Bring Knowledge to Life: A Case Study of National Palace Museum, Taipei

While prior studies of knowledge management have provided valuable insights, our understanding of how emotion experience influences and is influenced by knowledge and the process of knowing remains extremely limited. If we accept the argument that emotion experiences are integral parts of our existence and day-to-day functioning (Frijda, 2005; Lambie & Marcel, 2002; Russell, 2003), we need to question why they have been neglected in our conceptualisation of knowledge and knowing for so long.

Following the tradition of grounded theory (Strauss & Corbin, 1998), this study explores and theorises the dynamic interplay of actors and their engagements within social and cultural contexts where knowledge is reconstructed, narrated and experienced through given new meanings and added with ‘felt quality’ (Piaget, 1971). Empirically, this study is based on a case study of the National Palace Museum in Taipei. Based on our case study, we detail and theorise the social interaction of three groups of actors, namely museum researchers, guides and visitors, and their distinctive yet interrelated engagements in the knowing of encultured knowledge. Our contributions are threefold. Firstly, the intellectual traditions that we drew and built on enable us to architect and depict the notion of “knowing as emotion experience”. Secondly, our emerging findings reveal the theoretical significance underlying the process of narrating culture enacted by the museum’s guides which is termed by us as “emotionalising knowledge”. Our third contribution is reflected in the methodological approach taken to achieve above two contributions. In particular, we are required to be creative in our research design and in the way we iterate and integrate our emerging findings with existing theories.

Biographical sketch
Dr Jimmy Huang is Reader of Information Systems at Warwick Business School, the University of Warwick in the U.K. His research interests are centred on the process and dynamics of knowledge integration, organisational learning, rhetorical practice and emotional experience in the contexts of information systems and organisational development. Amongst his 20 refereed journal publications to date, 8 are ABS 3-star rated, 1 is 4-star rated and 1 is the winner of the Emerald Outstanding Paper Award for 2008. Following the methodological tradition of grounded theory, his research is explorative in its orientation and inter-disciplinary in its nature. He is in the editorial boards of some leading IS journals, such as JAIS and Electronic Commerce Research and Applications, and has been track chairing international conferences, such as ICIS, ECIS and PACIS, during the past 3 years.

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