Literature Review

Organizational knowledge scholarship provides the first foundation. Polanyi (1966) established that knowledge includes tacit dimensions not fully reducible to explicit statements. Nonaka (1994) theorized organizational knowledge creation through interaction between tacit and explicit knowledge. Grant (1996) treated firms as institutions for integrating specialized knowledge, while Kogut and Zander (1992) emphasized recombination and replication. Alavi and Leidner (2001) synthesized knowledge management systems research while distinguishing knowledge processes from supporting systems.

Organizational memory scholarship explains retention and retrieval across distributed facilities. Walsh and Ungson (1991) show that organizational memory resides across individuals, culture, transformations, structures, ecology, and external archives. Nelson and Winter (1982) link routines to memory and patterned action. This literature is necessary for OKK theory but insufficient because memory can contain stale, superseded, contested, or decontextualized knowledge and does not by itself distinguish current state, projection scope, or authority.

Sensemaking and organizational cognition explain interpretation. Daft and Weick (1984) describe organizations as interpretation systems, while Weick (1995), Walsh (1995), and Weick, Sutcliffe and Obstfeld (2005) explain meaning formation and managerial cognition under ambiguity. Organizational information-processing theory explains why uncertainty, equivocality, and interdependence create information-processing demands (Galbraith, 1973; Tushman and Nadler, 1978). Routines, learning, absorptive capacity, and dynamic capabilities connect knowledge to action and change (Cohen and Levinthal, 1990; Feldman and Pentland, 2003; Argote and Miron-Spektor, 2011; Teece, Pisano and Shuen, 1997).

Sociotechnical and boundary-object literatures prevent technical reductionism. Trist and Bamforth (1951), Barley (1986), and Orlikowski (1992) show that technology and organization are jointly constituted. Star and Griesemer (1989) show that representations can support coordination across social worlds while remaining locally adaptable. This is central to the projection problem: multiple representations may be valid only if they remain grounded in source knowledge and governance.

Formal representation, provenance, and traceability literatures provide important infrastructure concepts. Ontologies and knowledge graphs can formalize vocabulary and relationships (Gruber, 1993; Guarino, 1998; Uschold et al., 1998; Hogan et al., 2021), while organizational digital twin work illustrates the representational promise of dynamic organizational models (Parmar et al., 2020). Provenance and traceability can preserve lineage and lifecycle relationships (Gotel and Finkelstein, 1994; Cheney, Chiticariu and Tan, 2009; Moreau et al., 2011; Moreau and Missier, 2013; Cleland-Huang, Gotel and Zisman, 2012). Yet formal structure, provenance, and traceability do not by themselves establish organizational authority, legitimacy, interpretation, or correspondence.

AI and multi-agent literatures clarify computational participation (Wooldridge and Jennings, 1995; Jennings, Sycara and Wooldridge, 1998; Russell and Norvig, 2020). AI and management research identifies automation-augmentation tensions and changing decision structures (Shrestha, Ben-Menahem and von Krogh, 2019; Raisch and Krakowski, 2021). Human-AI interaction and AI governance research emphasize uncertainty, human control, transparency, and responsible lifecycle governance (Amershi et al., 2019; Shneiderman, 2020; Mäntymäki et al., 2024). OKK theory builds from these foundations while preserving a boundary: AI may participate in organizational cognition, but it does not become an autonomous source of organizational legitimacy.