Comprehensive Analysis of Knowledge Governance Research: A Systematic Review and Framework for Future Studies

Knowledge governance, as a key topic in knowledge management, has garnered significant attention over the past two decades. Given the increasing importance of knowledge as a strategic resource in organizations, numerous studies have been conducted in this area. However, the dispersion and diversity in the approaches and results of these studies highlight the necessity for a comprehensive and systematic analysis and classification of them. This research aims to provide a systematic and comprehensive review of existing studies in the field of knowledge governance, identifying trends, challenges, and gaps. It employs a meta-synthesis research method to analyze qualitative studies. Relevant data has been gathered from various databases, particularly through the Google Scholar search engine, and categorized after evaluating quality and alignment with research questions. These categories include three main axes: the nature of research, level of governance, and the domain of knowledge governance. The findings indicate that studies in this area exhibit high diversity in terms of type, scope, and subject, which aids researchers in analyzing and designing knowledge governance models from different perspectives. Furthermore, the research suggests that a comprehensive framework should be developed to guide future research in this field, and the proposed tree structure for classifying studies serves as an effective tool for visually displaying the relationships among different sections and enabling a more precise analysis of them.