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Hillsborough: how the police rewrote history
It is a sound general principle to treat any phrase containing the word ‘management’ with a degree of scepticism. If one of our revered banks offers to help with your ‘financial management’, you would be well advised to proceed with caution.
Similarly, anyone who has cause to make use of a firm specialising in ‘reputation management’ is probably best avoided. And if you are an employee who believes that ‘human resource management’ is there to support you in your work, the chances are that you will be disappointed. The pretensions and failures of the management industry over the last half century is part of the reason for widespread disenchantment with government, business and the public sector.
‘Knowledge management’ is an interesting addition to the lexicon of suspect phrases. At first glance it may seem relatively innocuous. Libraries, in their classification of books and other materials, have been in the business of ‘knowledge management’ for a long time. Universities too, through their structuring of knowledge within established disciplines, have contributed to the process.
The internet, with its ready access to vast stores of knowledge – as well as to a great deal of trivial rubbish and misinformation – has posed particular challenges in terms of the organisation of material which have not yet been fully resolved. The credibility and trustworthiness of websites, and the motives of those who set them up, should be carefully assessed before the material they contain is cited or used.
Within powerful public and private organisations some serious questions about ‘knowledge management’ begin to arise. It is a field that has developed over recent decades, alongside a focus on the commercial value of ‘intellectual capital’. One influential definition of ‘knowledge management’ describes it as ‘a discipline that promotes an integrated approach to identifying, capturing, evaluating, retrieving and sharing all of an enterprise’s information assets’. These ‘assets’ include not only codified knowledge set out in records and documents, but also tacit knowledge which individuals and groups possess through the daily work of the organisation and the collective culture it embodies.
In the public sector we have seen too many cases of governments, health boards and the police attempting to conceal information. Had it not been for the investigative efforts of journalists at the Daily Telegraph, the sheer scale of the MPs’ expenses scandal would never have come to light. Again, in cases of medical failure or negligence, the families of patients who have died in hospital have sometimes been told that the relevant files do not exist or have been lost. And in the report into the Hillsborough disaster, it emerged that police officers were encouraged to re-write statements to attribute blame to spectators and exonerate themselves. These are among the less savoury aspects of ‘knowledge management’.
Such practices are now firmly embedded in many institutions, indeed central to their mode of operation. Often the task of ‘information officers’ is not just to disseminate facts and figures to enquirers from within and outside the organisations which employ them. It is to ‘package’ the information, with careful editing and highlighting of particular points, in ways that are designed to put a positive spin on what is happening. Information that is potentially damaging to the organisation is airbrushed out of the account. After a time, this process becomes second nature to those who operate it, so that they begin to see nothing wrong with casual manipulation of the truth.
Throughout history, lies and propaganda have been part of the repertoire of governments, big business and ideologues of various kinds. What is particularly disturbing about ‘knowledge management’ is that it attempts to put a veneer of respectability on motives and practices that should be exposed as unacceptable. It is a phrase we can do without. We already have a perfectly serviceable set of terms to signify the epistemological status of different types of assertion: these include facts, theories, opinions, interpretations and narratives. By all means let us retain the word ‘knowledge’, but its coupling with ‘management’ should be regarded as a dangerous liaison.
Walter Humes held professorships at the universities of Aberdeen, Strathclyde and West of Scotland and is now a visiting professor of education at the University of Stirling
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