Do we really understand tacit knowledge

2013

""Tacit knowledge is invoked in a wide range of intellectual inquiries, from traditional academic subjects like psychology, sociology and linguistics to more pragmatically orientated investigations into the nature and transmission of skills and expertise. Notwithstanding its apparent pervasiveness, the notion of ‘tacit knowledge’ is a complex and puzzling one. What is its status as knowledge and what is its relation to explicit knowledge? What does it mean to say that knowledge is tacit? Can it be measured? Recent years has seen growing interest from philosophers in understanding the nature of tacit knowledge. Philosophers of science have discussed its role in scientific problem solving; philosophers of language have been concerned with the speaker’s relation to grammatical theories; and phenomenologists have attempted to describe the relation of explicit theoretical knowledge to a background understanding of matters that are taken for granted. This book aims to bring unity to these diverse philosophical discussions by clarifying their conceptual underpinnings; to advance a specific account of tacit knowledge that elucidates the importance of the concept for understanding the character of human cognition; and to demonstrate the relevance of the recommended account to those concerned with the communication of expertise.""

Electronic Journal of Knowledge Management

The aim of this article is to increase understanding of tacit knowledge as a phenomenon and also, to specify and understand tacit knowledge of an expert in a given context. In the discourse of organizational behavior, the use of the concept of tacit knowledge and empirical scientific research on it has become more popular only in the 1990s. The strong increase in expert work and knowledge-intensive fields make examining the topic timely and both theoretically and practically interesting. The most significant theoretical contribution of the study is the increase in understanding, as well as, the creation of new knowledge of the contents and the nature of tacit knowledge. Based on our study, it seems that the current division of knowledge to explicit and tacit is not sufficient to describe the phenomenon. It has been proposed that explicit knowledge is visible and "articulated" knowledge that can easily be transferred and codified, e.g., through speech, documents and various information management systems. Implicit knowledge, on the other hand, is "silent", hidden and non-verbal knowledge that is difficult or even impossible to transfer and express verbally. We propose that tacit knowledge comprises different components, some of which can be articulated and made explicit. Examples of such are individual"s or organizations accustomed lines of action that are based on explicit instructions. On the other hand, individual-specific tacit knowledge that includes feelings, emotions and intuition, individual"s intuitive behaviour or personal relationships, can be considered as "the genuine tacit knowledge" in the sense that it cannot be made visible or transferred. These findings suggest that the interconnectedness of explicit and tacit knowledge ought to be examined further.

2012

The development and maintenance of organized cooperative work practices require, as an integral feature, what can loosely be termed 'didactic practices' or 'mutual learning' (giving and receiving instruction, advice, direction, guidance, recommendation, etc.). However, such didactic practices have not been investigated systematically in CSCW. Michael Polanyi's notion of 'tacit knowledge' vs. 'explicit knowledge', which plays a key role in the area of Knowledge Management, would seem to offer an obvious framework for investigating didactic practices in CSCW. But as argued in this article, the notion of 'tacit knowledge' is a conceptual muddle that mystifies the very concept of practical knowledge. The article examines the historical context in which the notion of 'tacit knowledge' was devised, the purpose for which it was formulated, its original articulation, and the perplexing ways in which it has been appropriated in Knowledge Management. In an attempt to gain firm ground for our research, the article towards the end offers a general analysis of the concept of 'knowledge', informed by the work of Gilbert Ryle and Alan White. Overall, the article argues that a framework based on the notion of 'tacit knowledge', or on similar conceptions devoted to categorizations of kinds of knowledge, impairs the for CSCW essential focus on actual work practices: instead of focusing on forms of symbolism, what is required is to focus on uncovering the logics of actual didactic practices in cooperative work.

IGI Global eBooks, 2011

2007

Tacit knowledge definitions tend to be extremely varied. Some argue that tacit knowledge is precisely that. Others feel that only time and effort prevent all tacit knowledge from eventually becoming articulated. For the purposes of our research "tacit knowledge", in practice at least, encompasses a medium ground, being comprised of articulable and inarticulable subsets. Along the lines of Weber (1997), we have formalised a meaning for this "tacit knowledge" and for comparison have completed a content analysis of the literature to determine what other researchers understand "tacit knowledge" to mean.

Journal of Management Studies, 2001

With the emergence of the resource‐based view of the firm and of the concept of core competencies, intangible resources, and tacit knowledge in particular have been argued to occupy a central place in the development of sustainable competitive advantage. This is because tacit knowledge is argued to be difficult to imitate, to substitute, to transfer and it is rare. However, there is little empirical research to support this theoretical proposition. Tacit knowledge has so far resisted operationalization. This paper sets out to define the term tacit knowledge and proposes to redefine it, within the context of the resource‐based view of the firm, as tacit skills. A methodology (based on causal mapping, self‐Q and storytelling) for empirically researching the subject is outlined.

2013

This paper is a description and analysis of found conceptualizations of tacit knowledge in the knowledge management (KM) literature. The essay’s argument is that there are several different ways of framing or understanding the nature, conceptualizations, of tacit knowledge. Because tacit knowledge is the most foundational idea and experience, in knowledge management literature, the purpose of this essay is to clarify the several perspectives discovered to be in use in the literature.

The development and maintenance of organized cooperative work practices require, as an integral feature, what can loosely be termed ‘didactic practices’ or ‘mutual learning’ (giving and receiving instruction, advice, direction, guidance, recommendation, etc.). However, such didactic practices have not been investigated systematically in CSCW. Michael Polanyi’s notion of ‘tacit knowledge’ vs. ‘explicit knowledge’, which plays a key role in the area of Knowledge Management, would seem to offer an obvious framework for investigating didactic practices in CSCW. But as argued in this article, the notion of ‘tacit knowledge’ is a conceptual muddle that mystifies the very concept of practical knowledge. The article examines the historical context in which the notion of ‘tacit knowledge’ was devised, the purpose for which it was formulated, its original articulation, and the perplexing ways in which it has been appropriated in Knowledge Management. In an attempt to gain firm ground for our research, the article towards the end offers a general analysis of the concept of ‘knowledge’, informed by the work of Gilbert Ryle and Alan White. Overall, the article argues that a framework based on the notion of ‘tacit knowledge’, or on similar conceptions devoted to categorizations of kinds of knowledge, impairs the for CSCW essential focus on actual work practices: instead of focusing on forms of symbolism, what is required is to focus on uncovering the logics of actual didactic practices in cooperative work.

2018

In this paper, we will present some ideas on how informal learning could be communicated. Within today’s fast changing society, most of our competences predominantly result from an on-going process of experiential learning at our workplace and in other day-to-day activities. So-called expert knowledge is not acquired or constructed in the short time span of our formal or non-formal learning career (school, studies) but during all our (life) activities in which we try to find solutions to challenges. Therefore, this kind of knowledge is not the outcome of arrangements that are particularly oriented to the intention of learning, but is a spin-off or side effect of intrinsically meaningful actions for all persons actively involved in these situations. This leads to the problem, that learners are often unaware of the significance, the depth or the variety of their informal learning. But how can we judge this kind of personal knowledge in a reproducible and comparable way? We need a theo...