Information Networks and Community Knowledge Structures By Robert A. Cropf, Ph.D. Dept. of Public Policy Studies Saint Louis University 3663 Lindell Blvd. St. Louis, MO 63108 Office:(314) 658-3934 E-Mail:CROPFRA@SLUVCA.SLU.EDU Prepared for delivery at the 1994 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, The New York Hilton, September 1- 4, 1994. Copyright by the American Political Science Association. This paper is a substantially revised version of a paper coauthored by Vincent Casaregola and originally presented at the 1993 meeting of the World Future Society, Washington, D.C. Introduction Daniel Bell recognized that: "The crucial point about a postindustrial society is that knowledge and information become the strategic and transforming resources of the society, just as capital and labor have been the strategic and transforming resources of industrial society (Bell 1979, 29; similar observations made earlier by Bell, 1973; Ellul, 1964; McLuhan, 1964). New technology dramatically alters the individual's relationship to society in line with McLuhan's assertion that "any technology tends to create a new human environment" (1964, iv). This new relationship has important consequences for both politics and community. Complementing the role of information as a strategic resource in the economy, is the role it plays as an increasingly significant part of the political process in developed societies. For example, Harlan Cleveland argues that "very large numbers of people empowered by knowledge...assert the right or feel the obligation to 'make policy'" (1985, 188). This empowerment of individuals and communities will strengthen democratic institutions only if access to the newly developing information networks is broad-based and not limited to a technological elite. Interactive technologies provide the means for interconnecting individuals and for connecting communities with large national databases and thereby helping to enrich and revitalize those communities. National information networks enable diverse cultural communities to establish a dialogue (Ducker 1985, 167) that could provide a model for global interaction. This new technology has the potential to offset the centralizing tendency of the current dominant technology: broadcast mass media and its largely one-way flow of information. Access, because it does not automatically alter the cultural paradigm of an "information hierarchy," is only one part (albeit a significant one) of an equation for successfully integrating currently excluded groups into the information economy Establishing a true dialogue with these groups, and their community-based knowledge structures, is also crucial and should serve as a basis for national policy concerning the information highway. The globalization of the U.S. economy also requires that we interact with vastly different social and cultural communities throughout the world. Access to international information networks (for example, through the Internet) enables individuals from diverse cultural communities to establish permanent dialogue and provides a model for virtual communities based on networks of shared interests and concerns whether it be commerce or environmental protection. The remainder of this paper consists of three sections. In the next part the potential for new technology to foster a broader and richer interaction among diverse communities is examined borrowing concepts from the field of cultural studies. After that the evolution of information technologies and structures is described as a prologue to the argument for increasing interaction between local knowledge structures (for example, cultural communities) and centralized knowledge structures (for example, information networks). This section asserts that social and political changes often accompany the introduction and dissemination of new technology in a culture. The paper concludes with a caveat regarding the proposed data highway that suggests that it is community and not simply information that is necessary for the production of new knowledge. Thus a successful information policy must include input from and allow access to U.S. society's many distinct cultural communities. New Technology and Local Communities The term "new technology," as used in this paper, includes not only computer hardware and software but also the communications system, networks, and databanks and other information utilities to which computers may be connected (Ronfeldt 1992, 5). Also encompassed by this broad term are advanced television, radio and telephone technologies (ibid). The chief characteristic of the new technology is interactiveness which allows the end-user to directly affect the operations of the hardware/software in an iterative manner. The U.S. economy is becoming integrated into the world economy in no small measure because of this new technology. Nonetheless, a real danger exists that the U.S. economy's dependence on information could increase the economic marginalization that many African-Americans, Hispanics and other minorities already experience while at the same time these groups comprise an increasingly large proportion of the U.S. population and workforce. Hitherto, the American educational system has not adequately served these groups nor has it served well the more advantaged groups in our society with respect to preparation for a twenty- first century workforce. The continued failure to train young, particularly minority, workers for an information-based economy could lead to reduced productivity and a lower standard of living for everyone in the country and jeopardizes our national security (Zinberg 1993, pp.244-248). Underscoring this problem is the fact that much of the predicted job growth in the next century will be in occupational areas requiring significantly higher levels of education and training. The U.S. Department of Labor finds that "the fastest growing jobs require much higher math, language, and reasoning capabilities