5.1 INTRODUCTION

This chapter marks a step in extending the discussions around knowledge management (KM) in the direction of social constructionism (SC) for a theory of knowledge, critical social psychology for a view of knowledge and language in action, and a methodology for research.

The aim of the chapter is essentially to lay out the arguments for a discursive approach to knowledge work in social interaction drawing on a constructionist epistemology and view of the world. Laying some early groundwork, the position taken here differentiates between critical social psychology and experimental social psychology: the former is positioned as a challenge to the latter and its adherence to traditional experimental methods of research (viz., laboratory, also referred to as the “positivist” approach). In using the term “critical social psychology,” and following Wendy Stainton Rogers, we refer to developing new perspectives on what social psychology should be, and should be concerned with, and which draws on, among other ideas, SC and discourse analysis. Consequently, all of the following discussions are located within the context of critical social psychology, thus providing some clear boundaries. The objective is to establish the foundations for what follows throughout the rest of this book by fitting together all of the pieces to form an intelligible and relevant picture.

We start with a brief account of SC, which Kenneth Gergen is credited with coordinating in social psychology, and its relevance to KM. This is followed by an account of how the thesis proposed here is simply extending the directions, which many in the KM field have already been shown to be indicating (see Chapter 4 in particular). Next, consideration of the constructionist theory of knowledge leads into the long-running dispute over knowledge and how it should be researched. This can not only be seen as having a profound impact on what we know about the world, but also on how we generate new knowledge. Henry Markram and his colleague make the point: knowledge from research is the “foundation stone” on which societies stand. That being the case, what happens when two sides of a research community wholly disagree on how and what topics should be researched? Critical and experimental approaches in social psychology are shown to be polar opposites in terms of their epistemologies, which in turn transforms the topic of research methodology into the proverbial battleground. This debate lies at the center of what is termed the “crisis in social psychology” and raises a question over the “knowledge” that we routinely acquire and use in everyday work. This inevitably, and again, raises the question over what is meant by “objectivity” from the perspectives of methodology, which we have already seen has an impact on how one chooses to approach knowledge and its management.

What we end up with is an alternative theory of knowledge to that adhered to by what is referred to as mainstream KM and a view of language as the “stage” of social interaction. Importantly, this results in language being seen as a topic of interest in its own right. In many ways, these alternative views are only extending and explicitly locating directions already taken by many in the KM field.

5.2 SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONISM AS A WAY OF LOOKING AT THE WORLD

From the outset, it is admitted that SC is not a subject that features prominently in the indexes of organizational management guides. Some might see SC as an example of academic ideas in which, as management consultants and authors Christian Madsbjerg and his colleague note, the business world declines an interest because these are deemed to have little relevance of any practical value to organizations. But, as I hope to make clear, because of the issues in KM over the nature of knowledge and its management, SC has something very particular to speak on the matter.

Located in postmodernism, SC has its roots in the 1950s alongside a growing interest in ideas of language as social action. The British philosopher John Austin succinctly captured this idea in his profoundly influential book How to Do Things with Words, with its—at the time—radical idea of language not just as words and grammar, but as action-performative. In this view, what we say has function and effect beyond the literal meaning of the words strung in a sentence. This coincided with an increasing dissatisfaction over the reliance on experimental research methods in social psychology. Against this background, SC marked a radical change of emphasis, focus, and epistemology. Often referred to as the “crisis in social psychology,” the result is a near schism in the discipline, which persists to this day. Consequently in the field of social psychology, SC and critical social psychology are a counter-reference to and reaction against the positivist-experimental agenda of traditional psychology, a debate that is considered in more detail later in this chapter.

In particular, the SC movement brought about a shift in the focus of research interest from the idea of the “self-as-entity” (which, from traditional perspectives, can be empirically tested and measured) to the self as a construct accomplished in language. Jonathan Potter and Margaret Wetherell, early pioneers in the take-up of discourse analysis in social psychology, summarize this: “…any sociopsychological image of the self, in fact the very possibility of a self concept, is inextricably dependent on the linguistic practices used in everyday life to make sense of our own and others’ actions” (1987 : 95). Describing the increasing influence of SC, the psychologist Carla Willig points out that SC is concerned with human experience and perception as “mediated historically, culturally, and linguistically.” Drawing on both of these accounts, and from a practical perspective, not only did the SC movement bring about a significant change in research theory—what is studied, why, and how—but also coincided with a reconceptualization of language as the site of human accomplishment, that is, language as a topic of study in its own right, as action oriented, constructive, and constructed, with discourse analysis constituting an appropriate methodology for its study. In positioning language as one of the primary mediating factors in the human experience, it axiomatically follows that language should constitute a prime focus of action—and of interest.

