7.1 INTRODUCTION: QUESTIONS AND CONNECTIONS

“…most of a person’s everyday life is determined not by their conscious intentions and deliberate choices but by mental processes that are put into motion by features of the environment and that operate outside of conscious awareness and guidance….”

(John Bargh and Tanya Chartrand, 1999 : 462)

In their extensive review of scientific research into questions concerning the properties of, and relationships between, unconsciousness and consciousness as mental phenomena, psychologists John Bargh and Tanya Chartrand, of New York University, offer the perfect metaphor: “mental butlers.” This refers to those mental processes activated by the environment and its contents, which are simultaneously beyond conscious control but which nonetheless direct action. This notion has significant correspondence to some formulations of tacit knowledge/knowing/know-how that we have seen in earlier chapters. The present chapter reengages with this topic, approaching it from some alternative viewpoints of which “mental butlers” is one.

Thus far, we have reviewed in detail issues, debates, and theory in the field of knowledge management (KM), followed by a consideration of discursive psychology (DP) within the wider perspective of discourse analysis and the “turn to talk” in critical social psychology. This leads to the conclusion that DP constitutes a valid approach to the study of organizational knowledge work in discourse, which may lead to insights unavailable to more conventional experimental research paradigms. But this comes with a problem.

The proposal of DP as a theory and methodology for the study—perhaps even practice—of knowledge management in organizations has a potential pitfall. From perspectives beyond those bounded by academia, there is the very real risk of this proposal being seen as irrelevant. That is, there is an unavoidable question over DP’s relevance to the practice and concerns of knowledge management in terms of what novel, meaningful and relevant contribution it can bring that would be of interest and practical use to the practitioner. That is the “US$64,000 question,” or what some have referred to as the “so-what question.” The key to unlocking this issue, it is argued here, lies in the conceptualization of tacit knowledge (TK) or tacit knowing. This has already been shown to have a somewhat checkered history in the field of KM.

The present chapter has the objective of developing some clear arguments for this proposal’s relevance, particularly for KM practitioners. The basis of these arguments is the speculation that the study of organizational discourse, drawing on DP, can reveal “tacit knowing” in action, and that this can be directly connected to the thematic categories of identity, trust, risk, and context identified in Chapter 3 as factors in knowledge sharing.

More specifically, the question under discussion in the present chapter is this: does an approach to the study of everyday discourse in organizational settings, drawing on the DP paradigm, have the potential to reveal empirical evidence for how knowledge work is done and with what consequences, particularly how the tacit is made manifest and with what effect (“the tacit question”)? Why is this potential important and relevant to KM? There are two reasons: first, that TK is generally regarded in the KM field as possessing beneficial and advantageous qualities, commensurate with organizational success and innovation, for instance, and, second, that TK influences action, in the manner of John Bargh and his coworkers’ “mental butlers.” Both of these points are returned to in a moment. Proposing the tacit question involves quite a leap of logic and consequently warrants some explanation. How has this speculative question been arrived at, and what issues and opportunities does it raise? It is a complex story that brings together three domains: knowledge management, DP, and cognitive psychology’s field of implicit learning (IL).

The discussions begin by addressing the origins of the tacit question, and the connections to KM’s social perspectives on knowledge. Next, the subject of TK, from the perspectives of knowledge management, is revisited in detail reviewing its perceived values and definitional complexities. The objective is to position TK as a viable target and topic of research and practice. In pursuing this, disputes over its nature are shown to be centered around two perspectives: conversion versus interaction, and the implicit formulation. It is the consideration of the latter version of the tacit that prompts moving investigations into an area that might, on first sight, appear to be something of a substantial tangent. As it transpires, the field of IL is shown to offer KM a considerable database of scientific evidence in support of an implicit understanding of the tacit and a more robust understanding of the phenomenon. To make this point, a direct comparison is made between the two respective fields’ formulations of TK.

