ORGANIZATIONAL KNOWLEDGE DYNAMICS Simona VASILACHE Academy of Economic Studies, Bucharest Abstract. The paper addresses the main issues concerning knowledge conceptualization and knowledge dynamics, in the context of Romanian organizations. The links between organizational knowledge, organizational learning and organizational culture are being investigated, with the aim of conceptual clarification and paradigm unification, in a domain of increasing research interest, where increasing complexity implies the risk of increasing confusion. Key words: knowledge dynamics, organizational learning, organizational intelligence, organizational culture. 1. Conceptualizing knowledge When, back in 1597, he had asserted that knowledge is power, Sir Francis Bacon couldn’t possibly have foreseen the everlasting echo of his saying. Indeed, nothing haunts the post-bureaucratic organization (Heckscher and Donnellson, 1994) like the problem of knowledge. What it is and how it should be employed. In 1988, Drucker identified knowledge as the source of competitive advantage and economic growth. From then on, the resource-based view of the firm (Barney, 1991) and the capability-based view of the firm (Prahalad and Hamel, 1997) take into account intangibles as key assets, evolving into a knowledge-based view of the firm (Grant, 1996; Spender, 1996). The age when knowledge existed inside the organization, but the organization, not its knowledge, was managed, is gradually replaced by the managerial focus on knowledge as such (Diekers et al., 2003; Easterby-Smith and Lyles, 2003). Still, what do we manage? Knowledge was considered to be the fourth factor of production (Jameson, 2001), a dynamic and relational one, whose complexity, according to Schneider (2007), makes it an expression of the conditio humana, as difficult to define as life, or culture. The same researcher states that intensive publishing, in the last decade, on the topic, does nothing but to increase the confusion. Brown and Duguid (2001) speak of an abundance of definitions and classifications of organizational knowledge. The starting point, if any, may be considered Ackoff’s (1989) DIKW model. This pyramid advances from data to information, then to knowledge, and, finally, to wisdom, a fourth layer which is usually left apart in further quotations of the model (Davenport and Prusak, 2000). A main critique of the model, which is to found, for instance, in Spender (2008), is that the categories in the model are nested, rather than neatly separated (information is constructed starting from data; knowledge is built on information, etc.), which makes it difficult to define each of them other than tautologically. Spender’s own definition of knowledge places it between organizational learning, which generates it (Duncan and Weiss, 1979), and