Learning or Absorbing: Strategy Choice of Chinese Government KM

During the past two decades, with the emergence of globalization and information economy, knowledge has become a core resource of organization, knowledge management (KM) presents an increasing importance at different levels, but how KM is applied in the public sector has not been sufficiently discussed. Negligence of context, over borrowed theories, concepts and frameworks from enterprise KM turned learning government into an alternative strategic objective of government KM in China. In this paper, the authors discuss the unreality of learning government by analysis of the conflict between organizational learning capability and bureaucraciespsila constraint; outline the characteristics of core competence to realize knowledge value for Chinese government agencies. By introduction of absorptive capacity framework and comparison with learning capability, this paper points out that as a context-embedded relative competence, the formation and development of absorptive capacity mostly depend on inter-organizational dyadic relation in a social network instead of intra-organizational structure, process and culture changes, itpsilas more appropriate as the strategic orientation of Chinese government KM considering of bureaucracies context. This paper also simply analyzes the main approaches about reinforcement of absorptive capacity. At the same time, this heuristic perspective waits for the comprehensive examinations by further empirical researches.