Finally, a way must be found to rationally make connections between the two theoretically polar opposite fields of IL and DP. Specifically, from the constructionist and postmodernist perspectives in which the latter has been located (Chapters 5 and 6), drawing on research from IL, with its roots in a positivist view of science and knowledge, could be contested. This leads to the proposal of an extension to DP, specific to its application to organizational knowledge discourse, and the study of knowledge sharing’s “mental butlers.”

7.2 THE ORIGINS OF THE “TACIT QUESTION”

What prompts the tacit question is a foundational tenet of DP itself. DP is not concerned with what people say but rather what they do with their talk and text: what linguistic devices are employed, what functions are performed, and with what consequences. Discourse is approached as an accountable, action-oriented, and functional phenomenon: what the Cambridge philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously described as “language games.” Consequently, the analysis of organizational discourse, from the DP perspective, is not concerned with what might be termed the “explicit.”

Yet, to simply state that DP-grounded research looks beyond the explicit nonetheless risks that analysis becoming an end in itself, with findings that are unlikely to be of interest or use to those working in KM’s front line. For instance, one can analyze discourse to show how people might formulate this or that rhetorical device with what effect for both hearer and speaker at that given moment and in that context, but this does not, it is argued, satisfy the proverbial US$64,000 question—“so what?” Moreover, will this lead to simply telling us something that we already know? If DP is not concerned with the explicit, can it be claimed that it has, instead, a concern with the tacit? “Tacit,” in this sense, is understood as referring to the means by which people make sense of their world, which makes the explicit actionable.

In exploring these questions, two assumptions are made. First, that all discourse involves knowledge work: at the most basic level, linguistic knowledge of language and a psychological knowledge of cause and effect, as well as contextual knowledge, are essential to human communication and social interaction. Therefore, DP is concerned with “knowledge action.” Secondly, no discursive account can be objective: as the originators of DP, Derek Edwards and Jonathan Potter, propose speakers axiomatically attend to their stake and interest when they construct accounts, reports, and descriptions, as well as to the features of the localized social contexts in which they take place. That is, speakers invent versions of the world in utterances adequate to the prevailing conditions and sensibilities of the speakers themselves, and the context of interaction with all of its implications. Margaret Wetherell succinctly brings the point home: to “speak at all is to speak from a position.” In other words, a position or a standpoint is immersed in subjective perception, belief, attitude, and so forth. There really can be no such thing as an entirely objective statement.

As discussed in previous chapters, the DP view of discourse highlights the constructive and action-oriented nature of talk in interaction. It approaches the cognitive as embedded within not separate to discourse. These ideas suggest connections to some of the formulations of the tacit seen in the KM domain. Haridimos Tsoukas, for instance, reasons that one of the principle reasons behind the misunderstanding of knowledge that characterizes management studies is the cognitivist view of language—“communication”—as a “conduit” to people’s inner minds and thoughts. The implication of this metaphor suggests that language can be seen as an accurate representation of the mental stuff between our ears. Thus, in Tsoukas’ interpretation of the cognitivist perspective, what a person knows can be unproblematically displayed “as is” in linguistic communication.

Add to this perspective another, this time from the field of cognitive psychology and the study of human consciousness, which is concerned with, among other things, the core question of the extent to which we have conscious control over judgments, decision-making, and other behaviors. John Bargh and his colleague’s review of this dauntingly enormous field finds that consciousness plays a role in only around 5% of behavior, suggesting that 95% of the time we are all operating on “autopilot.” Accordingly, unconscious processes are an automatic perceptual activity, influenced by environmental features and contents but which are nonetheless behaviorally influential (summarized in Fig. 2). And obviously, behavior has an influence on the environment of action.

