I am not a born academic. I deliberately joined the ranks of academia at a fairly late stage as a natural progression from my professional career as an executive in what in those days was known as "decision support". My career had begun in the telecom industry before the days of deregulation in what one would call strategic planning and then I moved on to decision support in the field of banking, developing trading room software and risk management systems. As I developed decision support systems for real applications, the more I realized how very dependent these systems are on decision design. I began to question a number of basic business assumptions. I felt increasingly the need to review the way decision support systems were conceived at the time since they not only limited what one could do with computers, but also limited the decision-making capacity of executives. I thus decided to take time out from my professional obligations in order to be able to investigate the 'whys and wherefores' behind decision-making. I experienced yet another disappointment at the beginning of my academic career as I noted the academic research style prevailing in most Business Schools. The academic community was adhering to a type of research methodology based on a single view of the way humans think.

This annual series presents basic research on the theory and practice of management and administration. Volume 10 includes both invited contributions and revised versions of papers presented at the 2004 International Conference on Advances in Management, held at Orlando, Florida. This volume exemplifies ICAM's comparative orientation, in its broad scope of management perspectives, in the diverse locations of its research as well as its application, and in its comparisons of findings, methodologies, and operational definitions. The chapters in Part 1, "Knowledge Management, Learning, and Effectiveness," discuss the Effective Knowledge Organization; new frontiers to actionable knowledge; and reframing and engaging with organizational learning constraints. In Part 2, "Organization Change, Innovation, and Learning," chapters examine the new sciences and Organization Studies, and Exploratory Research on the Effect of Autonomous Learners to Team Learning within Healthcare Systems. In Part 3, "Performance, Social Capital, and Ethics," chapters elaborate on corporate performance cycles; the Marginal Temp Syndrome; the liabilities of social capital with respect to career development, third-party relationships, creativity generation, change, organizational and societal fragmentation, and collective wrongdoings; and ethics and the 2003 Mutual Fund Scandal. In Part 4, "International and Cross-cultural Management," chapters discuss selecting employees for global assignments; rethinking citizenship in public administration, and styles of handling interdepartmental conflict and effectiveness. This volume will be of particular interest to corporate libraries, doctoral students in management and administration, economists, and labor studies specialists. M. Afzalur RahimInternational Journal of Organizational Analysis and International Journal of Conflict Management, author of twenty books and numerous journal articles, and is professor of management at Western Kentucky University. Robert T. Golembiewski is distinguished research professor, emeritus at the University of Georgia, and has authored or edited over seventy-five books and numerous articles in scholarly journals.

Knowledge management (KM) is a set of relatively-new organizational activities that are aimed at improving knowledge, knowledge-related practices, organizational behaviors and decisions and organizational performance. KM focuses on knowledge processes—knowledge creation, acquisition, refinement, storage, transfer, sharing and utilization. These processes support organizational processes involving innovation, individual learning, collective learning and collaborative decision-making. The “intermediate outcomes” of KM are improved organizational behaviors, decisions, products, services, processes and relationships that enable the organization to improve its overall performance. Knowledge Management and Organizational Learning presents some 20 papers organized into five sections covering basic concepts of knowledge management; knowledge management issues; knowledge management applications; measurement and evaluation of knowledge management and organizational learning; and organizational learning.

This manual will enable the user to identify the changes that need to be made in order to leverage the company's intellectual capital and to bring about the processes, infractructure and organizational procedures that will enable you to build and use your corporate knowledge base.