The von Krogh and Roos Model of Organizational Epistemology

The von Krogh and Roos Model of Organizational Epistemology (1995) is the first model that clearly distinguishes between individual knowledge and social knowledge following an epistemological point of view regarding knowledge management.

According to this model, the following aspects should by analyzed:

• why and how the knowledge gets to the employees of a company
• why and how the knowledge reaches the organization
• what does it mean knowledge for the employee/organization
• what are the barriers for organizational knowledge management (Cristea and Căpaţînă, 2009, p.356).

The cognitive perspective states that a cognitive system, no matter if it’s human or artificial, creates representations (models) of the reality, and the process of learning appears when this representations are somehow manipulated (used in different inferences) (Cristea and Căpaţînă, 2009, p.356).

A cognitive epistemology sees organizational knowledge as a system with self-organization characteristics, where people are transparent to the information coming from the exterior. In this perspective, the brain can be perceived as a machine based on logic and detections, which doesn’t permit opposite declarations. So, the organization gathers information from its environment, which it process logical. By searches and different cognitive competencies, possible way of actions will be generated – everything is based on the mobilization of individual cognitive resources (Cristea and Căpaţînă, 2009, p.356).

It is known that the brain is not processing sequential symbols, but rather it perceives the whole perspective, global properties, models and synergies. Learning rules are those which can govern how the different components are inter-related. The information it is not just taken from the exterior environment, it can be generated also internally. The familiarity and practice are leading to learning. The employees form nodes of an organizations system, with relative weak links – knowledge represents an emergent phenomenon which comes from the social interaction of these persons (Cristea and Căpaţînă, 2009, p.356).