Recall the core tenet of critical discourse analysis, touched on in the previous chapter, and its view of the relationship between discourse and context (environment) as bidirectional. While Bargh and his colleague do not explicitly state this, is it not obvious that in the same way that “environment” influences perceptual processes, which in turn influence behavioral practices, it is equally plausible that those practices will have an influencing effect on environment? Clearly, what we are about here is to equate the unconscious processes to “tacit knowledge” or “tacit knowing” and to speculate an influencing role for what is often and perhaps mistakenly shut away in the KM strategic drawer.

To suggest that DP can reveal the tacit at work in discourse is potentially counter to the central tenet of DP in its implied suggestion that analysis opens a channel to hidden mental states. As noted earlier, this is precisely the assumption that Tsoukas criticizes. The cognitivist view, and indeed that of most conventional KM workers, conceptualizes discourse as the expression of thought, intentions, or other underlying cognitive process, thus implicating a mind–behavior (discourse) distinction in which behavior is contingent to mind. By contrast, Edwards and Potter claim that “(R)rather than seeing the study of discourse as a pathway to individuals’ inner life, whether it be cognitive processes, motivations or some other mental stuff, we see psychological issues as constructed and deployed in the discourse itself” (1992: 127). There is a subtlety at work here: provided that one formulates TK as a psychological phenomenon that is “done” in discourse and that only matters of relevance to the speakers as invoked in that discourse are the subject of analysis, it is argued that posing the tacit question is consistent with Edwards and Potter’s approach.

To underline this argument, consider other synergies between this understanding of what DP can reveal and formulations of “tacit” in the KM field. DP’s approach to discourse as action oriented corresponds with the notion of TK as action oriented and an influencer of action. The importance of context in the formulation of the tacit is also reflected in DP’s approach to context. According to Potter, the “particulars” of any given context of discursive social interaction are important because they are subject to human perception.

In essence, the proposal of adopting a DP theory and methodology to investigate organizational knowledge work, and TK in particular, is only extending in directions that many KM theories are already signposting. Such a proposition should hold some resonance and relevance for the KM practitioner and scholar. The DP project, nonetheless, has its limitations that are returned to toward the end of this chapter. Next, we briefly recall some of the reasons why the tacit is considered to be so valuable in the KM field despite its disputed nature, highlighting the undercurrent of an interesting perspective.

7.3 THE VALUES OF TACIT KNOWLEDGE

The idea that TK (tacit knowing, know-how, etc.; hereafter collectively referred to as TK unless otherwise stated) is crucially linked to innovation and new knowledge in organizations was premiered in the KM field by Ikujiro Nonaka in 1991 , in a guide (as opposed to a theory) explaining how Japanese companies are able to generate continuous innovation as knowledge-creating entities. This formed the basis of his future theory, published for the first time in 1994, introducing all of the key and core features of the theory including the SECI model and the imperative to convert TK to explicit (organizational) knowledge and vice versa (see Chapters 2 and 4 for detailed discussions; note that both 1991 and 1994 versions are the basis of Nonaka and Takeuchi’s book published the following year, and all subsequent versions). In both guide and theory, Nonaka envisions TK as rooted in action and commitment to specific context, and as comprising skills and cognitive elements. The key to the acquisition of TK is, according to Nonaka, experience with or without the use of language. TK quickly became a focal point of debate.

A brief tour of some of the competing perspectives adequately illustrates the tensions over its values. While Nonaka envisions the tacit as the subject of amplification, JC Spender contrastingly ascribes the value of TK to its amplifying agency. Competitive advantage, from this view, emerges through the integration of tangible (explicit) firm-specific knowledge with the intangible (tacit), leading to outcomes unique to the organization. Unlike Nonaka, Spender stops short of speculating on the nature of this “integration.” Robert Grant reports the development of a number of “powerful” information technology tools for knowledge management that are targeted on “tacit knowledge,” which, according to his description, is the oldest known form of knowledge. One wonders how such technology would deal with Dorothy Leonard’s brand of TK, which she describes as “sticky” and not easily transferable other than through mentoring, observation, and collaborative problem solving.

