Trust in Knowledge Management and Systems in Organizations

Maija-Leena Huotari University of Oulu,

Finland

Mirja Iivonen University of Tampere,

Finland

IDEA GROUP PUBLISHING

Hershey • London • Melbourne • Singapore

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Copyright 2004 by Idea Group Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, without written permission from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

 Huotari, Maija-Leena.  Trust in knowledge management and systems in organizations / Maija Leena Huotari and Mirja Iivonen.    p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. 

ISBN 1-59140-220-4

ISBN 1-59140-126-7 (hardcover) -- ISBN 1-59140-127-5 (ebook)

1. Knowledge management. 2. Trust. 3. Strategic alliances (Business) 4. Business communication. 5. Information resources management. I. Iivonen, Mirja. II. Title.

HD30.2.H865 2003

658.4'038--dc21

2003008761

British Cataloguing in Publication Data

A Cataloguing in Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

All work contributed to this book is new, previously-unpublished material. The views expressed in this book are those of the authors, but not necessarily of the publisher.

About the Authors

Maija-Leena Huotari is professor and head of the Department of Information Studies at the University of Oulu, Finland. With a BA in economics and an MSc in information studies, she received her PhD in information studies at Sheffield University, UK, in 1996. She worked in the Department of Information Studies at the University of Tampere, Finland (1997–2002), as assistant professor, associate professor (acting) and professor (acting), and was deputy department head (2000–2002). She has published both internationally and in Finland, and is a member of the Editorial Board of Information Research News (UK). She was reporter of the intermediate evaluation of the Multilingual Information Society Programme of the EU in 1998–1999 and chair of the Total Quality Evaluation of the Libraries of Helsinki University in 1999–2000. Her research interests focus on information needs, seeking and use, organizational information behaviour, information management, and strategic management of information and knowledge.

Mirja Iivonen received her PhD in information studies at the University of Tampere, Finland, in 1995. The topic of her dissertation was consistency in the formulation of query statements in online bibliographic retrieval. Currently she is the director of Tampere University Library and senior scholar attached to the Department of Information Studies at the University of Oulu where she previously held a full professorship and served as the head of the department. She has supervised several doctoral and master students. She has published both internationally and in Finland, and is a member on the Editorial Board of Library & Information Science Research. She has worked as a visiting scholar at the University of Rutgers and at the University of Maryland, both in the United States. Her main research interests include information storage and retrieval, in which area her latest publications focus on searching in the web, and knowledge management. Currently she is involved in management and leadership issues both in theory and practice.

Kirsimarja Blomqvist is a part-time professor for knowledge management, director for Teliasonera Chief Technology Office and a director for the Telecom Business Research Center at Lappeenranta University of Technology, Finland. With an MSc and a PhD in economics, she worked earlier in developing, consulting and financing small and medium-sized enterprises. Her research interests include trust and social capital, R&D management, strategic alliances and inter-firm cooperation as well as knowledge creation and knowledge transfer, e.g., in university-industry cooperation.

Cristiano Castelfranchi is full professor of cognitive sciences at the University of Siena and director of the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies of the National Research Council, in Rome, Italy. A cognitive scientist with a background in linguistics and psychology, he is active in multi-agent systems, social simulation, and cognitive science. He has served as program chair of the First International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems — AAMAS-2002, as chair of several international workshops in these fields and an advisory member of several international conferences and societies. He has published three books in English, eight books in Italian and more than 100 conference and journal articles on cognitive, computational and formal-theoretical models of social interaction and social mind. He was guest speaker at IJCAI'97.

Elisabeth Davenport is professor of information management at Napier University, UK. She leads the social informatics group in the School of Computing and is an associate of the School's International Teledemocracy Centre. She is also a visiting scholar in the School of Library and Information Science at Indiana University. Her current research interests include organizational and social computing, management of tacit knowledge and social capital, digital genres, and ethnomethodology in the workplace.

Rino Falcone is a computer scientist with a background in physics. He is a researcher for the Division of Artificial Intelligence at the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technology of the Italian National Research Council. His main scientific competencies range from natural language processing to plan recognition, multi-agent systems and agent theory. He is co-leader in the ALFEBIITE European Project. He has published more than 100 conference and journal articles. He has organized several international conferences and he is editor of several special issues of international journals on these topics. He has been a presenter of two tutorials on themes in social artificial intelligence at ICMAS-2000 and at AAMAS-02.

Risto Harisalo is a professor in administrative science at the University of Tampere, Finland. He has researched diffusion of innovations and practices of innovative leadership in public organizations. He has published books on privatization and other methods of new public management. He has made a wide study of trust in organizational environment. His first book on the subject came out in 1996.

Soile Hirvasniemi, MA, has worked as a researcher in the Department of Information Studies at the University of Oulu, Finland, on a project on usability and user studies of the educational web services coordinated by the Finnish Ministry of Education, and on a project coordinated by the Finnish National Board of Education's web service. Currently she is the children's librarian in a public library.

Saana Kaleva is a project researcher in the Department of Information Studies at the University of Oulu, Finland. Her research interests focus on usability of Internet services. Currently she is involved in usability research of Internet services of the Finnish Open Universities and the Oulu Public Library.

