Different organizations handle the complexity of the knowledge and information they need in different ways, according to their structure and authority relationships. This results in different degrees of codification and abstraction (KO) which in turn determine the type of dissemination mechanism employed.
That’s the interesting theme of an article in Information World Review (Bizmedia, March 2009, Issue 253) available online and entitled Shrink or Swallow?. It’s a very good article and I recommend you to read it, but it fails in one important respect: it mentions nowhere that the theory expounded was developed by Prof. Max Boisot and colleagues and described in their book Explorations in Information Space: Knowledge, Agents and Organization (OUP, 2007).
My advice: read the article, then buy the book. It’s a classic.
KOnnect 