An Exploration of the Downfall of Jute Industry with Perspective of Knowledge Management: A Case Study of Sindh, Pakistan

This qualitative research explores the factors behind the downfall of the jute industry in Pakistan, specifically in region of Sindh. Through preliminary informal interviews, a major cause of downfall is identified which is the lack of formal knowledge management mechanism within the firms and industry. Accordingly, a knowledge transfer mechanism is proposed for the efficacy of knowledge transfer in the firms and hence improves the overall knowledge management of the industry which is later validated through formal interviews with industry experts. The literature states that in Pakistani context there is a dearth of awareness of the proper knowledge transfer in SMEs. For this research, to fulfill the aim of exploration of the factors behind, a collapsed jute firm is taken into consideration in the Sindh region of Pakistan as a case study. Therefore, to ascertain reasons of the downfall of the industry, semi-structured interviews were conducted from 11 personnel from industry and academia and were analyzed by using the manifest qualitative content analysis technique to identify the underlying rationales and gap between the connected entities. The findings suggests that, there are many veiled factors behind the downfall of the prosperous firm, amongst those is the lack of government support, since Pakistan is the jute dependent  country ,so in such environment the unit setups look forward for the helping hand from the government. Additionally, it was also found that in Pakistani context there is no any practice of succession planning in the firms of any type, leading to many unspoken problems. One of such problem is absence of codification, which in turn makes difficult for the firms to transfer the knowledge to the coming generations. It was also observed that, the industrial units are always looking forward to have a collaborative link to the knowledge generating units known as universities. Likewise the academia is also intended to approach to have such linkages to the industries to create a more developed milieu. On the whole this study is an attempt to comprehend the significance of knowledge transfer as one of the factor in understanding the downfall of the firm and to look for the ways with which the knowledge management of the industry can be developed.