Lost in Translation: Why Organizations Should Facilitate Knowledge Transfer
Year: 2006
Type: article
Abstract: (968 words) In the movie Lost in Translation the two main characters, Bob and Charlotte, experience the feeling of being “lost ” in a foreign country. Both do not speak the language and they feel detached from the existing world. In this paper, I support the view that when knowledge is transferred in organizations, the same process occurs: a great part of it is “lost in translation”. Even if knowledge transfer has been extensively studied both in theory and in practice in the last few years, very few analyses have been made in the lenses of rhetoric. With very few exceptions (Czarniawska and Joerges, 1996; Gherardi and Nicolini, 2000) organizational knowledge transfer-defined as the process through which one unit (eg. group, department or division) is affected by the experience of another (Argote and Ingram, 2000: 151)- has been mainly represented as a communication process. Complementary to this view, I propose to interpret the circulation of knowledge in organizations as a process of translation: knowledge is not only transferred between two entities but transformed during that process. To support my point, I look at the different theoretical views on knowledge transfer in the organizational context. Four analyses can be found: the cognitive approach, the economic approach,
Author: Alexandre Perrin
Institution: Groupe de Recherche en Droit, Économie, Gestion
Language: English
Subfield: Strategy and Management
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2158521685