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Part of Team Working on Project to Rehabilitate Poor Part of Rotterdam

Wittenborg lecturer, Dr Yasmina Khadir-Poggi, recently presented a paper at the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) during the 2018 IFKAD conference. IFKAD stands for the International Forum on Knowledge Asset Dynamics. The theme of the conference was “Social Impact of Knowledge through Design”.

Khadir-Poggi is a lecturer in Business Studies at Wittenborg Amsterdam. She recently obtained a PhD in Knowledge Management from the Trinity Business School in Dublin, Ireland.

She said her paper focused on knowledge creation in organisations. “Because of my paper, I was selected to participate in an experimental (and successful) workshop called “The Science of Ideas”. With my team, we spent one day working on a project to suggest an urban design aiming at rehabilitating a poor borough of Rotterdam harbour with a high criminality rate.”

According to their website, the purpose of IFKAD 2018 was to explore the role and the relevance of new sources, dimensions and characteristics of knowledge supporting organisations, as well as regional and urban systems in their aim to create valuable societal impact by addressing fundamental questions. What are the major challenges society is facing in the near future and how are they related to knowledge and design? What is the role of knowledge and design to cope with the major challenges our society is facing?

Khadir-Poggi’s paper abstract reads: “Many scholars concur that organisational theorists have restricted their contributions within a Cartesian epistemology that ignores the fundamental debate around the complex nature of human knowledge. Considering the current state of research on knowledge management and its positivist prism, introducing a novel perspective is timely. Instead of furthering the prevailing positivist consensus on the treatment of human knowledge in organisations, this paper invites reflection on its ontological and epistemological foundations. More specifically, a Marxian approach is introduced with a view to challenging the positivist philosophical underpinning of organisational knowledge.

“The Marxian approach developed in this paper draws on development psychology and neurophysiology and underscores the benefits of adopting these lenses for an alternative interpretation of human knowledge in organisations. Accordingly, a view has been developed that knowledge resides in action downplaying the phrase knowledge in favour of knowing. While an epistemology of possession embodied by a static view on knowledge has been widely studied in literature, its pendant, an epistemology of practice or knowing was downplayed.  Consequently, this paper opens a discussion on the benefits of integrating a psychological dimension to the study of organisational knowledge and provides new insights on knowing.”

WUP 28/7/2018

by Anesca Smith
©WUAS Press