Inquiring Organizations: Moving From Knowledge Management To Wisdom : 9781591403098

Inquiring Organizations: Moving from Knowledge Management to Wisdom assembles into one volume a comprehensive collection of the key current thinking regarding the use of C. West Churchman's Design of Inquiring Systems as a basis for computer-based inquiring systems design and implementation. Inquiring systems are systems that go beyond knowledge management to actively inquire about their environment. While self-adaptive is an appropriate adjective for inquiring systems, they are critically different from self-adapting systems as they have evolved in the fields of computer science or artificial intelligence. Inquiring systems draw on epistemology to guide knowledge creation and organizational learning. As such, we can for the first time ever, begin to entertain the notion of support for "wise" decision-making. Readers of Inquiring Organizations: Moving from Knowledge Management to Wisdom will gain an appreciation for the role that epistemology can play in the design of the next generation of knowledge management systems: systems that focus on supporting wise decision-making processes.

Mason and Mitroff brought Churchman’s (1971) inquiring systems into the mainstream
of information systems research with their landmark article in Management Science in
1973. Yet, today they write in this volume: “To say that Singerian and Churchmanian
systems are underrepresented is putting it kindly. They are virtually nonexistent.” This
book hopes to take at least modest steps toward remedying that deficiency.
Some steps in this direction began with a paper entitled “Inquiring Organizations”
presented in the first Philosophical Foundations of IS (PFIS) mini-track at the Americas
Conference on Information Systems in 1996 (Courtney, Croasdell & Paradice, 1996).
Inquiring organizations are learning organizations that generate knowledge based on
one or more of Churchman’s inquiring systems. The basic concepts were refined, extended,
and presented at a workshop on philosophical aspects of information systems
at Wollongong University in Australia in 1998. This paper was published in the Australian
Journal of Information Systems later that year (Courtney, Croasdell & Paradice,
1998) and republished in the electronic journal Foundations of Information Systems
also in 1998 (http://www.bauer.uh.edu/parks/fis/fis.htm). These concepts were also extended
to knowledge management (Malhotra, 1997), decision support systems (Courtney,
2001), and Perspectival Thinking (Haynes, 2000).

In this book, we emphasize ethical organizational behavior and make a move toward the
explication of organizational wisdom (although Chauncey Bell’s chapter eloquently
disputes organizational wisdom as a possibility). As Churchman (1982) put it in Thought
and Wisdom, “wisdom is thought combined with a concern for ethics” (p. 9).