The Knowledge Evolution offers a unique and powerful road map for understanding knowledge creation, learning, and performance in everyday work. This book reframes current thinking by delving into the hidden world of knowledge supporting both individual and organizational performance, laying the foundation for the emerging art of knowledge management. Packed with best practices from leading edge companies, essential guidelines, design principles, analogies, and conceptual frameworks, it serves as a practical guidebook for mastering the Knowledge Era. It will help managers make more intelligent decisions about knowledge creation, reduce wasteful technology investments and lead to new ease and confidence in applying knowledge and learning principles for themselves and for their organizations. Verna Allee delves into current thinking and practice to unravel the genetic code of knowledge itself. This revolutionary approach has surfaced a simple and elegant knowledge archetype. She demonstrates how this archetype can help us deal with complexity and suggests ways of self-organizing that make profound sense in today's networked enterprises. From strategies for core knowledge competencies to the key components of individual expertise, The Knowledge Evolution zeroes in on the critical success factors for the knowledge-based enterprise. What emerges is an approach to knowledge management that is simple enough to communicate at every level of the organization, yet rich enough to encompass all the complexity of modern enterprises. Verna Allee is the founder of Integral Performance Group, a consulting practice in California that specializes in the learning organization, knowledge competencies, organizational systems change, systems thinking, total quality and learning, benchmarking support, best practices research, and strategic development. She holds a degree in the Study of Human Consciousness and her work is informed by a deep interest in intelligence, human development, cognition, intuition and consciousness. She is the author of Learning Links: Enhancing Individual and Team Performance, Pfeiffer and Co-Jossey Bass, 1996.

Jürgen Renn examines the role of knowledge in global transformations going back to the dawn of civilization while providing vital perspectives on the complex challenges confronting us today in the Anthropocene--this new geological epoch shaped by humankind. Renn reframes the history of science and technology within a much broader history of knowledge, analyzing key episodes such as the evolution of writing, the emergence of science in the ancient world, the Scientific Revolution of early modernity, the globalization of knowledge, industrialization, and the profound transformations wrought by modern science. He investigates the evolution of knowledge using an array of disciplines and methods, from cognitive science and experimental psychology to earth science and evolutionary biology. The result is an entirely new framework for understanding structural changes in systems of knowledge--and a bold new approach to the history and philosophy of science.

An argument that the development of scientific practice and growth of scientific knowledge are governed by Darwin’s evolutionary model of descent with modification. Although scientific investigation is influenced by our cognitive and moral failings as well as all of the factors impinging on human life, the historical development of scientific knowledge has trended toward an increasingly accurate picture of an increasing number of phenomena. Taking a fresh look at Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in How Knowledge Grows Chris Haufe uses evolutionary theory to explain both why scientific practice develops the way it does and how scientific knowledge expands. This evolutionary model, claims Haufe, helps to explain what is epistemically special about scientific knowledge: its tendency to grow in both depth and breadth. Kuhn showed how intellectual communities achieve consensus in part by discriminating against ideas that differ from their own and isolating themselves intellectually from other fields of inquiry and broader social concerns. These same characteristics, says Haufe, determine a biological population’s degree of susceptibility to modification by natural selection. He argues that scientific knowledge grows, even across generations of variable groups of scientists, precisely because its development is governed by Darwinian evolution. Indeed, he supports the claim that this susceptibility to modification through natural selection helps to explain the epistemic power of certain branches of modern science. In updating and expanding the evolutionary approach to scientific knowledge, Haufe provides a model for thinking about science that acknowledges the historical contingency of scientific thought while showing why we nevertheless should trust the results of scientific research when it is the product of certain kinds of scientific communities.

The Evolution of Scientific Knowledge aims to reach a unique understanding of science with the help of economic and sociological theories. The economic theories used are institutionalist and evolutionary. The sociological theories draw from the type of work on social studies of science that have, in recent decades, transformed our picture of science and technology.

This volume explores how the limitations of human knowledge creates opportunities as well as problems in the modern economy.

Over the course of the last century, political scientists have been moved by two principal purposes. First, they have sought to understand and explain political phenomena in a way that is both theoretically and empirically grounded. Second, they have analyzed matters of enduring public interest, whether in terms of public policy and political action, fidelity between principle and practice in the organization and conduct of government, or the conditions of freedom, whether of citizens or of states. Many of the central advances made in the field have been prompted by a desire to improve both the quality and our understanding of political life. Nowhere is this tendency more apparent than in research on comparative politics and international relations, fields in which concerns for the public interest have stimulated various important insights. This volume systematically analyzes the major developments within the fields of comparative politics and international relations over the past three decades. Each chapter is composed of a core paper that addresses the major puzzles, conversations, and debates that have attended major areas of concern and inquiry within the discipline. These papers examine and evaluate the intellectual evolution and natural history of major areas of political inquiry and chart particularly promising trajectories, puzzles, and concerns for future work. Each core paper is accompanied by a set of shorter commentaries that engage the issues it takes up, thus contributing to an ongoing and lively dialogue among key figures in the field.