than current jobs, while slowly-growing jobs require less"(1987, 99). Currently, African-Americans and Hispanics are more likely to be employed in occupations that will grow more slowly or actually decline in the future (Hodgkinson, 1992, pp. 9-10) Moreover, "where technological unemployment is occurring, there is particular pressure applied to women and minorities to surrender their jobs first" (Pelton 1989, 123). Although these current employment trends are themselves troublesome, these groups also face a future of even greater cultural marginalization, as they become increasingly isolated from the mainstream society's technology-based culture. As the U.S. economy becomes both more dependent on new technology and on foreign markets it will increasingly require a workforce that is both well-trained in technical skills and well- acquainted with multicultural patterns of knowledge production. This requires that the educational system create an environment in which "The student learns to examine reality from many angles, in different lights, and thus to visualize new possibilities and choices" (Reich 1992, 230). In order to reach this goal the educational system must embrace more diverse notions of knowledge (what it is and how it is created) as found in our wide variety of cultural communities. In order to create an non-exclusionary environment in the high-technology sectors of the economy it will be necessary to reform the educational system at all levels shifting its orientation away from an industrial-age view of society to more of an information-age perspective. The emergence of vast new information networks offers opportunities to accelerate dramatically the development, production, and distribution of knowledge; however, this evolving opportunity at the same time highlights the already existing inequalities in current educational and social institutions and practice. Hindering our progress in this respect is the fact that for much of our recent history, the major technology affecting society has been that of the broadcast media, which encourages passiveness on the part of the receiver-consumers and relies on the dominance of large media organizations characterized by centralized control. On the other hand, interactive technologies, if supported by institutions with the greatest resources (that is, government, enlightened corporations and universities) and if balanced with community-based programs, can be a major step toward decentralizing the processes of learning and teaching. Unlike the broadcast technologies, interactive technologies can create broad-based networks that serve wide populations while still encouraging individual and small-group participation. Promising new computer technologies and related developments include hypertext, multimedia, Mosaic, and Wide Area Information Servers (WAIS) as well as other techniques for better "envisioning information" (Ronfeldt 1992, 18). Hypertext allows the reader to move around several levels of the "text" by "hotkeying" certain words. Multimedia typically involve the use of CD-ROMs (compact disks capable of storing large amounts of data--usually the equivalent of thousands of pages of text but not restricted to text only) put at the user's fingertips enormous amounts of information that may also include pictures, sounds and video material in a conveniently searchable format. Mosaic is a program that introduces a user-friendly graphical user interface (GUI) to the otherwise intimidating environment of the Internet and also utilizes hypertext. WAIS has the potential for creating a single database of the world's information through its integration of major libraries and other large information providers in a single coherent system. It is still far too early to determine what the effects of these new technologies will have on society. However, it is likely that these new technologies will speed the transition from more limited, linear thinking, rooted in old text-based assumptions, to more expansive, multi-dimensional approaches to learning (by emphasizing the interdependence of any one text upon many others). Throughout much of the past, information and knowledge was created, preserved, and disseminated through two- dimensional text. Today, textuality has been, or will be, supplanted by multimedia forms derived from computer technologies. In text and print cultures, knowledge was static and preserved in canonical forms. Knowledge in post-print culture, however, is likely to become more dynamic and adaptive to rapidly changing social and technological environments. Under these conditions, what we know and how we know it will be characterized more by fluidity than immutability. This shift to a more fluid construction of knowledge could have a significant effect in broadening our understanding and appreciation of different cultures and distinct communities within those cultures. For example, hypertext and multimedia applications allow the integration of a variety of cultural perspectives into a single presentation bringing different perspectives into play. In this new type of presentation the sensory field becomes dynamic and multi-medial, allowing for concurrent presentations of multiple texts along with video images and sounds. Consider the simple example of a student reading King Lear. Today's student will read the text, refer to footnotes, perhaps look up words in a dictionary, and consult outside sources. Before or after the reading, the student may also view a performance. In the future, a similar student might view simultaneously performance and text of King Lear while having instant access to all extensive additional information on an on-line database such as those currently available through Mosaic and WAIS. With hypertext, performance and interpretation become intertwined with the text in an integrated sensory field. The authoritativeness of any single text is fundamentally challenged by the essentially pluralistic nature of hypertext. Textual