Reflection of "Extending Cross-Generational Knowledge Flow Research in Edge Organizations"

In this article they immediately introduced the word ontology, a formal representation of knowledge as a set of concepts within a domain. The ontology they discussed was that for cross-generational knowledge flows along the edge of organizations. They collected their data from surveys and then analyzed it using social/organizational network analysis (a system of analysis that can be found using the Protégé program from Stanford University if I understand it correctly).  The study was very vague in this sense despite the fact that it included images of what the program was like and which tabs to press.

The authors included copies of the survey that they handed out to employees  in the methods section which was nice to see, to see what type of questions they asked and the way in which they were presented. Many of the questions were technicalities (how long have you worked for the agency, what year/ generation were you born to, etc) but the last page had very subjective questions such as rate your organization on how well there is a shared understanding of command intent among your team? For my study I think a majority of the data will be subjective.

According to the data workers from the Baby Boomers generation are often seen as powerful individuals in industrial networks, or close to power, with high performance rates. This information coincided with the picture of Baby boomers from the article on perception of the university shown through metaphors, that they are hard working individuals because they think hard work will progress them in life.

In one section of the article they discussed other articles they had read. While they seemed to directly relate the information the similarity in the wording to the hypothesis and data analysis makes me wonder if they had read the articles before hand and created a slight bias in their analysis.

Overall the article didn’t conclude anything that I could tell. It said that there was a clear structure the organization of knowledge transfer and, even more importantly, evidence that generations had tendency towards a particular location in this system. Even this was somewhat doubtful to gather from the data. They raised so many questions, though I suspect this is the way it will always be with research. The article had little information that pertained to my study but was a good sample of writing style.