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.
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