1.3.1 Knowledge: “Thing” or “Action”?

The lines can generally be drawn up into those who—explicitly or otherwise—reify knowledge as an object, and those who view it as social action. On the latter, “social action” refers to the notion of knowledge as action accomplished in interaction with others. This latter understanding requires a little explanation. Taken to its extreme, the idea of knowledge as action accomplished socially might suggest that it is only in social interaction with other people that knowledge comes into existence. But this interpretation causes problems for the idea of individual capability to experience a “light-bulb” moment in solitude, for instance. Alternatively, it could be interpreted as “knowledge as a psychological phenomenon experienced in social interaction with others, or through the individual’s interaction with their environment.” Where knowledge is approached as constituting social interaction or as its product, this does not necessarily imply that knowledge is always spontaneous to that interaction. In other words, the germ of knowledge new to the recipient may be seeded in social interaction with others, but may not emerge as such until some later point, perhaps triggered by some unconnected event in the environment. It is to this latter understanding that we refer throughout this book.

Those who offer a reified account of knowledge, although they may well resist such a classification, include Professor Ikujiro Nonaka of the Graduate School of International Corporate Strategy, Hitotsubashi University; Dorothy Leonard of the Harvard Business School; Varun Grover, distinguished professor at Clemson University; and Thomas Davenport. On the other side, advocates of knowledge connected to social action include professor of anthropology and director of the Institute for European Studies at Cornell University Davydd Greenwood, Professor Morten Levin of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, and Professor Frank Blackler of the University of Lancaster. A prestigious line up by anyone’s standards, but can they all be right? Recall David Snowden’s paradoxical perspective of knowledge as both an object and a flow. According to this, they can. This is a debate in which no perspective can be said to be “right” or “wrong” for that matter.

The substance of debate is this: there is a world of difference between a strategy geared toward managing and leveraging knowledge as an object, lying out there to be found, a commodity to be codified, counted, stored, and even sold, and the view of knowledge as a socially constructed and distributed phenomenon. The two respective sides are fairly entrenched with, for instance, Greenwood and Levin describing the commodity view as “petty.” All of this, of course, suggests an either/or case, which according to Snowden is old thinking. But this is an incredibly complex issue. It is so complex that it is a theme to which these discussions return to throughout most chapters of this book. It is, for instance, fundamental to theories in KM, to which an entire chapter is devoted. In among all of this complexity, it is nonetheless clear that whichever agenda is adopted, it will have major ramifications on any business strategy designed to manage knowledge and on precisely what is managed.

But what of the traditional hierarchical model: data—information—knowledge? Max Boisot of the School of Administration in Barcelona suggests that data is out there in the world, knowledge is in people’s heads, and information is the element that mediates between them. Can this not offer a concise understanding of the nature of knowledge, as defined in relation to data and information? Unfortunately not, but a clearer understanding of this particular model can be gained following a discussion of the issues and competing formulations of knowledge.

So far, a landscape has been imagined in which the ranks of “knowledge as object” are pitched on one side, with those of “knowledge as social action” on the other. To put these polarized viewpoints into perspective, two further questions are briefly considered: the subjective versus objective view of knowledge and the debates around organizational versus personal knowledge.

1.3.2 The Subjective versus Objective

The subjective/objective debate, which can be equated to the debate over knowledge as a “thing” versus knowledge as “action,” has a lengthy tradition in the philosophical and scientific domains, with a recent trend seeing a shift away from a strict distinction between the two. A simple way of looking at this is to see the subjective as personal, open to bias and opinion, evaluation, attitude, and belief. By contrast, the objective relates to undisputable facts, divorced from bias, experience, or influence.

As background to the subjective versus objective question, consider two cases of “objective accounting” drawn from psychology: witness accounts and scientific reporting. Witness testimony is idealized as “objective,” an unbiased account of what happened, and in fact, many witnesses will go to extreme lengths to frame their accounts as such. Social psychologists Abigail Locke and Derek Edwards, for example, studied President Clinton’s testimony before the US Grand Jury concerning his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. According to their fascinating analysis, Clinton portrays himself as determined to focus solely on the facts of the matter—the objective, knowable account of events—and thus is able to sidestep awkward questions by appealing to his faulty memory.

Witness accounts are not just confined to courts of law: in everyday conversation, for instance, we routinely frame our reports, accounts, and descriptions of events as valid and authentic as firsthand experience. In his study of “witness accounts” by callers to a radio station, Ian Hutchby of Brunel University finds that narrators of firsthand eyewitness accounts show themselves as in possession both of the rights to recount the experience and also how it emotionally affected them, whereas the person listening to the story usually does not. If the recipient were to retell the account and couch it in their own emotional response, this would seem odd. Moreover, as Elizabeth Loftus, professor of psychology and law at the University of Washington, has shown in her empirical studies of eyewitness accounting, memory is remarkably faulty and seriously open to influence. How unbiased is that?