How is this relevant to KM? Nelson Phillips, of London’s Imperial College, and his colleague, writing specifically about organizational discourse, claim that the study of discourse allows one to get to a greater level of understanding of the organization as a socially constructed reality. Far deeper, they propose, than that achievable through the application of conventional research methods. Taking this at face value should stand as reason enough to warrant a focus of interest and research on the study of discourse in action. In other words, the approach to the organization as discursively constructed in social interaction opens the potential for an understanding of the lived experience of the organization that is not available through more traditional methodologies and theories. Thus a different understanding of the organization and its members’ knowledge work similarly promises alternative avenues for approaching KM. While the analysis of discourse in general is not a new paradigm in the study of organizations, as may be construed from Phillips and his coworker’s comments, such an approach is mostly if not entirely missing from the mainstream KM field and literature.

5.3 SIMPLY EXTENDING EXISTING DIRECTIONS

These claims can be further supported by connecting them to the already existing trends within KM in approaching knowledge as social action. In general, the thesis under consideration here is that knowledge is dynamically constructed in linguistic action: this implies function and consequence. In reality, this is just extending the directions that many KM scholars and theorists have been shown to be leaning in. The reader will no doubt have already noticed that the boundaries of KM are frequently shown to be porous in drawing on other disciplines. This is not surprising given a field with such diverse origins (see Section 2.2) and which is concerned with a phenomenon that is itself the subject of interest within many other disciplines. It is however beholden on the serious researcher to avoid being seen to be merely “cherry-picking.” Still, the reader might question why KM’s horizons need to or should be broadened in directions, SC for instance, which might seem somewhat irrelevant and perhaps unjustified. Justifying why and how these directions are in fact relevant to KM is one of the aims of the current and all subsequent chapters of this book. A few observations based on the investigations and discussions of KM’s primary debates and issues and its theoretical landscape help to make the case.

A recurrent theme that has been seen in all of the previous chapters is the trend toward a conception of knowledge as constituting or as embedded in social action. But what is meant by “social action”? As far back as the mid-1990s, not long after the first publication of A Dynamic Theory of Organizational Knowledge Creation, Frank Blackler defined “knowing” as an active process that is mediated, situated, provisional, pragmatic, and contested. He promoted a change in focus from “the kinds of knowledge demanded by capitalism” toward the “systems through which doing and knowing” are accomplished, as the unit of analysis. Blackler’s “systems” are similar to the notions of Communities of Practice, for instance. Both his conceptualization of knowing and his proposed unit of analysis are consistent with the idea of knowledge accomplishment in social interaction.

More recently, Ikujiro Nonaka and his coworker, in their 2007 version of The Theory of the Knowledge-Creating Firm, although categorized along the “knowledge as object” axis of the taxonomy of KM theory, nonetheless emphasize the notion of knowledge created through people interacting with people. There is also a hint of constructionism in their denial of knowledge as something “out there to be discovered.” So, “social action” is the action by and through which the individual interacts with their environment and its contents and which action is largely mediated by the individual’s personal understanding and knowledge of socially normative precepts. From all of these perspectives, then, knowledge or knowing is contingent to social (inter)action. That is a constructionist concept.

The idea that the action of knowing is accomplished in social interaction implicates talk-in-interaction (“people interacting with people”). From the perspective of critical social psychology, language is theorized as the site of “knowing,” along with all of other psychological phenomena, and as the topic of interest in its own right. Making connections directly, KM’s concept of knowledge and social interaction is consistent with the paradigm of discursive psychology and the social constructionist movement in the field of social psychology. While KM’s scholars and practitioners may not have overtly walked in these directions, there is a good sense that these are indicated, with justification.