Terttu Kortelainen, PhD, is a lecturer at the Department of Information Studies, University of Oulu, Finland. With an MSc in natural sciences, a licentiate's degree in information studies, she received her PhD in information studies at the University of Oulu in 1999. Her research interests focus on informetrics, currently webometric studies of digital libraries, and on the evaluation of public libraries. She has supervised research projects on usability at Cuber, a European virtual university, the net service of the Finnish Open University, a study pilot web service provided by the Finnish Ministry of Education, an evaluation research project of Northern Finnish public libraries, and on database indexing and content-based retrieval of audio and video recordings. She has published both internationally and in Finland, and holds a number of positions in trust.

Andreina Mandelli received her PhD in mass communication from Indiana University. She is on the faculty of the Marketing Department of SDA, the business school of Bocconi University, Milan, Italy. She also teaches New Media on the executive master in communication management program of the University of Italian Switzerland in Lugano, and marketing on the executive programs of Duke Corporate Education. She coordinates the Italian chapter of the World Internet Project, a research program joined by 25 different research institutions in the world.

Leo McLaughlin completed his bachelor's degree in the School of Computing in Napier University, UK, in February 2002 and worked as a research assistant in the School until September 2002. He is currently employed as a web analyst and developer in Central Scotland.

Diane H. Sonnenwald is a professor at the University College of Bor s, Sweden. She received her PhD from Rutgers University and previously worked at Bell Communications Research, Bell Labs and the University of North Carolina. She has published more than 50 journal papers, book chapters and conference papers and received more than 20 grants from government funding agencies and corporations. Her research focuses on collaboration and knowledge management in a variety of contexts, including geographically distributed, interdisciplinary and interorganizational scientific, corporate and educational settings. Current research projects include laboratory and ethnographic studies investigating the impact of technology and organizational design on work processes and outcomes.

Pirjo St hle is professor of knowledge management at Lappeenranta University of Technology, Finland. She has also worked as a practitioner in the field as chief knowledge officer in Finland's biggest telecom company. At the moment she works for many expert groups for national and international assessment for improving innovativeness of companies, universities and regions. Her research interests include theoretical bases and practical implementation of knowledge management, development and measurement of companies' intellectual capital, innovations, social capital and networking.

Jari Stenvall is professor of administrative science at the University of Lapland, Finland. He has researched inter-organizational relationships and administrative and political roles of civil servants in central administration. He has studied trust in the management of public organizations.

Kai rni, MA, is a PhD student in the Department of Information Studies at the University of Oulu, Finland. His research focuses on usability and user studies of educational web services and information needs related to education in a project coordinated by the Finnish Ministry of Education. Previously he has worked on usability studies of the Finnish National Board of Education's web service and parts of the Cuber service, a European joint virtual university project.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful for being challenged by Idea Group Publishing to write this book and to Mehdi Khosrow-Pour who invited us to edit this book. The process has been demanding for both of us but we have also been eager to learn more about how to enhance trust and trustworthiness in managing knowledge and information and related systems within organizational contexts. We gauged the relevance of the topic for adding to the knowledge of the role of trust in the highly turbulent and continuously "shrinking" world. The book was inspired by the fact that the editing process was simultaneously a good opportunity to learn about and also to put trust to the test in practice when collaborating across geographical distances and disciplinary boundaries via social and technological information networks. The authors of the book are from various countries — Finland, Great Britain, Italy, and the United States — and there are some whom we have never met face-to-face. Furthermore, during the editing process one of us moved to another university over 500 kilometers away, and we collaborated mainly by using ICT to complete the editorial work. Therefore, we can confess that trust has played a crucial role also in helping the editorial work to go smoothly. It is a well-known fact that interacting without meeting face-to-face is more difficult that when having the possibility to meet in person. Therefore, mutual trust and respect were an essential ingredient in our collaboration. We communicated often just to be able to inform each other about our possibilities to work with the book at that moment. Because the editing process took place at the moment when we both were very involved in many other activities, it was necessary to share schedule information as well as to take into account each other's situation. It was also useful to understand each other's feelings during the editing process — pleasure and satisfaction when the process moved on, as well as anxiety from time to time.

During the whole process we have owed our deep gratitude to the authors. They all contributed in an excellent manner to the content of the book. Special thanks also go to the referees. Many authors of chapters contributed also as referees for chapters written by other authors. These valuable contributions helped other authors to improve their text. Because every chapter was reviewed by two or three referees, we also are indebted to a number of experts and highly recognized researchers in this area of research who did the work with care. Moreover, we owe our warm thanks already in advance to those colleagues who have expressed their interest in reviewing the book when published. We hope that apart from them other readers of the book also find it of interest, providing fresh insights and recent research findings in this highly topical area of research.

Our warm thanks go to the efficient publishing team of IGP, in particular, to Amanda Appicello, who patiently and most kindly replied promptly to all our question during the process, Jan Travers for taking care of the legal issues, and Jennifer Sundstrom for promoting the book. Besides being an inspiring process, the editing of the book has also been an intensive learning process for both of us. When starting the work we were already familiar with the topic of trust in KM. However, each chapter has added to our understanding of certain aspects of the multidimensional phenomenon of trust and its many faces that are highlighted differently when examined from multiple angles and viewpoints. Thus, we warmly welcome further empirical studies on this motivating and challenging research topic.

Maija-Leena Huotari and Mirja Iivonen
Linnanmaa, Oulu, and Kissanmaa, Tampere, Finland
February 2003