Preferring to apply an organizational typology, Chun Wei Choo ascribes TK as the personal experiences and expertise of the individual with TK as the principle ingredient in the effective acquisition and application of new knowledge. This headlines TK as not only essential but also intrinsically valuable. This is, of course, reminiscent of Paul Duguid’s perspective that TK (“knowing how”) makes the explicit (“knowing that”) actionable and his claims that the importance of Communities of Practice is contingent on the TK that they share. Rounding up some of its other ascribed values, we find TK described as the well spring of knowledge, as vital to competitive advantage and the explaining factor in expertise, and as the most crucial and challenging “knowledge flow” to acquire. It is also described by Max Boisot as the most valuable component of personal knowledge. In fact, Nick Bontis, while describing its importance to delivering strategic performance, is one of the few scholars who temper the valuation of TK with its limiting characteristics in terms of competitiveness and adaptability.

Thus, irrespective of theoretical perspective, TK is valuable to organizations, and as such requires and warrants some action. But the real issue remains—what is it?

7.4 A DISPUTED PHENOMENON

The enduring issue at the heart of the tacit debate largely centers around two questions: what did Michael Polanyi actually mean, and is Nonaka’s imperative to convert tacit to explicit knowledge mistaken?

Without repeating the discussions of earlier chapters, it is worth reemphasizing that despite the disunity over its nature, a substantial portion of the literature draws on Polanyi’s work for an understanding of the tacit. One interpretation of this state of affairs suggests that the root of the problem lies in the interpretation of Polanyi’s work and even, as the scholar Kenneth Grant claims, a lack of consultation with the source work, relying instead on second or even thirdhand accounts. Another sees this as an appropriate, if ironic, example of what Paul Duguid means when he describes the rules for interpreting texts as residing within the individual reader rather than in the text itself, as we saw in Section 4.3. In this case, understanding is in the eye of the beholder, and from this perspective, one interpretation is as good as any other until shown otherwise.

A further point worth noting is that whereas considerable criticism has been brought to bear on Nonaka’s theory of the knowledge-creating firm, very little has been made of Polanyi’s work. One exception is Anu Puusa and her colleague, of the University of Joensuu, Finland, who suggest that his perspective of TK is unhelpful and restrictive (so far as research is concerned). So on one hand there is an obvious issue with the interpretation and understanding of what Polanyi meant but on the other, a near unproblematic acceptance of what he is understood to have written as being true.

According to Polanyi, TK is personal, practical, abstract, ineffable, indefinable, unspecifiable, instrumental, and dwelling in subsidiary awareness. There is one characteristic of this account that is the most clearly misrepresented: Polanyi does not divide knowledge into two distinctive, separable entities. In fact, he argues for a quite opposite formula in which every act of knowing contains tacit and explicit components, implying that one cannot exist without the other. Thus, “…the act of knowing includes an appraisal, and this personal co-efficient, which shapes all factual knowledge, bridges in doing so the disjunction between objectivity and subjectivity” (1962: 17). In denying a distinction between the “objective” and “subjective,” Polanyi insists that complete objectivity is a “false ideal.” According to Ilkka Virtanen and others, many misinterpret Polanyi’s thesis by making precisely these distinctions. A further interpretation suggests Polanyi’s meaning to invoke a process, not a category of knowledge, and indeed, many criticize the reduction of Polanyi’s concept of “tacit knowing” to “tacit knowledge.”

While Polanyi did not explicitly describe the tacit as having most value—he was talking about personal knowledge in the context of scientific discovery, not organizational knowledge in a commercial context—his description of it as intangible, hard to articulate, even ethereal, inevitably brings to mind a prize worth pursuing. One could say that it is the “mystic” dimension afforded through the tacit that lends the practice of KM its primary distinguishing feature from information management. Without TK, is KM not simply managing explicit, codifiable, quantifiable, expressable information, which recalls some of the questions addressed earlier in Chapter 2: is KM a “trendy” new name for information management, and is it merely a passing fad?

