Attaining The Knowledge Organizational Paradigm: Theoretical Views Of The 21st Century Organization And The Case Of Slovenian Institute For Learning Enterprises

Abstract

As we enter the first decade in the twenty-first century, contemporary management thinking is being profoundly reshaped by two new convictions: managing organizational knowledge effectively is essential to achieving competitive success; and managing knowledge is now a central concern, and must become a basic skill of modern manager. In the paper we would like to present the impact of the increased interconnectivity of people and organization, and to perform the new organizational paradigm that provides a modern knowledge construction of the 21^st century organization. Therefore, the paper focuses on the process of attaining the knowledge organization, and enlightens different theoretical architectures of the 21st century organization. Modern forms of organizational structures range from horizontal, process and team structures to virtual networks. We illustrate the impact of organizational paradigm in the Slovenian economy with a case study, where we examine the Slovenian Institute for Learning Enterprises (SILE). SILE was registered as a non-profit institute and established by 18 flourishing major Slovenian enterprises in January 2001 with the aim of developing the concept of learning organization (LO) and diffusing the concept of knowledge management (KM) to become regular practice in Slovenian enterprises.