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Principal Topic In recent years, organisations have come to realise that what they’know’is crucial to their competitiveness. From the mid 1990s there has been a rapid growth in the study and practice of knowledge management. Now it is accepted that organisations whose people have superior knowledge and who are able to harness that knowledge, will develop a fundamental source of competitive advantage (De Geus, 1997; Teece, Pisano and Shuen, 1997). In recent years, organisations have placed an extremely high value on knowledge: Knowledge has become the most important factor in economic life. It is the chief ingredient of what we buy and sell, the raw material with which we work. Intellectual capitaloe has become the one indispensable asset of corporations”(Stewart, 1997 in Little, Quintas and Ray, 2002, p. 2).

The recent growth in interest about knowledge has led to many writings considering the …