Knowledge behaviors when the commons are at stake: Insights from the Covid-19 crisis

How do people’s beliefs on the likely system-level consequences of circulating a certain piece of knowledge influence those people’s knowledge behaviors? To address this question, we leverage the most recent developments of the theory of the commons as learning systems. According to this theory, people are strongly responsive to perceived threats to the commons they (may) benefit from, and strive to learn and respond accordingly. Through this theoretical lens, we analyze thick qualitative data (January-April 2020) from the Covid-19 crisis, which resulted in unprecedented visibility of commons-related knowledge behaviors. The contribution of this inductive study is fourfold. First, we identify a new emerging taxonomy of knowledge behaviors, including knowledge unleashing and knowledge curbing behaviors. Second, we identify a new emerging taxonomy of commons-related postures, that is, specific cognitive and behavioral attitudes that an individual may display about a certain commons. Third, we identify interesting emerging regularities in the relationships between specific commons-related postures and specific knowledge behaviors. Fourth, we show that the empirical data, analyzed in the light of the theory of the commons, strongly suggest disentangling knowledge behaviors from their consequences: for example, knowledge withholding proved far from being “intrinsically” counter-productive. We argue that these results open up promising research paths and opportunities for new knowledge management approaches in a wide range of organized and self-organizing contexts, such as innovation ecosystems, sustainability transitions, open innovation, or crisis management.