Support for the sense-making activity of managers

Abstract The knowledge management literature has focussed on the creation and capture of organisational knowledge, but little attention has been paid to the ways in which senior managers make sense of, and use, this knowledge for decision making. This paper describes a new approach to the study of this problem using the cultural-historical activity theory. This theory takes activity, mediated by tools and the community, as the basic component in purposeful human work. A consequence of using this theory is the recognition of the pivotal role of the sense-making activity in linking the processes of knowledge management and strategic decision-making.

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