Literature Search: 2 December 2005

1. Paul W Chan School of the Built Environment Northumbria University Ellison Building (A221B)Ellison Place Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 8ST +44 0 191 227 4219 paul.chan@unn.ac.uk Literature Search: 2 December 2005

2. Personal Profile • Ph.D. thesis on construction labour productivity • Research interests: People in construction, Skills, especially keen on blue-collar workers • Formerly researcher in University of Salford • Joined Northumbria University July 2005 • “Constructing Futures” team at Salford: Prof. Rachel Cooper, Carl Abbott and Prof. Ghassan Aouad

3. Key Themes • Trust and psychological contracts • Strategy • Human resources management • Knowledge intensity (secondary) • Dynamic capabilities and core competencies (secondary)

4. Trust and psychological contracts • Politis, J D (2003) The connection between trust and knowledge management: what are its implications for team performance. Journal of knowledge management, 7(5), 55 – 66. • Importance of trust in knowledge sharing • Lack of depth and specifics as to what knowledge is shared (and how types of knowledge is distinguished) • Study looked at self-managed teams comprising unionised workers from an intra-organisational perspective in the manufacturing sector (aerospace) • Adler, P (2001) Market, hierarchy, and trust: the knowledge economy and the future of capitalism. Organisation science, 12(2), 215 – 234. • High trust institutional forms to proliferate • Growth in knowledge intensity increases reliance on trust • Conceptual paper that subscribes to Marxist theory (in particular the concept of ‘community’ • Need to modern forms of reflective trust

5. Strategy, dynamic capabilities and core competencies • Resource-based view of the firm • Hamel and Prahalad’s notion of core-competencies (the challenge and need to identify clusters of ‘know-how’) • Drucker suggested that knowledge has a shelf-life and constantly necessitates refreshing • Harrison, R and Kessels, J (2004) Human resource development in a knowledge economy: an organistaional view. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. • Classifying knowledge • Explicit versus tacit knowledge • Mode I and Mode II knowledge (also Popper’s Mode III) • Propositional, procedural and dispositional • Agency theory versus Stakeholder theory • Inter-play between the state and industry (lessons on social partnership in Continental Europe; also the Singapore example)

6. Human Resources Management • Taylor, R (2002) Britain’s world of work: myths and realities. Gloucestershire: ESRC Publications. • 90% of the workforce have permanent contracts (shifts towards flexible workforce) • On average, these workers stay in the same organisation for seven years and four months (contrast with Japan) • Dominance of the cognitive perspective of knowledge sharing • Lack of unifying body of knowledge addressing group and organisational level of analysis • Ambiguous notion of knowledge (analogies and metaphors) • “Honest probing is needed now, rather than glib answers

7. Knowledge Intensity • Studies undertaken by the Work and Employment Research Centre (WERC) • The need to excite knowledge workers with interesting work • Development of knowledge workers has to be done inductively rather than top down • Sample of research and technology organisations