibility that new insights into knowledge work, possibly deriving from the East, may suggest alternative approaches to agriculture and the development of sustainable communities.

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