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The purpose of this paper is to confirm quantitatively the previous finding that organizational characteristics influence knowledge management, and to assess whether the national culture of knowledge workers equally affects the management of knowledge.

Based on data gathered from a questionnaire survey of a Japanese pharmaceutical company's 14 foreign subsidiaries, the effects of organizational characteristics and national culture on knowledge management were tested using multiple regression analysis.

Although organizational characteristics and national culture were found to affect knowledge management, the data showed organizational characteristics to be a stronger prescriptive factor compared with national culture.

Because this research centered on a single company in the pharmaceutical industry, future research should attempt to confirm the validity of this framework in other industries.

Changes in organizational characteristics, such as structure and relationship in particular, rather than adjustments in the composition of employees' nationalities, will have a stronger impact on the resulting knowledge management.

This framework linking organizational characteristics and national culture to knowledge management had received a first justification using a case study approach with a qualitative comparative method and has now been confirmed with a quantitative approach. Among the predictors of knowledge management beyond the realm of deliberate measures within the firm, the data show that organizational characteristics exert a stronger influence than national culture.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an example of how an apparently incongruent combination of organizational variables can have a positive effect on innovation through knowledge creation.

Based on previous theory, four original hypotheses were developed and later tested with empirical data collected from 125 research and development organizations in Japan, using analysis of variance and regression analysis.

Managerial influences and resources can significantly interact to generate a combined impact on the knowledge creation capability of organizations, which in turn is positively associated with their innovation performance. In particular, long‐term managerial influences were found to have a greater impact on knowledge creation when combined with knowledge‐exploitation resources. Synthesizing short‐term managerial influences with knowledge‐exploitation resources is not better than combining them with exploration resources. This holds true especially for organizations of small and medium size.

This study only evaluates one case of many possibilities of seemingly antithetical combinations that can also have a beneficial impact in organizations. A larger and diverse sample, together with enhanced dimensions of managerial influences and organizational resources can make this study's implications much more universal.

An ingenious and purposeful synthesis of organizational variables conventionally seen as incompatible and contradictory can in reality benefit organizational goals related to knowledge creation and innovation.

This study puts forward a unique framework and perspective highlighting the importance of combinatory effects and the management of duality in organizations.

The purpose of this paper is to propose propose a practical framework for the design and measure of active ba and assess whether workplace reformation initiatives actively contribute to promoting knowledge creation by activating ba.

The workplace reformation is first segmented into virtual and physical environments. Then, using the SECI knowledge‐creation process, the effects of each environment as well as their mutual interactions on active ba are analyzed. Next, the case studies of two workplace reformations are introduced, the first using a qualitative analysis and the second the results of a questionnaire survey carried out at three different stages of the implementation.

The effective implementation of workplace reformation in two separate entities enabled the creation of active ba. The influence of the physical and virtual environments on the creation of active ba were significantly different, thus justifying the assumption of the division of such environmental factors. The main factor of active ba generated by a complete workplace reformation was shown to be direct communication.

The two firms studied here belong to the same group of companies, and both departments' workplace reformations were conducted by the same person, whose widely known track record may be seen as a self‐fulfilling prophecy.

Because these two types of workplace reformation reversely impact the emergence of direct communication, and therefore the type of active ba, practitioners could avoid the co‐existence of groups organized under different configurations by simultaneously implementing a workplace reformation across both virtual and physical environments.

This research shows how workplace reformation – achieved with the same people, all things being equal, relatively immediately and inexpensively – can raise knowledge productivity.

While knowledge management has been shown to be a strategic source of competitive advantage, processes designed to enhance the productivity of knowledge do not, however, equally contribute to the organization's capabilities. Consequently, this research aims to focus on the relationship between each mode of the knowledge management process and multiple sources of competitive advantage.

This research, using questionnaire data collected from the entire population of a pharmaceutical company's head office in Japan, investigates how different perceptions and behaviors related to knowledge management affect the perceived contribution of certain types of organizational knowledge acting as sources of competitive advantage.

The study finds that the perceived importance of knowledge management activities, especially combination, appears as an important source of competitive advantage related to technical knowledge, and more time spent on knowledge management tasks, in particular socialization, contributes to a competitive advantage related to affective knowledge. Further analysis involves a taxonomy of employees based on their perceived importance of, and the time they spend on, knowledge management activities

This paper focuses on the entire population of a single firm, and for that reason, further research with other companies in different industries is necessary.

There is evidence suggesting that knowledge management strategies should be tailored to fit the discriminate beliefs and actions of each group of workers, identified based on their level of congruence between their espoused theories and theories‐in‐use related to knowledge management.