That is not to downgrade the value of explicit knowledge, nor the challenges and complexities of managing it. However, if one follows Polanyi’s thesis, all knowledge contains both explicit and tacit phenomena, and one without the other suggests a meaningless state of affairs.

This, once again, links to one of the most contentious debates in the literature: the “conversion versus interaction” question. This question has made an appearance in the preceding chapters (see, for instance, Sections 1.4 and 4.6) so regularly that the reader is, here, sparred any further comment on the matter other than that it remains one of KM’s most contested debates. Scrutiny of the debates around the question of TK raises another, and for the present purposes, more interesting notion: the “implicit” formulation of TK.

7.5 KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT’S “IMPLICIT FORMULATION” OF TACIT KNOWLEDGE

In his phenomenological framework for TK, Tsoukas argues that rules are of no use in mediating action until it is “assimilated” within the unconsciousness. This is in considerable contrast to the traditional dualism—the “either/or” state of knowledge—expressed in the tacit–explicit distinction promoted by Nonaka. It also indicates a trend toward an implicit formulation of TK in the knowledge management field.

Note that while the term “implicit” in connection to TK is used widely in the KM field, this is generally taken to mean “unspoken” or inexpressible in the sense of phrases such as “they all tacitly understood…” or “when she stated XYZ, she implicitly meant ABC….” The understanding of the implicit nature of TK discussed here is much broader than this, as will be made clear, and is why this understanding is referred to as the “implicit formulation.”

In a theory that is designed to address the tacit–explicit issue, Max Boisot proposes that new knowledge results from mentally abstracting and coding information from the environment, reckoning this pattern elaboration to a process of problem solving. In this way, Boisot introduces the idea of TK as implicitly acquired: that is, knowledge of the environment and its contents that bypasses a person’s conscious mental systems. Similarly, Dorothy Leonard and her colleague openly state that knowledge can be acquired through IL, again referring to mental actions that are automatic and that bypass conscious awareness. People are not even aware of possessing knowledge acquired in this way, they claim. Stephen Gourlay is another scholar who suggests that “know-how” contains a tacit fraction (incidentally, he resists mapping “know-how” entirely to TK, but any reasonable interpretation would suggest that “know-how” is precisely that!) that can be acquired through IL without the subject being aware of either learning or knowledge. In a similar vein, Davyyd Greenwood and his coworker, preferring to use the term “tacit knowing,” characterize this as “hidden understanding,” which is difficult to express and which is integral to the active struggle to know how to act in the world.

Offering a slightly different understanding, and drawing on studies in neuroscience, JC Spender suggests that different areas of the brain are responsible for different types of learning, with some areas being evolutionarily older than others. This is a concept that will be returned to in more detail presently (Section 7.6.6).

Connections to John Bargh and his colleague’s work mentioned at the outset of this chapter are crystal clear particularly in their category of “mental processes that are put into motion by features of the environment.” However, have the discussions and investigations around an implicit understanding of TK gone far enough in the KM field? It arguably remains a somewhat vague concept: for instance, in what way is TK “integral to the active struggle to know how to act in the world,” and why is this important?

The implicit theme around TK slightly slipped off the KM agenda for a few years, arguably sidetracked by a refreshing of the original “theory of the knowledge-creating organization” by Nonaka and Toyama in 2007. In the present sampling of the KM literature, it is not until 2011 that the “implicit formulation” makes a reappearance with Tsoukas’ phenomenological framework.

So far, we have seen that TK is generally considered to be a valuable asset to the organization, and while acknowledging the ongoing disputed nature of its constitution, the “implicit formulation” is a well-established account that is shown to have correspondence with some accounts of the unconscious processes in neuroscience fields. Could the “implicit formulation” hold the key to a deeper understanding of the tacit? If so, then the proposal that an approach drawing on DP has the potential to directly study TK in discourse as implicitly accomplished action with effect and consequence would acquire some rationale.

