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The Knowledge Creating Company: How Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation by Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995, 284 pp., $25.00, cloth [ISBN: 0-19-509269-4]. Reviewed by Margaret B. Haack, Aoyama Gakvin University, Japan Nonaka and Takeuchi's recent collaborative effort, The Knowledge Creating Company: How Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation, is the culmination of their ground breaking work in organizational learning and innovation. In addition to its comprehensive overview of their own innovative "theory of knowledge creation," the book provides in-depth case studies of Japan's most successful innovative organizations.
The book is organized into four main themes: knowledge in organizations, the theory of knowledge creation, the structure of knowledge creating companies, and globalization and knowledge creation. Throughout their discussion of these main themes, the authors illustrate continuously their theoretical model by providing relevant and timely examples from highly successful companies such as Matshushita, Sharp, Fuji-Xerox, and Nissan.
According to the authors, knowledge in organizations is highly influenced by the religious and cultural biases of scientific philosophy. Although it is widely accepted that knowledge in organizations represents more than just information, Nonaka and Takeuchi view "knowledge" as the result of a process in which information is transformed into a solid state of justified belief. These justified shared beliefs or "organizational knowledge" in Japanese organizations reflect traditional Japanese assumptions of the interconnectedness...