The Inquiring Organization: How Organizations Acquire Knowledge and Seek Information

Organizations behave as knowledge-seeking communities when their members share beliefs about cause-and-effect relationships, norms for evaluating information, and values that guide the translation of knowledge to practice. What are the practices, arrangements, and mechanisms that make up how an organization knows what it knows? What are the underlying values and norms that shape the character and orientation of these methods? What can we learn from failures and disasters in organizational learning -- and how do organizations become susceptible to common learning traps such as the self-fulfilling prophecy, groupthink, group polarization, learning myopia, and selective information processing? In The Inquiring Organization, Chun Wei Choo examines how an organization's knowledge-acquisition and information-seeking leads to the construction of beliefs and the formation of epistemic practices that can affect its capacity to learn and grow. The book explores the epistemology of organizational learning and information seeking; how organizations acquire and justify knowledge; and how information is sought and shaped to warrant as well as to question beliefs. It starts from the premise that organizations are truth-seeking -- they seek beliefs which are well supported by reasoning, evidence, and experience in order to act more effectively. It then makes the case for a normative view of organizational knowledge which identifies the epistemic norms that an organization needs to pursue in order to acquire valid knowledge and true belief. The book progressively develops a set of information and epistemic features that are used to describe an inquiring organization. An inquiring organization is one that is motivated to acquire knowledge, where this motivation for knowledge includes not only the pursuit of truth, but also understanding, creativity, and curiosity. It has developed norms and practices of information seeking and knowledge acquisition that are truth-conducive, granting it reliable success in acquiring knowledge that is advantageous to the organization. It sees knowledge as the result of an ongoing process of inquiry in which knowledge is always provisional and always being improved upon, where beliefs are linked to experience, and the seeking of knowledge is an inclusive, collective enterprise.

About the Author :
Chun Wei Choo is Professor of the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. His recent books include The Knowing Organization (OUP, 2nd ed., 2006), The Strategic Management of Intellectual Capital and Organizational Knowledge (OUP, 2002), Information Management for the Intelligent Organization (3rd ed., 2001), and Web Work: Information Seeking and Knowledge Work on the World Wide Web (2000).

Review :
"One more time, Professor Choo offers a unique and ground breaking analysis of the nature of human organization and information behaviour. Mastering more than ever the art of weaving concepts, theories and models from various disciplines into a fascinating text, Choo provides a completely innovative discussion aimed at understanding how and why organizations acquire knowledge, and seek and use information. The book should become indispensable and a must-read for anyone seriously interested in studying organizations in the age of the Internet. It brings a totally new and much-needed modern perspective of organizations that will challenge well-established approaches in organizational theory and information science." --France Bouthillier, Associate Dean, Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies, McGill University "Choo's The Inquiring Organization is a monumental achievement. This book should be required reading in fields such as organizational behavior, library and information science, organizational communication, knowledge management, and information systems." --Ronald E. Rice, Arthur N. Rupe Professor in the Social Effects of Mass Communication, University of California, Santa Barbara "Chun Wei Choo's new book is a well-grounded theoretical text that will also benefit the organizational practices of information management and use. The Inquiring Organization will be an essential text for any teaching programme in information management and for courses on organizational information behaviour, but it should also be read by any organizational manager concerned with ensuring that organizational decisions at any level are well-founded." --T.D. Wilson, Senior Professor, University of Bor�s, Sweden "In The Inquiring Organization, Choo raises the critical question of how information is transformed into knowledge to support organizational learning. The book brings together theories of information and organizational behavior with pragmatic, social, and value-driven information-seeking and knowledge acquisition to provide a comprehensive framework for understanding and improving inquiring organizations. This important book comes at a critical time in the development of organizational theory and is highly recommended for those concerned with organizational sense-making, knowledge creation, and decision making." --Carol C. Kuhlthau, Professor Emerita, Department of Library and Information Science, Rutgers University "A remarkable achievement and enjoyable reading for scholars in organizational communication, knowledge management, information systems, and organizational behavior." --International Journal of Communication "The amount of intellectual effort put into the book is remarkable...I am quite sure that many young and senior researchers may find a way out of a creative block that many of us run into from time to time or a brilliant idea for a project while reading this monograph." --InformationResearch