presentations have long been viewed as the mind of an individual at work but few privileged individuals usually gained the authority of print. In contrast, multimedia presentations may be viewed as the collective mind of the culture at work potentially enabling unlimited participation in the creation of knowledge, provided there is access to the database. Improving our understanding of diverse cultures is an important pedagogical tool for the new technology but it is not the only one, nor may it be the most significant. Interactive technology may have an even more profound impact on the processes of learning and knowledge creation. Technologies currently under development, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality, may occasion the need for a new epistemology in the future. These technologies may alter our current notions regarding basic questions concerning "what we know" and "how we know it." This is likely to produce a revolutionary change in Western culture and might represent the final step in the movement to a global civilization. Interactive technologies provide the opportunity for diverse communities all over the world to engage in knowledge construction over wide networks connecting individuals through cyberspace. A current prototype of this can be found in the Internet which links millions of users from around the world to databases at universities and government agencies. Evolution of Information Structures Recent research in anthropology and cultural studies suggests that many of our basic assumptions about information and knowledge are culturally bound (Geertz, 1983; Kuhn, 1970; Rorty, 1979). Knowledge, according to these theorists, emerges out of specific culture-based patterns of thinking about what constitutes meaningful and useful information and patterns of presenting the information. Thus it presupposes a community who shares assumptions about knowledge. The following table presents a typology of the evolution of information structures and knowledge systems (Havelock, 1986; Ong, 1982). There exists considerable overlap between the eras such that residues (that is, elements of the previous type of culture) typically coexist with the dominant type of culture. Accompanying these changes in knowledge structures have been changes in social organization. By information structures I refer to the technologies and tools by which information and knowledge are created, transmitted, and stored. In primary oral cultures, information technology as such did not exist (Ong, 1982, 31ff). Chirographic cultures were the first to introduce information technologies through early forms of writing such as cuneiform, ideograms, and pictograms (Ong, 1982, 81-93).These forms, however, were severely limited in their capacity to produce new information, and to convey and retain vast amounts of information because of their inability Table 1: Typology of Cultures and Their Associated Information Structures Type of Culture Information Structures Examples Primary Oral Oral performance of narrative and ritual. Pre-Homeric Greece / several indigenous cultures in North America, South America, and Africa / 19th- century Serbo-Croatia. Chirographic Alphabetic writing; manuscripts, rise of powerful class of scribes; high oral residue in written work; systematic representation of speech in writing. 1st Millennium Phoenician, Greek and Hebrew, preceded by other cultures in the Fertile Crescent, northern Africa, and China with ideographic writing. Textual-Print Printing from alphabetic type. Renaissance Europe, from there to rest of the world through trade and/or colonization; the assumptions of a print- based culture still persist, in some form, to the present. Post-Print Telecommunications, Photography, Radio Broadcasting, Film, Television, Interactive Computing, Hypertext. Mid 19th-century Europe to the present global culture. to transcend a too literal representation of reality and a failure to make subtle distinctions between objects and ideas. The ability to draw such distinctions arose with the invention of the alphabet. The alphabet revolutionized humankind's relationship to its experience by now making it possible to express subtle ideas in writing (Havelock, 1986, 98-117; ibid.). Before the creation of the printing press, the technology of producing texts was prohibitively expensive except for the largest institutions in society--namely the church, the state and the universities. As a result, these entities were able to exert near-total control over the production and distribution of knowledge. This monopoly over information mirrored the monopoly on power exercised by these institutions. Evolution of print-based culture began with the mid-15th century development of the printing press by Gutenberg and others. This occurred at a time when the already existing manuscript culture of western Europe had reached its culmination, creating among intellectuals a receptive community for the increased production of texts through printing. The emergent "textual consciousness" of the early Renaissance offered a friendly conceptual environment for the textual products of the new information technology of printing. At the same time, the advent of the printing press marked a quantum leap into a new level of textual awareness and a whole new pattern of knowledge production that unleashed powerful forces within Western society. The cultural historian, Elizabeth Eisenstein (1968), argues that printing was an agent of sweeping change that helped set in motion the cultural and social revolutions that transformed Western Europe over the next several centuries. The invention of mechanical printing ushered in the modern era of information structures and knowledge systems. As a result of this process (which media and culture scholar Walter Ong has referred to as the "technologizing of the word") the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries was made possible (1982, 117-123). Printing allows for the