Shifting the perception of the location of knowledge work to language could signify some fundamental ramifications for the study and practice of KM or none at all—depending on one’s viewpoint. From the perspective of constructionist social psychology, Stainton Rogers usefully defines “discourse” as both the product and the means of constructing meaning in particular ways. Put another way, language is both constructed (product) and constructive (means). In Section 3.6 discussions on creating new knowledge, the work of Endel Tulving in human memory and consciousness introduced the idea of a person’s unique store of knowledge about the world, combined with the “predictability” of language, as the essential prerequisite of making sense of the world and its contents. Synthesizing these two ideas—admittedly drawn from two competing ends of the psychological debate—a person’s unique store of knowledge informs and influences both the product and action of making sense of the world and its contents through discursive social interaction. The influencing nature of what might be thought of as “personal knowledge” is a topic that is returned to in detail in Chapter 7.

A further point to clarify here is that when we talk about “discourse,” we are referring to both talk and text. While it is obvious to consider talk as socially interacted, what of text? Recall Paul Duguid’s proposal that no text can determine the rules of its interpretation, that these are the product of a person’s tacit understanding of the ground rules, which they bring to the reading of any text (as discussed in Section 4.3). The action of producing a text, and another reading it, are just as much a form of social interaction as two people engaging in a conversation.

5.4 THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONIST VIEW OF KNOWLEDGE

Knowledge constitutes the very basis of all forms of social cognition, including social attitudes, social identities and attribution, among many other phenomena traditionally studied in social psychology.

(Teun van Dijk, 2013: 498)

In contrast to the traditional Western assumption, from the SC viewpoint, knowledge is not approached as something “out there” waiting to be discovered but rather as constructed in social interaction. As we saw earlier, this is partly the idea promoted by Nonaka and his coworker, for instance. From this perspective, knowledge cannot be derived from an unambiguous perception of truth and fact. At the heart of the constructionist perspective is the view that people engage and interact with the world and its phenomena through meaning-making. For instance, Egon Guba, professor emeritus of Education at Indiana University, and his coworker reason that knowledge can never be separate from the knower because what a person knows is bound to their “meaning-making mechanisms,” which are themselves inextricably a part of the social, cognitive, and linguistic worlds in which the knower exists. These ideas have some interesting synergies with “sense-making,” the study of how people experience life (a brief account of this is given in the next chapter).

Collectively, this view is, of course, at considerable variance to much of the mainstream KM “knowledge as object” theoretical accounts. However, the genesis of the idea that knowing emerges in and through social interaction is frequently implied in those theoretical approaches that are particularly categorized as “knowledge as social action.” The influence of SC’s epistemology in Guba and his coworker’s reasoning is clear: knowledge is constructed by individuals in discourse—it is personal and unique. It is, above all, subjective with “knowing” existing in and through social participation. This notion, it is suggested, has a great deal of resonance with many of the KM theorists encountered in the previous chapter.

Similarly, one can start to appreciate how mainstream approaches to knowledge and its management are, from the SC perspective, founded on doubtful principles. Notice also how, in the SC paradigm, there is no mention of “two types of knowledge, one tacit and one explicit.” Knowledge is knowledge, a construction of, and accomplishment in social interaction. This holistic view of knowledge is consistent with the SC view of language: rather than being seen as a conduit to the inner thoughts of minds, language is understood as the constructive site of knowledge and meaning-making. There is, consequently, no real need to think of two or more “types” of knowledge. This notwithstanding, the terms “tacit” and “explicit” will continue to be used here for two reasons: first, to maintain a coherence to KM’s terminology, and second, and perhaps more importantly, because of its connections with the “knowing how–knowing that” formulation promoted by Paul Duguid and others (see Section 4.4 for a review), which is already identified as central to the ideas developed here. In the following chapters, tacit knowing (also known as tacit knowledge) is equivalent to “knowing how.” True, some might dispute the efficacy of conflating these terms, particularly tacit knowing and tacit knowledge; however, the hair-spitting over such matters is arguably one source of the perception of a confused picture. In this case, I would argue that the devil is not in the detail.

To reprise what was proposed earlier, a person’s unique store of knowledge informs and influences both the product and action of making sense of the world and its contents through discursive social interaction.

