Who owns my soul? The paradox of pursing organizational knowledge in a work culture of individualism
SIGCPR '99 Proceedings of the 1999 ACM SIGCPR conference on Computer personnel research
Communications of the ACM
Guidelines for the Security of Information Systems
Guidelines for the Security of Information Systems
Knowledge Management Foundations: Thinking about Thinking - how People and Organizations Represent, Create, and Use Knowledge
Working Knowledge: How Organizations Manage What They Know
Working Knowledge: How Organizations Manage What They Know
Bridging Space Over Time: Global Virtual Team Dynamics and Effectiveness
Organization Science
Market, Hierarchy, and Trust: The Knowledge Economy and the Future of Capitalism
Organization Science
Goals and Tactics on the Dark Side of Knowledge Management
HICSS '06 Proceedings of the 39th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - Volume 07
The Ethics of Knowledge Transfers and Conversions: Property or Privacy Rights?
HICSS '06 Proceedings of the 39th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - Volume 07
Human agency in a wireless world: Patterns of technology use in nomadic computing environments
Information and Organization
Information and Organization
Four ethical issues of the information age
MIS Quarterly
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The paper critically examines knowledge ownership when personal or organizational knowledge is transferred between individuals or between individuals and organizations. Employing a form of discourse analysis, we analyse the data from three complementary perspectives (international treaties and conventions on privacy and intellectual property, employment and merchant account contracts, and verdicts from knowledge-related legal cases) to unveil the conflicts between privacy and property rights. The results show a dialectical view where ownership shifts between the individual and the organization/community and therefore, the individual may or may not necessarily own what he knows. Privacy and property have been central issues in computational ethics for more than two decades. The use of information systems for strategic purposes offers new challenges for these established ethical concepts. Knowledge is not only a form of property governed by intellectual property law; it is also an individual attribute and, as part of the personality, it may be governed by privacy law. As a result, the dialectical view also shows that the ownership shift between the individual and the organization/community means that the organization may or may not necessarily own what it knows.