One of the few scientific domains that has explored and studied TK, with a particular focus on its acquisition and use, is that of IL, a branch within cognitive psychology. This is a substantial body of research that has been at best only briefly referenced in the field of KM. The link, somewhat appropriately, is Polanyi, and this link is shown to have consequences for KM. The following section investigates IL, its leading theory and key debates, together with its experimental methodologies and findings. A comparison between this body of evidence and theory and perspectives from the KM literature proves revealing.

7.6 THE IMPLICIT LEARNING PARADIGM

The study of IL from a cognitive psychology perspective finds its origins in the mid-1960s in the work of psychologist Arthur Reber, who is also credited with coining the term. According to Reber, in his essay on implicit and learning and its resulting base of tacit knowledge, IL is the process by which complex knowledge about structured stimulus displays in the environment is largely induced without awareness or the use of conscious learning strategies. Knowledge acquired in this way is unconsciously encoded and stored as abstract mental representations mainly of structural relationships. In Reber’s theory, these abstract mental representations are rule governed, and most importantly for the arguments being developed here, they are unconsciously deployed in modifying behavior appropriate to the environment. Recall John Bargh and his colleague’s thesis that, for the most part, everyday life is guided by unconscious mental processes that are triggered in accordance with prevailing features of the environment: the notion of “mental butlers.”

Before going any further, it is important to emphasize that the interpretation given here to Reber’s (and others’) terminology in IL studies is given the broadest understanding: for instance, his reference to “structures in the environment” is understood as contexts in the sense of the environment and its contents, and “rules” is taken too include shared “social norms,” for instance.

Referring directly to Polanyi’s work, Reber calls these mental representations “tacit knowledge”: “(I)it is this induction process that the philosopher Michael Polanyi referred to when he describes the essence of the work of the creative scientist as building up a ‘personal knowledge’ that resisted verbalization but nevertheless was the driving force behind the ultimate attempts to understand the ‘knowable reality’ that was out there”(1993 : 117). As Reber and his coworker, writing in the late 1970s, conclude, “…implicit learning is a naturally occurring, unconscious, cognitive act, an automatic process of a human mind operating in any complex environment with a rich underlying structure with which it must interact” (1977: 355). This is the launching pad of Reber’s clever but controversial theory of IL and its formulation of tacit knowledge (see Reber’s 1993 detailed essay on the theory, its evidence base, and debates). Importantly, the theory is concerned with both acquisition and application, consistent with the core concerns of KM.

At this early stage of the discussions, it is essential to lay down some boundaries for what follows. IL is bound to questions of consciousness and unconsciousness that modern scientists have wrestled with for more than a century. As one of the founders of cognitive psychology, George A. Miller, writing in the early 1960s, describes it, “consciousness is a word worn smooth by a million tongues.” It is not the intention here to enter into the debates over what the psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist Endel Tulving counts as among the most closely guarded of Nature’s secrets. But, while the present discussions stay focused around Reber’s theory of IL, it is important to view the IL project as sitting within the unresolved—perhaps unresolvable—questions of the nature of consciousness and unconsciousness.

A brief exploration of the Polanyi connection lays the foundations for an understanding of the potential importance of IL for knowledge management.

7.7 COMPARING KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT’S PERSPECTIVES ON THE TACIT WITH THE IL FORMULATION

The admittedly selective sampling in Table 3 demonstrates how closely some KM scholars come to expressing a theory of implicit processes, consistent with the IL literature. Common denominators include the articulation issue, the abstract property, automaticity, unconscious and influencing properties, use in problem solving, being rule based, and the formulation of both tacit and explicit as a “knowledge continuum.” This is an important conjunction and one that justifies drawing on the IL empirical evidence in the context of KM.

