William H. Starbuck

"Labeling a firm as knowledge-intensive implies that knowledge has more importance than other inputs."

"A knowledge-intensive firm may not be information intensive... Knowledge is a stock of expertise, not a flow of information."

"Most of the time, organizations generate actions unreflectively and non-adaptively. To justify their actions, organizations create problems, successes, threats and opportunities. These are ideological molecules that mix values, goals, expectations, perceptions, theories, plans, and symbols. The molecules form while people are result watching, guided by the beliefs that they should judge results good or bad, look for the causes of results, and propose needs for action. Because organizations modify their behavior programs mainly in small increments that make sense to top managers, they change too little and inappropriately, and nearly all organizations disappear within a few years."

"In deciding whether a firm is knowledge-intensive, one ought to weigh its emphasis on esoteric expertise instead of widely shared knowledge. Everybody has knowledge, most of it widely shared, but some idiosyncratic and personal. If one defines knowledge broadly to encompass what everybody knows, every firm can appear knowledge-intensive. One loses the value of focusing on a special category of firms. Similarly, every firm has some unusual expertise. To make the knowledge-intensive firm a useful category, one has to require that exceptional expertise make important contributions. One should not label a firm as knowledge-intensive unless exceptional and valuable expertise dominates commonplace knowledge."

"Professionals identify strongly with their professions, more strongly than with their clients or their employers. They not only observe professional standards, they believe that only members of their professions have the competence and ethics to enforce these standards. Similarly, professionals insist that outsiders cannot properly supervise their activities."

"The history of organization theory contrasts with the history of managerial thought. When people began to compose texts about organized activities, between 2,000 and 3,000 years before the Christian era (BCE), they focused on managerial practices rather than on organizations as such. Several writers proposed general principles for managerial practice before 1000 BCE, so one can say that theories about managing have existed for at least 3000 years. However, these writings often said nothing about the organizational contexts in which managing was to occur. When the writers did make statements about organizations, they did not generalize. They wrote about specific organizations."