Developing the core principles of responsible knowledge management (rKM): Section 2.7 – The vacuum of ethics in KM: A marginalised concept

This article is Section 2.7 of Chapter 2 of a series featuring my Master’s thesis The Emerging Concept of Responsible Knowledge Management (rKM): Identifying and Formulating the Core Principles of rKM.

Against the background of a preoccupation with metrics, in 2025, McIntyre¹, a handbook contributor on ‘responsible and inclusive’ KM can also assert with unwavering conviction that “KM…does not exist for any other reason than to bring value to the organisation it serves.” This statement is not an anomaly, it reflects the mainstream utilitarian view, crystallising what much of the field takes for granted. McIntyre’s assessment is delivered with serene selfassurance and without any awareness of its hollowness or a flicker of existential unease.

Dalkir’s pre-eminent textbook², Knowledge Management in Theory and Practice (4^th edition), devotes exactly one page to ethics, tucked into a section on team behaviour, as if ethics were a matter of etiquette. Firestone and McElroy’s book³ Key Issues in the New Knowledge Management, despite its claim to represent a paradigm shift in KM, manages to do so without addressing ethics at all. And in Roberts’ razor-sharp yet playfully titled book⁴ A Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap Book about Knowledge Management, the index does include ‘Egyptians’ for their hieroglyphs, but not ‘ethics’.

Such declarations and omissions are not accidental. They reveal that ethics is underdeveloped or structurally peripheral in KM, if not wholly absent from the core of how the field has defined itself⁵. I would argue that it is the existence of this void, this hollow core, that pushes the practitioners and researchers to repeatedly question what the focus of KM is or should be. The decades-long preoccupation with organisational value has left the field ethically and intellectually adrift.

This hollow core of KM can be attributed to engaging with the broader metanarratives that shape Western thought. Particularly those that valorise progress, productivity, competition, profit and control. Within this worldview, the unspoken normality of instrumental logic is in the driver seat. The primary concerns seem too logical to question. In this sense, KM has not gone astray so much as it has been perfectly consistent with the values of the system it inhabits.

“The positivistic view still dominates in economics” (Frey and Stutzer⁶). Homo economicus is the unerring rational agent, whose optimal environment is competition, where he perpetually outperforms others by consistently maximising utility more effectively than anyone else. Economists “have taken for granted that only those individuals can survive who correctly perceive the objective conditions” (Stroebe and Frey⁷). The reasonable man neglects emotions and spirituality, making correct decisions despite his ‘dysconsciousness’ (Seyama-Mokhaneli⁸).

According to Escobar⁹, “[t]he modern scientific and economistic worldview … divides the world into subjects and objects, a world we can understand and manipulate at will.” He links this objectivising stance to modernity’s deeper ontological dualisms, which have disconnected humanity from the nonhuman world and “banished the sacred from social life, reducing it” to private belief. As he warns, such disconnection not only grants rights exclusively to humans but also undermines our capacity to coexist with the full range of living beings in a wiser, more collaborative relationship with the Earth.

In this worldview, knowledge, alongside land, labour, and life itself, is simply an object of control. As Homo economicus observes the landscape of organisational life, intellectual capital, too, becomes another object in the service of competitive advantage. Its value lies not in what it enables humans to understand or become, but in how efficiently it can be converted into profit. Intellectual capital becomes a measurable input to production, a unit of value to be mined from employees’ minds and converted into organisational output. The human being, once the knower, becomes merely a temporary vessel.

In the world of rational business, particularly under the sway of neoclassical economics, ethics is largely displaced by utility. Decision-making becomes a matter of cost-benefit calculation, guided by efficiency and market signals rather than moral reasoning. The rational agent, Homo economicus, is not bound by responsibility in the ethical sense but only by rational self-interest. Within this logic, the pursuit of profit is not just accepted but moralised as a driver of societal good, rendering ethical scrutiny redundant or even suspect.

It is thus no surprise that ethics as a topic of interest within the discipline of KM is almost entirely absent. Ethics presumes that actions have moral weight and that humans have obligations to something beyond self-interest. Ethics determine how one ought to act, what is right or wrong, just or unjust, and what kinds of actions contribute to the flourishing of all life. In traditional philosophical terms, ethical reflection can involve questions of virtue (Aristotle), duty (Kant), or consequence (Mill), but they all involve accountability.

As a managerial paradigm of business, KM inherits the ethical vacuum of the economistic worldview. Responsibility, if mentioned at all, is usually tethered to compliance, data protection, or efficiency, not to the deeper questions of what knowledge practices serve, whom they exclude, or what they sustain.

This absence is not a neutral oversight, it is structural, rooted in the utility of assets. McPhail¹⁰ draws attention to the “productive function of ethics” in the knowledge economy, a concept that captures the way ethical language and structures are increasingly mobilised for purposes external to ethics itself. In this framing, ethics is not grounded in relational responsibility, moral inquiry, or civic obligation, but rather in its utility, its capacity to support other organisational goals such as trust-building, risk management, or legitimacy. This transformation of ethics into a productive resource is especially visible in Intellectual Capital Reports, where ‘ethical knowledge’ is often translated into survey scores, compliance signatures, or integrity management systems. These mechanisms allow ethics to be tracked, measured, and reported, thus rendering it a form of ‘ethical capital’ that adds to the organisation’s intangible assets.