efficient production and distribution of vast amounts of information similar to the factory system of mass production: Typography makes words out of preexisting objects (types) as one makes houses out of bricks: it hooks up words in machines and stamps out on hundreds or thousands of surfaces exactly the same spatial arrangement of words--constituting the first assembly line; and it facilitates indexing to locate physical places where specified knowledge can be retrieved through the eyes. (Ong, 1977, p.281). Industrialization, a direct outgrowth of print culture, accelerated the evolution into post-print culture, the type of culture that currently characterizes our society and the rest of the developed world. The Industrial Revolution was accompanied by the rise and spread of capitalism. Capitalism along with technological innovation produced a dramatic change in society's understanding and use of knowledge as Peter F. Drucker points out: This transformation was driven by a radical change in the meaning of knowledge. In both the West and Asia knowledge had always been seen as applying to being. Almost overnight, it came to be applied to doing. It had become a resource and a utility. Knowledge had always been a private good. Almost overnight it became a public good [final italics mine]. (1993,53) Early post-print information technologies that have shaped industrial culture include: (1) the telegraph, (2) photography, (3) the telephone, (4) the phonograph, and (5) the motion picture. Broadcasting technologies developed from advancements in electronics that occurred within a generation during the early mid-20th century. These technologies took the high-resolution representation of direct sensory experience and transmitted these representations to the public via airwaves. Whereas earlier telecommunication technologies relied essentially on point-to- point transmission and reception, the new broadcast technologies allowed for universal reception of a centrally transmitted message. This increased efficiency of communication, however, comes at a cost. Until recently, the hierarchical nature of mass broadcast communication, with its capital-intensiveness, made inevitable the passive reception of information by the public. From the mid-twentieth century to the present, we have been living in an era in which much of society and culture has been dominated by the mass media. The power of these large media entities derives principally from their effectiveness at persuading millions of people to purchase products and services (Galbraith, 1967,149-52). Because of broadcast technology, the previous thirty years witnessed a period where information and knowledge production were influenced to a large extent by large institutions in command of considerable resources. Society and technology evolve interdependently as Marshall McLuhan observes, "Any technology tends to create a new human environment" (1964, iv). The current period is marked by the rapid transformation of the world from an industrial-based economy to an information-based economy due in large part to computers, the information technology of the late 20th century. Information and the rapid speed at which it can be spread has destroyed national barriers: "Our ability to share information and knowledge is today creating global trade and culture. Tomorrow it will begin to form a global brain--a global consciousness" (Pelton, 1989, 120). Thus in contrast to the centralizing tendencies of broadcast media, computer networks offer the promise of greater decentralization of knowledge production similar to the printing press five hundred years ago but on a significantly larger scale. Nearly thirty years ago, McLuhan forecast that "the implosion of electric energy in our century cannot be met by explosion or expansion, but it can be met by decentralism and the flexibility of multiple small centers" (1964, 75). Today information networks spanning the earth are making McLuhan's observation a reality by interconnecting local communities that effectively serve as these multiple small centers of local knowledge production. Mass Communication and Local Knowledge In contrast to previous eras, the terms "data," "information," and "knowledge" describe different sets of relationships in our culture between patterns of representation and direct experience. In pre-print cultures, "data" and "information" did not exist as meaningful terms, at least not in ways recognizable to our culture. All information and knowledge production in oral cultures depends on artistic performance (i.e., visual arts, plastic arts, performing arts, and verbal arts). Knowledge is experienced directly in such cultures as small communities gather to share the stories, the dramas, and the other ritual representations of the accumulated knowledge of their society. Even in an early textual (chirographic) culture, the close relationship between knowledge creation and artistic performance remains because of the relative scarcity of texts and their inaccessibility to the masses. In a print culture, however, information creation is detached from artistic performance, and more widespread text literacy allows for a generalized separation between the acts of recording experience and the acts of interpreting and evaluating that experience. As a result of this distinction between community-based acts of knowledge creation and the way knowledge is created in print cultures, there arise two distinctly different types of knowledge: (1) "systematic" knowledge, the "objective," verifiable record of experience; and (2) "local" knowledge, the communal interpretation and evaluation of direct experience and recorded events (Geertz, 1983). Systematic knowledge is built upon objective fact and is the type of knowledge most closely associated with the Western intellectual tradition, at least since the Scientific Revolution. The assumption that facts exist in a pure state free of sensory perception, linguistic formulation, or cultural