1 Tacit Knowledge in Organizations Philippe Baumard Sage Publications, London, 1999. Reviewed by J.-C. Spender, New York Institute of Technology, Old Westbury, New York. In the Academy of Management Review, 25(2), April 2000, p. 443-446 . The proliferation of books, new journals, consulting groups, academic conferences, Web sites, and so on dealing with knowledge management (KM) pushes us to recognize two things. First, the KM literature speaks to a widely felt need. Second, a large number of people seem able to use a wide variety of methods and ideas to make themselves felt and perhaps even prosperous meeting this need. We can wonder whether there has ever been a previous occasion when so varied a community-currently including hard science computer specialists, new wave management gurus, biologists, chaos theorists, forward-looking accountants, cultural anthropologists, and epistemologists-all think themselves engaged in so similar an enterprise. In this book Baumard brings classical epistemology together with a historian's approach to four contemporary business situations. The result is a sharply drawn knowledge-based theory of the firm-or, rather, of its management. Baumard is interested in a particular model of corporate strategizing, which he defines as finding ways to deal with the "fog" and confusion that periodically overcome organizations in today's hypercompetitive environment. There is an allusion here to Von Clausewitz's (1984) expression about "the fog of battle" once what has so long been carefully planned is actually joined. In each of the four minicases, firms found themselves in contested situations that strategically disoriented them. Baumard's theory is that firms make progress through such fog by strategically shifting the way they think (their adopted epistemology), as well as what they think about. He illustrates this with the well-established 2 X 2 matrix of knowledge types (epistemologies), and he argues that their senior executives strategically repositioned or changed their firms' thinking during a process of strategic reorientation. His method is to plot their firms' tracks around the matrix. Baumard's remarkably practical conclusions emerge from a book that is sometimes as foggy and disorienting as the matters with which it deals. It will challenge readers used to crisp writings about networked access to integrated corporate databases. It will also challenge readers used to vague and ungrounded musings about organizational learning and "learning organizations." This is partly because the book has been translated from the French, partly because of the difficulty of this material when handled at a profound level, and partly because the book is written by someone born into the French discursive philosophical tradition. The result is decidedly uneven and at times seriously difficult. That said, there is no doubt that this book is a heavyweight contribution to the KM literature. With it Baumard identifies a new way of tackling an emerging academic research territory that we might describe as an epistemological historical approach to strategic analysis. Even in this initial and relatively underdeveloped state, Baumard`s approach will influence those who understand that the promise of a knowledge-based theory of organizations, their modes of competition, and their management is that it takes us well beyond reclothing familiar modes of organizational analysis in new rhetoric.