As discussed in previous chapters, particularly those around the nature of knowledge, it has been claimed that the way in which one conceptualizes knowledge must of necessity direct how one approaches its management. Exactly the same issue lies at the heart of the debate over research methods in science, and this has a profound implication on the nature of research.

5.5 THE DEBATE OVER METHOD

The topic of methodology is covered in far greater depth in part two, so the intention here is to offer some headline concepts and core principles to position a sensible question mark over the assumptions of traditional scientific research methods and the claims of findings. A second intention is to establish some methodological context for the following chapter. A brief detour into history provides some interesting perspectives on the importance of knowledge discovery in societal development.

In his ambitious account of the history of knowledge, Charles van Doren relates three periods of history, which can be interpreted as demonstrating what happens to society when the search for new knowledge—research—is compromised. First, the ancient Egyptians: for thousands of years, the Egyptian dynasties actively boycotted new knowledge as a way of maintaining the order of things. The result, according to van Doren’s analysis, was a civilization caught in a time warp, inadequate to the task of responding effectively when external forces threatened their society and its wealth. Second, the Roman Empire: their lack of interest in science and technology, according to van Doren, prohibited new developments and innovation that may well have solved considerable logistical shortcomings. For one thing, the sheer size of the empire meant that sending things from one end to the other was quite an undertaking. Third, the European Middle Ages: van Doren implicates the rise of monastery and cloister as being responsible for the removal of society’s most intelligent, imaginative, and creative individuals to lives of piety, solitude, and contemplation. This, he suggests, was an immeasurable loss that could well have been one of the reasons why Europe took so many centuries to recover after the fall of the Roman Empire in the early fifth century.

This may be a somewhat fanciful digression, particularly in the reliance on one single source (something that any reader should be wary of, by the way). However, there is a hint of connection to some of the ideas from KM touched on in previous chapters: recall, for instance, Peter Drucker’s vision of the future organization in which teams of specialists will work to generate innovative solutions in task-focused teams. Recall also Dorothy Leonard and her colleague’s emphasis on the importance of diversity of background, experiences, skills, and so forth in team members—the “creative abrasion” idea. Shifting the viewpoint back to the macro level, the lesson, certainly at face value, is clear. Knowledge—as an evolving phenomenon—is essential to societal and human evolutionary development and survival. The modern world sadly contains sufficient examples of nations suffering in the wake of decades of autocratic repression, and those which are teetering on the brink as a consequence of years of intolerance to progress, difference, and enlightenment. These are struggles taking place at the national level. Recall Markram and his coworker’s notion that the underpinning foundation stone of society is research knowledge: there are struggles here too.

The value of research is not solely determined by its product—knowledge—it is also determined by its methodology. When this is questioned, so is research knowledge. Beginning in the 1970s, the critical social psychology movement evolved as a direct reaction to, and argument against, the so-called “laboratory” methods of discovery common in experimental social psychology along with all of its connotations of statistical averages, probabilities, and so forth. This sets the goal of research as the production of objective truths and knowledge, which can only be gained through the application of the “scientific method,” and the discovery of general laws through observation. Both imply what Willig, writing in 2003, describes as a straightforward relationship between the world and the human perception and understanding of it. Moreover, language is valued as no more than a medium, which unproblematically reflects reality as it is. In contrast, the methodology of discourse analysis, as one of the principle methods used by critical social psychologists, approaches language as the topic of study, as action oriented, functional, and consequential, as both constructed and constructive. Why, critical social psychology asks, see language as a site of “secondhand” data (the “conduit metaphor of communication” disparagingly referred to by Haridimos Tsoukas, writing in 2011), when one can see it as the place where thought is actively constructed and made live? Where things actually happen.

The social constructionist Kenneth Gergen, writing in the early 1970s, particularly criticizes traditional scientific principles and research methods used in the study of human behavior. Human behavior, he reasons, cannot be empirically tested in the same way as the objects of the natural sciences. He subsequently claims that the modern world’s obsession with the need for objectivity, facts, realism, observation, and rationality results in an academia populated by “knowledge factories” churning out objective truths like “so many sausages.” In a similar vein, Professor Linda Wood, of York University, Canada, and her colleague diplomatically describe the introduction of the laboratory-based experimental methods to social psychology, with their aim of simulating “aspects of culture,” as misguided.