interpretation underlies and is essential to intellectual authority from the Renaissance to the present. Balancing this is the collateral assumption that opinion derived from objective fact has unique cultural authority. On the other hand, the terms "folk tale," "old wives' tale," and "folk wisdom" are used to refer to local knowledge created by communities outside the scientific tradition that persist in traditional, communal patterns of interpreting experience (that is, remnants of a pre-print culture). However, all our systems for the recording, storing, retrieving, and transmitting of information are dependent, to some extent, on cultural assumptions and linguistic representations (in other words, language describing an experience or object always exists at one remove from that experience or object, or as physicist, Niels Bohr noted, "We are all suspended in language."). These information systems are thus never completely free from interpretation and judgment (that is, subjective opinion or cultural bias). Thus, all our knowledge (even that which is typically referred to as scientific) is rooted in received opinions or common cultural assumptions. This is true whether we are discussing a Western society or an African tribe. The differentiation of types of knowledge corresponds to a bifurcation in the West into an intellectual tradition of philosophical, and later scientific, discourse engaged in authoritative knowledge production and an alternative, increasingly marginalized tradition of local and communal knowledge construction. The western intellectual tradition is rooted in a belief in a "universal" knowledge that can be applied everywhere and anywhere without losing any of its validity. This tradition stems from the natural sciences, particularly physics, in which certain universal mathematical laws are foundational explanations of natural phenomena. More recently, a number of prominent cultural and political theorists have begun to question the validity of this universality, as applied to certain areas of knowledge, particularly those concerning social and cultural phenomena. These theorists represent many different disciplines of thought, some of which overlap and some of which are quite distinct. The essence of their critique of universality is that gender, race, religion, ethnicity, class, physical or mental condition, age and other qualities have served and still serve to marginalize certain communities in the West (this is not to ignore the fact that non-Western cultures may engage in similar marginalizing behaviors toward others). The dominant intellectual tradition has never fully recognized that such groups might have valuable experience to contribute to the general culture, and that they might be reconstructing that experience through patterns of information and knowledge production distinctive from the institutionally authorized and centralized system of knowledge production. For example, Dordick and Wang recount an incident in their book in which farmers in Taiwan ignored information that would have allowed them to sell their wares at higher prices (129). The farmers believed there was nothing wrong with their traditional use of middlemen despite its inefficiency by Western economic standards. However, elimination of the middle-man would have resulted in large-scale unemployment which in the end would have harmed the entire community. Despite the claims of universality inherent in systematic knowledge cultures, in reality the cultural assumptions upon which these types of knowledge structures are based are actually quite limited. The information and knowledge produced by systematic knowledge structures are limited by the parameters established by what can be proved or disproved using often reductionist methods. This approach to understanding the world and experience does not lend itself easily to the creation of a comprehensive and holistic worldview. Moreover, without such a worldview, there cannot be true universal knowledge as the theoretical physicist, David Bohm persuasively argues: In essence, the process of division is a way of thinking about things that is convenient and useful mainly in the domain of practical, technical and functional activities (e.g., to divide up an area of land into different fields where various crops are to be grown). However, when this mode of thought is applied more broadly to man's notion of himself and the whole world in which he lives (i.e., to his self-world-view), then man ceases to regard the resulting divisions as merely useful or convenient and begins to see and experience himself and his world as actually constituted of separately existent fragments.(1980, 2.) The second type of knowledge, local knowledge, as the term itself implies, does not pretend to universal validity. Local knowledge, which cannot exist outside of the behaviors or the performances in and through which it is enacted, occurs within communities that retain the remnants of oral culture often with a strong element of folk culture. These communal knowledge structures tend to be fluid, in that they create knowledge in the form of events(for example, pageants and rituals) not commodities. In cultures characterized by these local knowledge structures, behavior and action are emphasized in the creation of knowledge and the attribution of meaning to objects and events. The knowledge structures of unitary communal cultures are also inherently limited, but for different reasons than systematic knowledge cultures. The small size of these cultures necessarily limits the breadth of their experience. Everyday life in such cultures tends to be sharply constrained by such concrete phenomena as climate and geography, which may prove insurmountable barriers to a genuine understanding of the different circumstances and experiences of other cultures. We now have begun to understand that systematic or "scientific" knowledge structures can coexist with communal or local knowledge