The danger here is profound: ethics is being absorbed, reframed as a performance indicator, and used to reinforce the very managerial logic that would necessitate genuine ethical scrutiny. As McPhail notes¹¹, this shift may signal not the presence of ethics, but its end. The more ethics is used to produce other forms of value, the less it functions as an autonomous mode of judgment.

From this perspective, the problem is not merely the absence of ethics in KM, but its instrumentalization. When knowledge, and by extension, ethics, is managed in service of capital accumulation or reputational control (e.g. corporate social responsibility), ethical deliberation is displaced by performative gestures.

McPhail identifies a distinction between broad and narrow ethical deliberations in the knowledge economy. Narrow discussions, he argues, tend to focus on technical questions (compliance, transparency, or information control) while broader approaches would engage with the normative foundations of knowledge systems, their civic implications, and their impact on justice.

Two examples from the KM literature illustrate this split with precision. Koulikov¹² explores knowledge sharing through the lens of subcultures (hackers, participatory media producers, and ideological proselytisers). He identifies what he calls “new ethics of knowledge transfer,” but these are better described as social justifications or subcultural norms that motivate informal knowledge exchange. Nowhere does Koulikov engage with whether such practices are ethically good, nor does he interrogate their consequences. The article skirts normative analysis altogether, offering instead a kind of sociological curiosity about knowledge transfer occurring “along the entire spectrum of human activity.” What emerges is not an ethics of KM but a taxonomy of underground sharing cultures; provocative, but marginal to the core challenges facing organisations and society. Koulikov’s contribution is broad in encompassing knowledge transfer in the society as whole but also narrowly focused on the challenge of controlling knowledge in digital environments, framing ethics as a risk-management issue tied to surveillance and control.

Land, Amjad and Nolas¹³ claim to introduce an “ethics dimension” to KM, but their focus is almost entirely on technical systems and processes, rather than on KM as an epistemic practice. Their examples, ranging from Enron’s data destruction to NGOs’ distorted reporting practices, reveal real concerns about accountability, surveillance, and manipulation, but these are portrayed as system-level risks rather than principled ethical reflections on behaviour. What is missing is any deeper inquiry into KM’s normative foundations: How should knowledge be treated? Who has the right to define, store, or restrict it? Whose knowledge is valued, and whose excluded? Instead, the article performs the very displacement it critiques: reducing KM ethics to issues of technological misuse rather than confronting the managerial logic that enables such misuse.

While both texts invoke the language of ethics, they do so in ways that contain ethical discourse rather than expand it. Their primary concern is how to ensure existing systems remain functional, secure, and legitimate, not whether those systems should exist in the first place, or in what form. In McPhail’s terms, these are examples of ethics that function productively but not reflectively. They help sustain the knowledge economy’s operations by offering procedural safeguards, but they fall short of interrogating the deeper values, assumptions, and exclusions upon which those systems rest.

When KM defines its primary objective as value creation, it implicitly dedicates itself only to the service of efficiency. This orientation demands that knowledge be harnessed to produce measurable improvements, faster processes, smoother coordination, increased output. This efficiency must be pursued, evidenced, and compared, which necessitates some form of consensus, genuine or imposed, about what counts as valuable, and it requires mechanisms of measurement to track whether value is indeed being increased. Anything that complicates or resists this smooth calculation (ambiguity, dissent, contextual complexity, generosity) is treated as an obstruction to be managed away. Within this logic, there is always room for more efficiency, more performance, more gain. If the focus is intra-organisational, the competition is with one’s former self: continuous improvement becomes a moral imperative. If the focus is inter-organisational, the drive intensifies: one competes not only against others but against the organisation’s own past, always falling short of the imagined optimum. Yet if we step outside this paradigm of perpetual optimisation, a host of neglected priorities come into view: equity, sustainability, community, flourishing, meaning, even limits.

The problem is not that value creation is inherently wrong, but that it has become narrowly defined, tethered to monetary metrics and performance indicators. A reorientation of KM requires not only rethinking what counts as value but also reclaiming the legitimacy of noneconomic forms of worth.

It must be noted that KM is not, in most cases, the primary engine of strategic direction, rather it is the mechanism of execution, embedded within the aims and logics that strategy sets. However, this does not absolve KM from responsibility. On the contrary, its complicity lies in the ease with which it pursues the prevailing priorities of performance metrics, efficiency targets, and organisational value narrowly construed. KM, as traditionally practised, rarely, if ever, interrogates the ends it serves. Its frameworks are designed to optimise, streamline, and extract – not to question.

KM could be ethically and intellectually invested in the implications of the strategies it helps implement. KM can – and must – do more. It already has, in the past. It is worthwhile asking: how could knowledge be mobilised in ways that increases long-term well-being?

Next part: Section 2.8 – Affirming life: systems thinking as ethical worldview.

Article source: Koskinen, H. M. (2025). The Emerging Concept of Responsible Knowledge Management (rKM): Identifying and Formulating the Core Principles of rKM. (Master’s Thesis, LUT University).

Header image source: Created by Hanna M. Koskinen using ChatGPT.

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