256 PROGRESSING HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
innovation (Cohen and Levinthal 1990). The latter is particularly helpful for
our purposes here because it deals with the embodiment and manifestation of
knowledge through innovation.
As interest began to focus on the value of human capital and SHRM, it
became apparent that the value inherent in HR was subject to dissipation
and spillage if the firm did not take effective measures to appropriate such
value. Kamoche and Mueller (1998) argue that the debate on the appropria-
tion of HR must be preceded by a more fundamental question in organiza-
tional sociology, that is, why people participate in organizations in the first
place. They call upon managers and scholars to recognize explicitly that the
exercise of managing people ‘strategically’, is ultimately about appropriating
the value derived from utilizing HR. If through their pronouncements and
actions managers demonstrate that people are valued only to the extent that
they contribute to measurable bottom-line outcomes, HRM as a function
thus boils down to the appropriation of value from the human ‘resource’,
or organizational gothic and the extraction of human vitality in Garrick and
Clegg’s terms (2000). Thus the strategic management of people as a process
should not be couched in ambiguous terms that obscure the real purpose of
managing people. It is important to call a spade a spade.
The appropriation process involves a plurality of stakeholders, and the
extent to which each party can appropriate value depends,inter alia, on their
relative bargaining power (Coff1999). An even more accurate picture of the
nature of appropriation has been emerging in recent years as attention shifts to
knowledge management. It is becoming more evident that managing people
is about extracting the skills and knowledge people possess and building
these into the organizational productive processes. In the sections below we
examine an important aspect of this process: the question of participating in
the organization and consenting to transfer and share knowledge. Hence, to
what extent is the individual a willing participant in the organization’s efforts
to extract his or her ‘HR vitality’ for the corporate good?
Knowledge diffusion and sharing
Nonaka and Takeuchi’s study (1995) of knowledge creation in Japanese firms
holds that the ‘knowledge conversion’ process is a social process between
individuals, and is not confined solely within an individual. For these authors,
the importance of social interaction and sharing cannot be overemphasized.
It is taken as a given, while attention quickly shifts to the interaction between
the various forms of knowledge, for example tacit and explicit. This per-
spective has fostered the impression that knowledge is created internally
through intense social interaction and diffused throughout the organization