According to folk wisdom, scientific reporting would stand as the paragon of unbiased, objective accounting. But it is also undeniably bound to human perception. Consider an account often related in psychology texts to underline the concept of “individual differences.” In 1795, Nevil Maskelyne (1732–1811), England’s royal astronomer, sacked his assistant, David Kinnebrook. According to the account given by psychologists Duane and Sydney Schultz, Maskelyne noticed variances between his assistant’s observations and his own of the same phenomena. He concluded that his assistant’s work was inaccurate, and thus Kinnebrook became victim to one of the earliest records of human individual differences. Twenty years later, the German astronomer Friedrich Bessel (1784–1846) proved that it had indeed been a case of individual differences—the innate, unavoidable disposition of the individual to uniquely perceive the world—sufficient to result in small observational differences.

The question then is to what extent can anything ever be objective or wholly subjective for that matter? Alan Chalmers, professor of the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney, questions whether science and its knowledge can ever be considered objective. He is not alone. Michael Polanyi, referring to knowledge, argues that complete objectivity is not only a delusion, but a false ideal, claiming that “…the act of knowing includes an appraisal, and this personal coefficient, which shapes all factual knowledge, bridges in doing so the disjunction between objectivity and subjectivity” (1962 : 17). What he means is that all “factual knowledge” comes drenched in personal, individual evaluation—experience and context—which renders even the most factual of knowledge as an inevitable mix of the subjective and the objective. Kenneth Gergen is even more critical of the idea that truth and knowledge are somehow lying “out there” to be discovered, citing human “individual differences” as the rug that pulls the feet from under objectivity. Everything—or mostly everything—is therefore subjective—or mostly subjective.

The objective/subjective question of the nature of knowledge takes on strategic importance in the context of knowledge as an organizational asset to be managed and leveraged. Those, for instance, who adopt a “systems approach” (i.e., with an emphasis on information technology (IT) as the primary means of managing knowledge) tend to apply an “object” label to the commodity they manage. This touches on yet another schism in KM: for some, its practice is mainly concerned with technologies and how they are used in managing knowledge, taking its roots from information management. So we see a proliferation of “knowledge repositories,” “yellow pages,” knowledge discussion forums, and a ramped-up increase in interest in the use of social media. The concerns of the systems approach center on effective content categorization strategies: the ability to find documented knowledge at the point of use and the people who possess the knowledge that is needed, for instance. Such technologies are valuable through their communicative potential, but can their contents really be called “knowledge”?

As might be expected, there are equally strong opposing views to the central role that some give technologies. For instance, in their analysis of case studies of information and communications technology-focused knowledge initiatives, Kenneth Grant and Umair Qureshi of Ryerson University in Toronto found high failure rates, which they correlate to initiatives’ emphasis on technology. In mitigation, IT projects are notoriously prone to risk and failure but, as Grant and his colleague conclude, knowledge IT projects come with an additional set of complicating parameters and must account for the personal nature of knowledge and the importance of communities.

An early conclusion to be drawn is that the either/or approach to knowledge as object or social action, as objective or subjective, has significant consequences for what is managed or studied and their outcomes. Grant and his coworker’s reference to personal knowledge leads into the next theme.

1.3.3 Organizational versus Personal Knowledge

This concerns the question of whether knowledge can only ever be personal or whether it can exist collectively, typically referred to as “organizational knowledge.” Once again, polarized sides are encountered. Scholars including Michael Polanyi, and Robert Grant writing in 2002 support a personal knowledge agenda. The latter, for instance, suggests that the more productive perspective is to view collective (viz., organizational) knowledge as an aggregation of the knowledge in individuals’ heads. It is precisely the relationship between the two that Grant calls into question, arguing that an emphasis on organizational knowledge simply clouds the relationship between collective and individual knowledge. This is a question considered in some depth by Haridimos Tsoukas and his colleague. In an admittedly confusing definition, they suggest that personal knowledge is the ability of the individual to operate effectively within a collective drawing on their understanding of its context and all things associated with this including its “theory,” which they contrast with organizational knowledge described as a set of organizational rules that people are able to draw and act upon. What they conclude is that these are two distinct types of knowledge, implying a requirement for two equally distinctive types of management.

What these many sides of the debate tell us is that KM, in its practice, research, and theory, targets a disparate—often incompatible—array of artifacts and phenomena. Is there any commonality at all to be found? In fact, there is and it is to this that we now turn.

