STRATEGY, KNOWLEDGE, APPROPRIATION, AND ETHICS IN HRM 257by employeeswillinglysharing with workmates. It is assumed that the knowl-
edge is so intricately intertwined with the knowledge-creators that it is mean-
ingless to contemplate the need for a separate process of appropriating such
knowledge. The appropriation process takes place both at the office and at
informal ‘brainstorming camps’ such as those at Honda where participants
(presumably all male) ‘discuss difficult problems while drinking sake, sharing
meals, and taking a bath together in a hot spring’ (Nonaka and Takeuchi
1995). These scenarios also illustrate the notion of ‘oversocialized’ people
responding to norms, values, beliefs, and attitudes developed consensually and
internalized through socialization (Granovetter 1985).
These camps provide opportunities for sharing tacit knowledge and build-
ing trust. Versions of such gatherings and social activities can be found in other
cultures and are not uniquely Japanese. The point to note is that the Japanese
experience has led others to believe that bringing people together in these sorts
of social contexts will automatically lead to knowledge-sharing. The idea of
sharing knowledgewillinglyhas subsequently come to be taken for granted by
scholars who tend to ignore the very unique features of the Japanese industrial
practices which render it feasible there and possibly untenable elsewhere.
As Glisby and Holden (2003) point out, knowledge sharing and transfer in
Japanese firms must be understood with reference to their embeddedness in
Japanese social and organizational culture and related value systems.
The circumstances that facilitate widespread diffusion include the dis-
tinct possibility or explicit promise of lifetime employment, a high degree
of commitment, extensive socialization, and relatively limited opportunities
for cross-organizational knowledge diffusion through employee mobility. This
latter is facilitated in part by a high degree of firm-specificity in the knowledge
itself and the processes through which it is created. Where these circumstances
do not hold, and where career advancement is typically individual or pro-
fession rather than organization-oriented, the appropriation of knowledge
becomes a much more problematic issue than in the case of Japanese firms.
Organizations in such environments are therefore likely to put in place more
explicit mechanisms for protecting their knowledge from what they consider
to be dysfunctional spillage or dissipation. Even so, the challenge of appro-
priation has not been fully understood within the HRM domain. While the
work on employee surveillance and control (e.g. Ogbonna 1992) implicitly
acknowledges the organization’s need to guard against dysfunctional knowl-
edge spillage, this is never explicitly recognized as a problem of appropriation.
In a recent contribution, Currie and Kerrin (2003) observe that employees
may be reluctant to share knowledge particularly if they fear this will hurt their
careers, and also that organizations may be unable to appropriate knowledge
that is situated in informal social groups. Theirs is a rare attempt to analyse
the connection between employees sharing knowledge with each other and
the contribution of HRM to knowledge management.