The taxonomy of workers introduced in the paper emphasizes the fact that the workforce is not a uniform body and therefore that intrinsic differences need to be taken into account to maximize the efficiency of knowledge management.

This paper intends to propose an “ontological shift SECI model” as a tool to diagnose organizations in the context of knowledge creation, and thereby support the management of knowledge creation‐related projects.

This research's hypothesis is based on existing knowledge creation theories and is tested using a case study methodology. The authors first examine the model in a completed project in order to test its validity and second, apply it in Company A's software project to demonstrate its feasibility and usefulness.

In any given project, knowledge creation activities occur in various ontological entities – individual, group, organization or social‐network. The diagnosis tool, which proved to be useful in this paper, traces such ontological shifts and makes visible all key activities of a knowledge creation project. These activities form an “ontological shift model” and trace an “activity map” which exposes underlying enablers and barriers, and provides viable solutions for improvement.

To carry out the analysis, the key activities identified in the knowledge creation‐related project have to be described in detail according to their ontological and epistemological dimensions. However, such description is complex and requires specialized expertise in knowledge creation and rich knowledge of the ongoing project.

The tool proved useful for supporting project managers in diagnosing their project's knowledge creation shortcomings. When knowledge creation breakdowns occur in a project, the tool can act as a navigator and uncover alternatives to continue the knowledge‐creating spiral.

Knowledge creation process is difficult to manage because of its cause ambiguity and intangibility. What is a knowledge creation activity? And why? This model makes explicit experienced managers' tacit solutions to knowledge creation problems. It can make organizational knowledge creation activities visible and therefore manageable for junior staff, outside consultants and even future software modeling.

The use of knowledge in organizations is largely a discretionary behavior that can be encouraged but not demanded. As such, the firm can only attempt to provide the right conditions for employees to endorse the role of knowledge workers. The purpose of this paper is to examine how the organization of the firm affects knowledge management.

This research proposes a new framework showing the prescriptive role of organizational characteristics onto knowledge management (KM) initiatives. Based on this framework, data were generated from nine semi‐structured interviews conducted in the American, British and Japanese offices of a major Japanese pharmaceutical company, using a Boolean approach and qualitative content analysis.

Organizational characteristics, specifically – structure, membership, relationship, and strategy affect KM, namely – knowledge acquisition, storage, diffusion, and application respectively.

Even though the departments of each local office under study were matched in terms of activity, the size of their own domestic market made comparisons sometimes challenging.

This research suggests that practitioners can increase the yield of KM when integrated upstream into the elementary business processes rather than when left voluntary.

This paper uncovers a possible link between the firm's organizational characteristics and KM, and the new practical framework can be useful to both scholars and practitioners.

The purpose of this study is to offer the bibliometric analysis of the Journal of Knowledge Management (JKM) to understand how the literature has developed over time.

This study used bibliometric approaches to analyze a sample of 669 studies from 1997 to 2021. This study focused on performance analysis and scientific mapping of articles using the R package.

The results indicate that the number of publications during the period has significantly increased which shows a growing interest of researchers in the JKM. This study highlights new emerging themes such as change management, change readiness, product innovation and digital libraries which uncover exciting avenues for new research opportunities. USA and UK were the most productive countries in terms of the number of citations followed by few European countries including Spain, Finland, Germany and Sweden. However, it is worth noting that India was the most productive country in the emerging economies.

This study will act as a guide for researchers of various fields to evaluate the development of scientific publications in a particular theme over time, especially for those who are in the field of knowledge management (KM).

This study aims to accomplish the systematic bibliometric analysis of the JKM for more than two decades, providing useful insights into the key developments in the field of KM. This study is more rigorous and comprehensive in terms of the analytical techniques used.

This study aims to investigate the relative weight of financial and non-financial performance measures used to evaluate production managers (such as shop floor managers or foremen) in a modern manufacturing setting.

Using survey data from Japanese factories, the paper examines the association between the choice of profit, cost, and non-financial performance measures with two characteristics of manufacturing systems: interdependence and multi-tasking.

The results indicate that interdependence has a significant and positive association with the importance of profit information, while multi-tasking is associated negatively with the importance of profit information, and positively with non-financial information for performance evaluation.

In recent years, a significant shift has been observed in Japanese production management with many companies now focusing on profit information instead of cost information. For example, the past studies show that large Japanese manufacturing companies are now using micro-profit centres and include profit information when evaluating factories. However, little empirical evidence is available on performance measurement at the shop floor foreman level, and even less is known about the importance of profit information in the evaluation of these lower level managers.