The points of departure highlight perspectives in KM that cast TK as rooted in action yet not part of action (3) and that TK can be converted to explicit knowledge through social interaction with others (9). Of these, the second has been shown elsewhere to be the subject of considerable dispute, while the first only requires an element of flexibility to become consistent with a theory of IL.

Three speculative points for KM practice and research can now be underlined. First, one could set aside the label “tacit knowledge,” preferring instead “tacit knowing” as more reflective of the action oriented and influential nature of the phenomenon. Second, the “trigger” for TK action is not mediated, facilitated, nor choreographed by management imperative or IT device: it is context—environment—driven, pure and simple. Third, TK’s value lies first and foremost within the individual, only becoming useful to the organization in the execution of performance. But it does have value.

The following section touches on philosophical underpinnings of KM, DP, and IL, and issues around theoretical incommensurability.

7.8 PHILOSOPHY, METHODOLOGY, AND INCOMMENSURABILITY

The theory of knowledge (epistemology) and the nature of reality, or ontology, are both concerned with how the world and its contents are perceived. Consequently these provide the philosophical foundations for theory and research methodology. As we saw in Chapter 5, in these matters we find two opposing agendas. On one side, positivism approaches facts and knowledge as out there in the world to be observed, discovered, and objectively acted upon. On the other, the constructionist perspective sees knowledge and reality as socially constructed and consequently mental representations are unique to the individual and cannot be known entirely to another. This is a debate that largely centers around the subjectivist versus objectivist debate. What will shortly become clear is that the field of IL and the academic discipline of DP both operate to opposite agendas. This is not conceptualized as a “spectrum” of debate as this would suggest a scale with two extreme points and an implied “middle ground”: in this debate, there is none. Drawing on both schools of thought consequently creates a problem of incommensurability.

7.9 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

(C)contexts—defined as mental constructs of relevant aspects of social situations—influence what people say and especially how they say it.

(Teun van Dijk, 2006 : 165)

This chapter started with a problem, namely, that to simply embrace the DP paradigm uncritically and unreservedly could lead to an approach whose product risks being of little interest or use to the KM practitioner or researcher. In attempting to address the “US$64,000 question”—what can an approach from the theoretical and methodological groundings of DP offer that would be of value and use to KM—the answer is found in a one of DP’s basic tenets and the conceptualization of tacit knowing.

In KM, the subject of TK invokes considerable disunity over definition but there is nonetheless a widely held perception of its importance and values. It has also been suggested that this disunity is the result of variation in understanding and interpretation of Michael Polanyi’s thesis that can be seen in, for instance, the “conversion” debate. But what is also evident among many KM scholars is the conceptualization of the tacit as an “implicit formulation.” If TK is valuable, implicitly acquired and deployed, yet is influential to action, then a proposal for a method of specifically targeting the tacit in action will surely yield relevant and valuable insights into organizational knowledge work.

An investigation of cognitive psychology’s IL finds decades of experimental research and theorizing. This also offers a more precise account of TK, including its acquisition and deployment, which is shown to have currency with at least some accounts in the KM field. Thus, implicit formulations of TK can be seen as being supported by IL’s empirical evidence. Admittedly, Reber’s theory of IL and research across the board are subject to considerable criticism, but despite this, there is arguably sufficient evidence to suggest its plausibility as a perspective on TK. “Plausibility” is a key measure here because there can be no objective and unbiased “truth” on what constitutes TK, nor any other aspect of knowledge for that matter. The truth is whatever is commonly shared at any given time. The idea of the tacit as the product of natural processes, unconsciously acquired and deployed, contingent to the environment and its contents, an influential mediator of action, and one component of what we call “knowledge” is consistent with many of the accounts discussed in this chapter, which are drawn from diverse fields: John Bargh and his colleague and their notion of “mental butlers,” Polanyi and his idea of the “personal coefficient,” Kahneman and his idea of “System 1,” Duguid and his notions of the contingent relationship between knowing how and knowing that; and so on and so forth. To add support to these arguments, a direct comparison between theoretical ideas in KM and IL reveals considerable compatibility.

