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This paper draws attention to the potentially focal role that appropriate people management practices can and do play in facilitating knowledge management within the context of a specialist consulting firm that sustains its competitive advantage through processes of knowledge creation. The paper highlights the way in which traditional approaches to people management issues such as recruitment and selection, professional development etc. are not necessarily appropriate or relevant when managing an expert workforce that expects and demands considerable levels of autonomy. The findings highlight that perhaps too much reliance has been placed on technological solutions to KM to date. Hence the paper emphasises the highly situated and contextual nature of KM and the practices or systems in support of KM, which existing literature in this field has failed to adequately address.

This paper explores the impact of communication strategies on shaping employee involvement at Rover’s Longbridge plant, between 1997 and 1999. At this time, the firm was experiencing severe difficulties. This triggered a period of transformational change within the company. Qualitative methodology was utilised to explore management’s internal communications strategies, which aimed to initiate and sustain change. These strategies were analysed in relation to external forces, specifically the media, which played a significant role in shaping management action at this time. Semi‐structured interviews with senior management and trade union representatives were conducted, and company data was utilised to provide the shop‐floor perspective. New developments with regard to existing EI theory were uncovered. Communications increased in prominence and centrality to organisational objectives, and a radical communications technique was introduced. The research also highlights that EI initiatives cannot be divorced from the organisational context. Several key issues emerged: management must brief internal audiences before information reaches the media; the timely provision of consistent information is paramount; and finally, personal involvement by senior management is a prerequisite for the success of any change management programme.

Throughout the turbulent recent history of UK carmaker Rover, culminating in parent BMW’s sale of the company for £10 to the Phoenix consortium in May 2000, internal communications with the workforce were never far from the top of the agenda.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the factors that influence knowledge processes and by extension organisational knowledge culture (KC).

Using a systematic model development approach based on an extensive literature review, the authors explore the notion of organisational KC and conceptualise a model that addresses the following research question: what factors affect employees’ values and beliefs about knowledge processes and by extension organisational KC?

This paper proposes that knowledge processes are interrelated and mutually enforcing activities, and that employee perceptions of various individual, group and organisational factors underpin employee values and beliefs about knowledge processes and help shape an organisation’s KC.

The findings extend the understanding of the concept of KC and may point the way towards a unifying theory of knowledge management (KM) that can better account for the complexity and multi-dimensionality of knowledge processes and KC.

The paper provides important practical implications by explicitly accounting for the cultural aspects of the inextricably interrelated nature of the most common knowledge processes in KM initiatives.

KM research has examined a long and varied list of knowledge processes. This has arguably resulted in KM theorizing being fragmented or disintegrated. Whilst it is evident that organisational culture affects persons’ behaviour in the organisation, the impact of persons’ values and beliefs on knowledge processes as a whole remain understudied. This study provides a model of KC. Moreover, the paper offers a novel systematic approach to developing conceptual and theoretical models.