In the field of Organization Studies, William Starbuck is particularly critical of experimental methods. He reports a fascinating study of how a US law firm achieves and maintains its stellar success despite breaking all of the conventional rules constituting what makes a firm profitable and successful. Starbuck is forensic in his dissection of the flaws in traditional research methods. In the rush to produce research outcomes that can be universally generalized, he argues, those properties that signify firms as unique—such as the firm at the center of his study—are actively ignored. This, according to Starbuck, leads to the situations where data is deceptive, findings lack validity, and “formulated rules” are no more than “sense-making ritual.” Following his argument leads to the conclusion that social science’s addiction to statistical averages risks overlooking all of those oddities, which are exactly those features that determine originality and excellence. In what could be described as the “killer argument,” he points out that while scientists in the conventional mold pursue the evidence of statistical averages in order to form rules about what makes success or failure, successful organizations do not achieve their success by imitating others! The altar of statistical averages is to be viewed with suspicion.

This raises an interesting point. According to Starbuck’s reasoning, the temporal, demographic, political, economic, geographic, and human contexts within which the successful firm operates are influencing—to a larger or lesser extent—factors. Thus, in his study of what makes the law firm exceptionally successful, the elements of this success, he argues, are specific to this case and this case only. Of course, you can reduce a phenomenon to a set of generic rules but in so doing the context is lost. In this sense, context is the defining factor in a way. Translate this idea to a common organizational practice: the production of “lessons learned” documents. Their objective is to facilitate the avoidance of past mistakes and the furtherance of good practice. But should those documents not be viewed as “historical artifacts” as unique to their temporal context and so forth? It is quite possible to imagine that actions and situations that led to errors in the past could, in a different time, represent good opportunities and not events to be avoided.

Continuing on the subject of context, Kenneth Gergen sees social psychology as a historical endeavor, which should approach the study of human behavior as reflections of situated, contemporary history, rather than seeking decontextualized rules. The context of phenomena in one timeframe cannot be assumed to be identical to that of a different timeframe, and to do so is to risk error. Recall Frank Blackler’s theory with organizations seen as “activity systems”: he argues that people construct selves as a historically evolving process. Nor does simply ignoring context avoid this issue as phenomena divorced of context are meaningless.

Both lines of argument can be seen in Tsoukas’ reasoning that “…to reduce something to allegedly objective information and then to treat that information as if it was an adequate description of the phenomenon at hand, is to obscure the purpose behind the information, a purpose that is not made explicit in the information as such” (1997: 830). Tsoukas refers to this misguided practice as information reduction, raising the other contentious topic of objectivity.

It should be emphasized that the perspectives presented here are not meant as a devaluing of conventional psychology. Traditional psychology has made a significant and rich contribution to the understanding of the human mind and behavior for more than 100 years. Of particular significance to the present project is the work of Arthur Reber and colleagues, and others, in the field of cognitive psychology and implicit learning, which claims to reveal the cognitive processes and systems by which tacit knowledge is acquired. This work is explored in more detail in a subsequent chapter.

5.6 ON OBJECTIVITY

The debates around subjectivity and objectivity have already been touched on (Section 1.3) in the context of the definition of knowledge. The following short discussion considers objectivity from the perspectives of SC and methodology. As will become evident, the conceptualization of objectivity is fairly fundamental to the SC theory.

A core argument of the SC case is that no phenomena can be objectively studied. Kenneth Gergen claims that one must abandon the whole idea of objective truth as this simply cannot and does not exist. Stretching this argument a little further, natural sciences, with their laws based on stable events that do not change over time, can be contrasted with the irrationality and unpredictability of human behavior. This leads Gergen to insist that the epistemology and methodology of the former cannot be applied to the latter. Central to this claim is the idea that all social interaction, including the social psychologist’s interaction with her subjects, is filled with value judgments, labeling biases, and value-laden terms. On the opposite side of the argument, the essence of the positivist-experimental case is that phenomena in the world can be observed objectively: objective facts may be found, and experimental findings generalized. As noted earlier, drawing on William Starbuck’s work, the pursuit of generalizability comes at a cost.

