Purpose: This article aims to introduce a guide to improving hospital bed setup by combining lean technical practices (LTPs), such as kaizen and value stream mapping (VSM) and lean social practices (LSPs), such as employee empowerment.Design/methodology/approach: Action research approach was employed to analyze the process of reconfiguration of bed setup management in a Brazilian public hospital.Findings: The study introduces three contributions: (1) presents the use of VSM focused specifically on bed setup, while the current literature presents studies mainly focused on patient flow management, (2) combines the use of LSPs and LTPs in the context of bed management, expanding current studies that are focused either on mathematical models or on social and human aspects of work, (3) introduces a practical guide based on six steps that combine LSPs and LSPs to improve bed setup management.Research limitations/implications: The research focused on the analysis of patient beds. Surgical beds, delivery, emergency care and intensive care unit (ICU) were not considered in this study. In addition, the process indicators analyzed after the implementation of the improvements did not contemplate the moment of the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, this research focused on the implementation of the improvement in the context of only one Brazilian public hospital.Practical implications: The combined use of LSPs and LTPs can generate considerable gains in bed setup efficiency and consequently increase the capacity of a hospital to admit new patients, without the ampliation of the physical space and workforce.Social implications: The improvement of bed setup has an important social character, whereas it can generate important social benefits such as the improvement of the admission service to patients, reducing the waiting time, reducing hospitalization costs and improving the hospital capacity without additional physical resources. All these results are crucial for populations, their countries and regions.Originality/value: While the current literature on bed management is more focused on formal models or pure human and social perspectives, this article brings these two perspectives together in a single, holistic framework. As a result, this article points out that the complex bed management problem can be efficiently solved by combining LSPs and LTPs to present theoretical and practical contributions to the important social problem of hospital bed management.

Knowledge is one of the most important assets in organizations. While there are several studies about knowledge management, there are few texts dedicated to classifying the existing types of knowledge. As such, the concept of knowledge is overlooked in the literature. Hence, this situation poses a dilemma: how could a thing that is not well understood be adequately managed? Drawing on current knowledge taxonomies and the organizational routines concept, we address this gap by outlining a taxonomy of how knowledge is manifested in the execution and structuration of organizational routines. This taxonomy is generated through the grounding process of examining the organizational routines of an academic department in a public university. As the main result, it was identified four basic types of knowledge: stable-reproducible, problem-solving, incremental-shift, and paradigmatic-shift. As main theoretical contribution, this paper introduces a knowledge taxonomy, which is an alternative view in relation to the current taxonomies. As a practical implication, these four types of knowledge presented point out to the necessity of the development of specific knowledge management practices for each type of knowledge.

Purpose: This article introduces a model of knowledge creation in consciousness, the creation of explicit knowledge in six forms and its register and organisation in documents.Design/methodology/approach: Assuming the premise of three realms of reference to knowledge and two forms of reference to entities, this article, through a phenomenological perspective, deduces a model of the creation of knowledge in consciousness and the creation of explicit knowledge in six forms and its register in documents.Findings: Two basic types of knowledge are introduced: situated knowledge and theoretical/normative knowledge. Considering three realms of reference of knowledge – the space–time realm, subjectivity realm and linguistic realm – six general types of knowledge are deduced. Finally, three layers of knowledge organisation are presented: classification and mapping documents, theoretical/normative documents and documents of situations.Practical implications: This article can contribute to the development of more efficient forms of creation of explicit knowledge, its register in documents and the development of more efficient knowledge organisation and management systems.Originality/value: Relying on established perspectives of the realms where subjectivity is immersed, this article discusses how knowledge is created in consciousness and registered in documents. It also presents a novel perspective of types of knowledge through the combination of dimensions, realms of reference and forms of reference to entities.