Purpose This paper aims to demonstrate how knowledge management (KM) emerges and evolves within different eras, establishing that KM is inherently human-centered – a characteristic consistently undermined by prevailing positivist epistemologies. Society 5.0 is a human-centered framework, and serves to restore the original human-centered understanding of KM. Design/methodology/approach This analysis examines KM’s past, present and future within the knowledge economy and Society 5.0 frameworks. The analysis considers current and relevant literature on Society 5.0, human-AI interaction and “responsible KM” (rKM). Findings The paper demonstrates that KM has stagnated since its inception in the 1990s due to the dominant positivistic agenda which objectifies knowledge and so separate knowledge from the knower. This epistemological misalignment has marginalized KM’s human-centered foundations and created confusion between KM and neighboring fields such as “organizational learning” and “dynamic capabilities.” Research limitations/implications The paper challenges current research priorities in KM and invites a fundamental re-evaluation of KM strategies, prioritizing human agency and contextual knowledge creation over mechanistic knowledge integration approaches. Originality/value This paper makes three contributions: it explains how KM is constrained by mindsets inherited from the industrial era; it reveals how KM is limited by epistemologies prioritizing knowledge integration over human agency; and it demonstrates how Society 5.0’s framework, combined with rKM principles, can realign the field with its original foundations.
Khadir et al. (2025) studied this question.