These ideas have currency from many different directions. For instance, coming at the subject of objectivity from the topic of scientific discovery but reaching a similar conclusion, Michael Polanyi reasons that the scientist’s participation in the discovery and validation of knowledge is itself a part of that knowledge. As we noted earlier, Alan Chalmers makes the practical point that no two observers looking at the same scene will come away with identical experiences. We encountered an example of this in Section 1.3 in the story of the English Royal Astronomer, Nevil Maskelyne, and his associate who was unfortunate enough to record different astronomical observations from his senior, resulting in his dismissal: individual differences. According to Paul Feyerabend, professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, the positivist-experimental viewpoint considers scientific facts to be sterilized of any kind of personal values such as belief or opinion, an assumption, and—as Feyerabend describes it—an almost slavish adherence, which he rhetorically demolishes.

Feyerabend, Kuhn, and Chalmers all fundamentally question and dissect the traditionalist, positivist approach, and methodology adopted by the scientific disciplines. In Against Method, Feyerabend singles out “critical rationalism” and “logical empiricism” as misguided practices that result in inadequate accounts of science, which in turn risk their future development. He further adds: “(T)they give an inadequate account of science because science is much more ‘sloppy’ and ‘irrational’ than its methodological image. And they are liable to hinder it because the attempt to make science more ‘rational’ and more precise is bound to wipe it out, as we have seen” (2010: 160).

This review of the debates in and around SC is admittedly eclectic. However, the objective is to draw attention to the fact that conventional approaches to science and scientific discovery are not themselves immune from criticism. Added to this, there is a sense that a view of knowledge as socially constructed, as a basic idea, exists across many different fields of enquiry.

5.7 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

This chapter has investigated SC and the challenging debates between the respective, critical, and experimental approaches to the world in general and knowledge in particular. This has an obvious impact on and consequence for research—what and how a topic is researched, and why. We have then considered the debates around the concept of objectivity finding this to be a contested area (see Chapter 1 for the KM debates on this particular issue). Two key definitions are offered: discourse, following Stainton Rogers, is understood as both the product and the means of creating meaning in particular ways. Social action is understood as the ways in which individuals interact with their environments and their contents, mediated by personal understanding and knowledge of shared precepts (which idea has connections to Paul Duguid’s notion of “knowing how” as mediating “knowing that”).

The aim has been to frame SC and discourse analysis as not only having the validity and credentials to constitute an alternative perspective on knowledge and KM but also as one which is perfectly suited to such a project. It is suggested that these proposed directions are only extending those already indicated by many working in the KM field. If nothing else, the strategic management of knowledge within organizations can perhaps now be clearly understood as dealing with something that is far more dynamic and complex than an “object.” Even a piece of text, a report, a lessons learned document, a corporate vision statement, are more than sets of ordered letters and words on a page to be read and understood in exactly the manner in which they were expressed by the author. They only take on meaning in the context of the reader, and which meaning is singular to the individual.

What we have before us now is an alternative theory of knowledge and a perspective of language as action oriented that constitutes a topic of interest in its own right, which can be studied using the methodology of discourse analysis. In particular, noting the foundational importance of research to the development of societies in the broadest sense, it has been argued that how and what is researched is contested ground, with implications for what knowledge is created.

The next chapter explores research in the discourse analysis field, with particular attention paid to what this reveals and what this means for KM.

FURTHER READING

1. Madsbjerg, C. and Rasmussen, M. (2014). An anthropologist walks into a bar…. Harvard Business Review, March: 80–88.
2. Marshall, H. (1994). Discourse analysis in an occupational context. In Cassell, C. and Symon, G. (Eds). Qualitative Methods in Organizational Research. London: Sage.
3. Phillips, N. and Di Domenico, M. (2009). Discourse analysis in organizational research: methods and debates. In Buchanan, D. and Bryman, A. (Eds). The Sage Handbook of Organizational Research Methods. London: Sage.
4. Potter, J. and Wetherell, M. (1987b). Discourse and Social Psychology: Beyond Attitudes and Behaviour. London: Sage.
5. Starbuck, W. (2002). Keeping a butterfly and an elephant in a house of cards. In Choo, C. and Bontis, N. (Eds). The Strategic Management of Intellectual Capital and Organizational Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press.