Abstract

Knowledge Transfer (KT) is a well-known process that shapes organisational collaborations between businesses and academia. Yet, within Knowledge Transfer Processes there are many differing meanings attributed to language used to define engagement within Science-Technology-Engineering-Maths (STEM) and Humanities communities of practice. These differing meanings are formed through perceived normalisation of varied unspoken assumptions impacting on how motivational schools of thought engage in KT, including: the Neo Human Relations School, Job-Design Theory School, and System Adaptation School. Moreover, motivations impact on team ethical values to create cultural subsets within an organisational office context, typically positioned on a spectrum between individualist (self-focused) and collectivist (group-focused) mentalities. The resulting mentalities within ethical cultures can create conflict and confusion, however, previous research either has too niche or too broad a scope to gain a wide-ranging cross-disciplinary understanding of the many meanings attached to day-to-day knowledge transfer across industries, terminology definitions, and ethical cultural assumptions. This is especially noted (by literature) to be true for Humanities communities of practice, which is an emerging field of study with limited sources of knowledge available to view. Thus, this thesis’ research addresses the gap in literature by exploring the extent to which assumptions can change and influence motivations and ethical office cultures. The aim of this research being to investigate assumptions surrounding seven key terms and how they may be compared and interpreted in STEM and Humanities communities of practice to facilitate understanding of how KT processes are conducted and assess whether resulting key term definitions may plausibly cross community boundaries. The KT context surrounding this study was partially informed using previous undergraduate research into Human Resource barriers to KT engagement. The investigation was carried out using a multi-methods approach of triangulating a textual thematic analysis of a literature review, 26 semi-structured interviews, and three case studies (with 20 direct KT partners) featuring in a participant observation approach.
To collect community perceptions of KT engagement, multi methods paradigm approaches from both an interpretivist and critical realist stance enabled evaluation of all interview and participant observation data. Results showed that there was some joined up thinking between STEM and Humanities communities of practice used similar definitions for solutions provided, goal alignment, and flexibility. Alternatively, there was also a divergence in thought for other definitions including proactivity, response time, and understanding business realities. Further results concluded that for the compiled definitions from both STEM and Humanities communities, there was marginal to mid-tier transferability between community of practice definitions with a variable plausible repeatability or potential interviewee bias expected when comparing subjective personal opinion-based data. As under-clarified themes in themselves, increasing understanding of how ethical groupings and motivational schools of thought may be related is of the utmost importance. Ethical groupings were based on: Consequentialism; Value Ethics; Contractualism and Contractarianism; Act and Rule Utilitarianism; Norm Theory; and Kantianism. The models and theories discussed using these groupings have been rarely combined and evaluated within research papers since the year 2000. Originality was created when the discussion chapter discovered new definitions and within this thesis’ literature review with two new sets of models including a new series of combined motivational theory hierarchies and a new sliding scale of ethical office cultures. Thus, providing a level of increased understanding to facilitate a smoother successful transition through the stages of KT engagement and create more repeated mutual benefits for all involved.