With this conceptualization of TK in mind, it is suggested that an approach to the study of organizational knowledge work, drawing on DP, can uncover tacit action and influence. Thus, we propose drawing on Derek Edwards and his colleague’s DP for a constructionist theory of knowledge, a theory of language and methodology for the study of discourse. In directly addressing the issue of relevance and the US$64,000 question, the DP paradigm is here extended in two ways: first, the conceptualization of TK drawn from IL theory and some in the KM field is acknowledged and made the focus of research. Second, it is explicitly claimed, based on the arguments and evidence discussed here and elsewhere, that in applying a DP approach to studying organizational knowledge discourse, one is studying directly tacit knowing (knowing how) in action, that is, the end product or “output” of the IL process—tacit knowing as an influencing factor in that discourse—with no need to speculate on the mental processes that result in such discursive displays.

In this way, knowledge is approached as constructed in discourse that is itself occasioned and situated, within which the “tacit fraction” is understood as action oriented and influential and contingent to the environment (context). The crux of the matter is the proposal that the influence, or footprint, of tacit knowing as an aspect of discursively actioned knowledge can be revealed through the analysis of organizational discourse for how speakers make sense of the world.

The point is that in any given account, a report to a meeting, for instance, a version of the world is actively constructed, which is influenced by tacit knowing. By examining discourse for how people talk and what actions they accomplish (e.g., managing risk, accountability, attribution, identity, claims to be heard as expert, and so on), rather than the explicit contents of their talk, an understanding of speakers’ lived in experience and interpretation of their world—their orientation to context—can be studied directly.

What all of this suggests is that a tacit/explicit dualist understanding of knowledge is not only inconsistent with the constructionist approach promoted here, but is also irrelevant. Tacit knowing is that aspect—or coefficient, to use Polanyi’s description—of knowledge that underlies, influences, motivates, affects, and drives discourse: it serves the functional, consequential, and variable actions in the construction. A further feature to underline, and drawing on Kenneth Gergen’s notion of “relational being,” is the view of knowledge as corelational or coactioned: it is always constructed in relation to someone or something else, which links back to Reber’s notion of covariance. The understanding of tacit knowing expressed here is very similar to the notions of Daniel Kahneman in his essay on intuition: “…the mystery of knowing without knowing is not a distinctive feature of intuition: it is the norm of mental life” (2011: 237).

Two further points to note that are relevant to the practice and study of KM are as follows: first, a preference for the term “tacit knowing” because this is more reflective of the active, processional, and influential nature of the phenomenon. Second, the “trigger” for TK action is not subservient to some management imperative: it is context driven, pure, and simple—with context understood as the actor’s interpretation and understanding of their environment and its contents.

The penultimate chapter in Part One brings these ideas together with the thematic categories of knowledge sharing identified in Chapter 3.

FURTHER READING

1. Bargh, J. and Chartbrand, T. (1999). The unbearable automaticity of being. American Psychologist, 54, (7): 462–479.
2. Cohen, J. and Schooler, J. (Eds). (1997). Scientific Approaches to Consciousness. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
3. Gourlay, S. (2006). Conceptualizing knowledge creation: a critique of Nonaka’s theory. Journal of Management Studies, 43, (7): 1415–1436.
4. Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. London: Penguin.
5. Nonaka, I. (1994). A dynamic theory of organizational knowledge creation. Organization Science, 5, (1): 14–37.
6. Pothos, E. (2007). Theories of artificial grammar learning. Psychological Bulletin, 133, (2): 227–244.
7. Reber, A. (1993). Implicit Learning and Tacit Knowledge: An Essay on Cognitive Unconsciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
8. Seger, C. (1994). Implicit learning. Psychological Bulletin, 115, (2): 163–196.