structures. In fact, interactive technology has, in certain respects, helped to restore an approach to knowledge creation similar to that found within local knowledge cultures. Within certain cultural contexts, it is possible to create an environment in which the knowledge structures rooted in community norms and values and those derived from systematic intellectual operations can be interwoven into a common, collaborative understanding and approach to knowledge production. The advance of new interactive technologies open opportunities to affect this collaboration as suggested by the following incident. Members of certain native American tribes were invited to a participate in an Internet workshop. For the first part of the presentation, they showed polite interest in the subject. However, at the start of the second part, the presenter announced "Enough of the white man's ASCII," and showed them various artifacts from their own cultures accessed via the Internet. The native Americans came away from the workshop duly impressed with the power of the new technology and with a willingness to learn more (LaQuey, 1993, pp.36-37). Community on the Data Highway An important concern for those developing information policy should be to recognize that centrally authorized information alone is not sufficient to the production of new knowledge and the economic and political empowerment of various groups and communities. American society encompasses a wide spectrum of distinctive groups who share patterns of behavior and discourse shaped by many common intellectual, ideological, and cultural values. These communities may be located in a specific geographic place, but need not be. Their shared cultural experiences and values constitute an important element in the formation of a national knowledge base. Currently, the primary users of new information technologies make up, in effect, a highly exclusive meritocracy, comprised in large part of well- educated males who are usually white. Recently, there have been limited efforts to alter the complexion of this group to make it more representative of America's diverse society. However, these efforts are far too limited and lack full support by government policy to achieve any genuine diversity. Even if these attempts at increasing access were to succeed, however, the hierarchical cultural paradigm would still exist. New information technologies, both extant and anticipated, seem to promise a brave new world of shared knowledge and empowerment. However, our present social tensions result in part from employing vast information technologies without altering hegemonic cultural constructions such as the information hierarchy noted above. Although a universally accessible, interactive information base is one necessary step toward empowering the technologically disenfranchised, other steps are necessary as well. The U.S. government, in conjunction with private enterprise, should develop an information policy in which universal access and meaningful community input into national databases are given sufficient resources and actively encouraged. A useful analogy may be drawn between current information policy planning and U.S. transportation planning at mid-century. Just as the interstate highway system, the product of 1950s technology and innovation, was as a solution to the nation's transportation needs that created its own set of problems; the proposed data superhighway could similarly encourage great expense of energy and resources without necessarily producing tangible benefits for most Americans. Getting from place to place is no longer a problem for most people, but at the same time valuable natural resources have been consumed and environmental quality has deteriorated. Similarly a data superhighway may find us efficiently shifting larger and larger quantities of information from place to place, in cyberspace, without any adequate means to or understanding necessary to convert that information into socially useful knowledge. Many people argue that we are literally drowning in a sea of information; a data highway could tremendously exacerbate this problem. Knowledge is constructed through numerous acts of discourse in communities and that construction may be accelerated and enriched through access to massive amounts of information. However, it is community and not tremendous volumes of information that is the necessary and sufficient cause of the creation of knowledge. The data superhighway, if properly conceived and implemented, should be dynamic and adaptive, similar to the brain itself (a vast neural network that consists of distinct, diverse, distant clusters of interconnected cells, producing a whole far greater than the sum of its parts). A national information policy must value local knowledge as much as it does centrally authorized knowledge; however, local knowledge currently has few ways of entering into the vast official information systems that help us to govern our society. Outreach programs must extend into a wide variety of communities, engaging in genuine dialogue with diverse groups, and allowing the experience of these groups to become part of the design of larger (statewide or nationwide) information networks and databases that offer a bridge between different communities. In this respect, educator Eugene F.Provenzo asserts that: Telematics, or networking, could restructure our work and culture. It gives people a way to maintain and promote their autonomy. Peripheral groups, or isolated units within the culture, can suddenly take advantage of data bases that previously had only been available to major organizations. (1986, 30) Access to and the opportunity to help shape information in national databases to reflect local knowledge can help bring into being a new cultural paradigm of information and knowledge creation one in which decentralized knowledge structures complement centralized knowledge structures. 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