Negative aspects of counter-knowledge on absorptive capacity and human capital
| Published date | 12 October 2015 |
| Pages | 763-778 |
| Date | 12 October 2015 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JIC-01-2015-0010 |
| Author | Juan-Gabriel Cegarra-Navarro,Gabriel Cepeda Carrión,Anthony Wensley |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Knowledge management |
Negative aspects of
counter-knowledge on absorptive
capacity and human capital
Juan-Gabriel Cegarra-Navarro
Economía de la Empresa, Universidad Politécnica de Cartagena,
Cartagena, Spain
Gabriel Cepeda Carrión
Administración de Empresas y Marketing,
Universidad de Sevilla, Sevilla, Spain, and
Anthony Wensley
Institute of Communications, Culture, Information and Technology,
The University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
Abstract
Purpose –People live and work in a world where they do not have complete knowledge and,
as a result, they make use of rumours, beliefs and assumptions about relevant areas of concern.
The term counter-knowledge has been used to refer to knowledge created from unverified sources.
The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between counter-knowledge and human
capital (HC) as well as investigating interactions between absorptive capacity (ACAP) and HC.
Design/methodology/approach –A model is tested to examine the relationship between counter-
knowledge, HC and the financial performance of 112 companies listed on the Spanish Stock Exchange.
Findings –The results are calculated using structural equation modelling. This leads to the main
conclusion that while the increasing presence of counter-knowledge leads to a reduction of ACAP and,
by extension with HC. However, in the context of the sample, HC has positive effects on firms’
performance. Therefore, consideration must be given to the evaluation of the real cost of counter-
knowledge or inappropriate assumptions on HC.
Practical implications –The key managerial implication of this paper is that management should
actively develop an organizational culture which questions the source of any knowledge and favours
evidence-based reasoning over reasoning based on “gut instinct”, what has worked in the past and
reasoning based on rumours and gossip.
Originality/value –This paper provides empirical support for the argument that the all so-called
“knowledge”generated from the sharing of unverified news is not necessarily good knowledge.
Rumours or gossip shared thanks to unverified sources are some examples that illustrate people
possibility to create inappropriate or false beliefs via unsupported explanations and justifications.
Keywords Financial performance, Human capital, Absorptive capacity, Knowledge transfer,
Counter-knowledge
Paper type Conceptual paper
1. Introduction
Intellectual capital possesses intellectual attributes that can contribute value of an
organization (Bontis, 1998). Some of such intellectual attributes include human capital
(HC). HC can be defined as the stock of competencies, knowledge, social and personality
attributes, including creativity, embodied in the ability to perform human labour so as Journal of Intellectual Capital
Vol. 16 No. 4, 2015
pp. 763-778
©Emerald Group Publis hing Limited
1469-1930
DOI 10.1108/JIC-01-2015-0010
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/1469-1930.htm
The data of this research were taken from a research programme supported by the Spanish Ministry
of Education (REF: ECO2011-28,641-C02-02) and the Mobility Project (REF: PRX14/00164).
763
Negative
aspects of
counter-
knowledge
to produce economic value (Bogdanowicz andBailey, 2002). In the last decade and a half
there has been a dramatic increase in interest in the concept of “HC”and whether it
produces any firm or industry effects on financial performance (Cheng et al., 2010).
As Unger et al. (2011) point out, HC increases employees’capabilities of discovering and
exploiting business opportunities as well as these intellectual attributes help
organizational members to identify and acquire other useful beneficial resources such
as related knowledge. These ideas illustrate that, in order to create HC, organizations
need to build an overall picture of the learned knowledge with a considerable degree of
familiarity (Nahapiet and Ghoshal, 1998).
This paper focuses on the capacities that facilitate learning or the more rapid
acquisition of knowledge. The concept of absorptive capacity (ACAP) has been
increasingly drawn on by researchers to explain the transformation of external
knowledge into innovations (e.g. Gray, 2006; Noblet et al., 2011). ACAP can be
conceptualized as a set of organizational abilities to manage knowledge, assimilate it
and apply it to commercial ends (Cohen and Levinthal, 1990). Kim (1998) understands
ACAP as skills relating to the ability to learn and solve problems that enable a firm to
assimilate knowledge and create new knowledge. It should be noted here that
knowledge is placed in an intellectual capital context as soon as it is recognized as
capital or resource (Andriessen, 2006) and ACAP plays an important role in the
acquisition, assimilation, transformation and exploitation of external knowledge in an
organization by, for example, facilitating a friendly environment where collective
knowledge can grow (Zhou and Fink, 2003).
Counter-knowledge in contrast to scientific knowledge, often masquerades as
scientific knowledge but, in contrast, can be shown to be untrue with reference to
known facts or shown to lack appropriate supporting evidence. Indeed, the very lack
of supporting evidence for counter-knowledge may be used as evidence of the truth of a
particular statement –for example, the statement that a cure for cancer exists leading
to the suppression of all positive evidence (Thompson, 2008). Rumours, gossip,
unsupportable explanations and justifications, and inappropriate or false beliefs are
just some of the examples that illustrate an organization’s employees’capacity to create
and share counter-knowledge. The creation of counter-knowledge occurs when an
individual or individuals create inappropriate or false interpretations of events or
sequences of events. This counter-knowledge leads individuals to develop world-views
that are distorted and at most partially true.
This paper addresses the following questions “What is the nature and strength
of the relationship between the existence of counter-knowledge and ACAP?”and “What
part does the concept of counter-knowledge play?”. This study proposes that the
existence of counter-knowledge will influence ACAP and, by extension, HC as
organizational members share inappropriate assumptions about inappropriate routines
or utilize inappropriate approaches to scanning the wider business environment and,
also, to defining, meeting and bringing forward their ideas by introducing new
knowledge structures (Gibb, 1997). In other words, counter-knowledge can influence
ACAP and HC because managers and organizational members perceive and follow
knowledge structures which arise from rumours and outdated routines or procedures
and, more generally, counter-knowledge.
The above relationships are examined through an empirical investigation of
112 companies listed on the Spanish Stock Exchange. There is a lack of empirical
evidence, particularly in relation to the Spanish companies listed on the Spanish Stock
Exchange that can be used to investigate the relationship between ACAP and the
764
JIC
16,4
To continue reading
Request your trial