KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT, COMMUNICATION AND LANGUAGE: WHERE IS RESEARCH GOING

This paper aims at providing an insight, although not exhaustive, into the literature on Knowledge Management, with a particular focus on the communicative aspects of knowledge transfer. Knowledge management is a very extensive research field, mainly applied to organizations. It is a system to manage knowledge assets in any organization of people, from making knowledge profitable to its transfer or sharing. These systems are implemented and improved over time and rely on the possibility to formalize knowledge as well as to find the best way to communicate it. Our research question stems from this latter consideration. Is knowledge effectively communicated and what is the role of language? Is knowledge management communication effectively structured or modelled? To answer these questions, first, we focus on corporate knowledge systems. Consequently, on the one hand, we partially assess the relevance and the size of the existing studies on knowledge management and its communication, and on the other hand, we provide implications and possible proposals to carry out future research on the application of communication theories to knowledge management in corporate life. In section 2, some studies on knowledge management will be reported, in order to link them to business discourse and business communication; in section 3, we try to peg knowledge management to communication models and eventually, to business communication. Section 4 reports the importance of the role of language in knowledge transfer.