How Knowledge Scaling Reshapes Strategic Human Capital Management: Evidence from Acquisitions in Private Higher Education
Abstract: This paper addresses how knowledge scaling–the simultaneous deployment of the same knowledge resource across multiple organizational units–reshapes human capital management. Specifically, we examine acquisitions as sharp opportunities for organizations to scale knowledge and to reconfigure resources. The main argument in this paper is that knowledge scaling may create incentives for organizations to specialize workers on tasks that complement the knowledge being scaled while also weakening the worker-organization relationship when if such tasks rely less on worker-level knowledge that is less specific to the worker (e.g. tacit knowledge and experience). We articulate and find empirical support for these ideas in the context of private post-secondary education in Brazil, where educational groups engaged in a wave of acquisitions between 2006 and 2014 and scaled standardized courseware, pedagogical practices, and managerial processes to target units. Empirically, we combine in-depth interviews to econometric analyses using a unique dataset with information about characteristics of universities, faculty labor contracts, and acquisitions in the Brazilian private higher education market. Our results show that beyond performance gains, knowledge scaling increased the specialization of faculty work arrangements around teaching and led to a sustained increase in turnover rate. This paper contributes to the literatures on resource reconfiguration and on the multi-level nature of strategic human capital by advancing how a firm-level strategy to scale knowledge resources reshapes the nature of how organizations deploy workers as valuable resources.