1.4.1 What Did Polanyi Really Say?

It may seem “off message” to slip so easily into a discussion of the works of a scientist and philosopher who was not even specifically addressing the concerns of KM. But, as noted earlier, KM refers to his work so frequently as to suggest that he was in fact writing with a management theme in mind, which, of course, he definitely was not. Polanyi’s concern is to dispense with the objective, impersonal ideals of scientific detachment in favor of recognizing “knowing” as an art in which the skill of the knower is a fundamental part of scientific understanding. What he is proposing here, according to this interpretation, is that it is the scientist’s participation in both discovery and validation of knowledge, which is itself a part of that knowledge and of the science. Consequently, science and its facts—knowledge—can never be entirely objective, because they will always include a personal subjective component.

Think of it like this. A market researcher canvasses opinions about a new product, which she does using semistructured questionnaires. She herself conducts the interviews, transcribes the results, and interprets the findings. At all of the following points of the exercise, the researcher could be shown to have, perhaps unknowingly and unwittingly, introduced her own personal interpretation of events based on past experience, beliefs, and attitudes:

• The selection of the research topic
• The selection of the interview candidates
• The selection and presentation of the questions
• Her own involvement in the interview
• The transcription of the interviews
• Interpretation and reporting of the findings

At any of these points, bias can slide in. The same could be argued about any research involving questionnaires, interviews, and even political polls, for instance. Why? For the simple reason that humans by their nature are designed to operate in a (un)conscious state of constant “sensemaking.” Everything you know, everything you think you know, everything you can do, or think you can has arrived with you via your sensemaking filter—your perceptual senses. This notion of “sensemaking” is returned to in more depth in later chapters. For the present, and with this point made, what does Polanyi have to say on the subject of the “tacit”?

In the course of fashioning his claims over the nature of subjectivity and objectivity, he particularly focuses on tacit knowledge. He variously describes this as personal, practical, ineffable, indefinable (sic.), instrumental, and residing in subsidiary awareness. It is, in sum, unspecifiable. Thus, in his own words, “(A)an art which cannot be specified in detail cannot be transmitted by prescription, since no prescription exists” (1962: 53).

If that is Polanyi’s brand of tacit knowledge, what of its relationship with the other kind, explicit? Recall Nonaka and colleagues’ tacit–explicit model and the imperative to convert one to the other, a distinction that is widely subscribed to. A substantial number of those who disagree with this model, including Paul Duguid of the University of California, Berkeley, have interpreted Polanyi’s claims as denying any divorce between the two phenomena: accordingly, all knowledge contains both tacit and explicit elements. In his railing against economists’ reductive treatment of knowledge to the level of “widgets,” Duguid persuasively reasons that the tacit cannot be reduced to the explicit. Moreover, the tacit is essential to engaging an understanding of the explicit. This he describes as evidenced in a long list of philosophical thought reaching back to the ancient Greeks several thousand years ago, and which understands what we call tacit knowledge as the underpinning cognitive dimension that mediates—“tells us how to use”—what we refer to as codified or explicit knowledge. The tacit, in this interpretation, is the key to unlocking the explicit.

Unfortunately, Polanyi does not offer an explicit, “cards on the table” explanation of the tacit–explicit relationship in a way that would have relevance and resonance for KM. Instead, a scenario that he uses to talk around the subject might shed some light. Imagine you learn to play the piano: at first, you concentrate on your fingers on the keys and their movement from one key to the next. Eventually, after much practice, you can play the piece without looking at your hands or even thinking about tapping keys. What began as the acquisition and application of what might be called explicit knowing—knowing that is necessarily in full focal awareness because you must concentrate on what you do and consciously apply the task’s rules—has become tacit knowing. That is, knowing that has become subsidiary to conscious awareness to the extent that if you switched your full conscious attention onto your playing, you would probably lose your ability to play. (“Focal” and “subsidiary” awareness are Polanyi’s terms.) So, from this scenario, it would appear that the explicit can become tacit through practice and experience, but the minute you attempt to “convert” that to explicit, you risk a reduction or loss in ability. However, I would suggest that the subtlety here is that both tacit and explicit knowing are implicated from the outset of the task: what changes is your awareness.

There is whichever way you approach it a lot of confusion over what Michael Polanyi actually meant. What is clear is that the majority of scholars and practitioners in the field approach knowledge as comprising two or more types, of which tacit and explicit are the primary classes. The main point of debate is over the nature of tacit knowledge, and whether this can be harvested and converted to the explicit, as many suggest. Or, as others claim, such attempts at “managing” the tacit are wholly inappropriate and a wasteful undertaking. The tacit question is returned to in a later chapter, where the discussions turn to a different scientific discipline for a more evidence-based understanding of the phenomenon. Now however consideration is given to some of the alternative accounts to the tacit–explicit duality.

1.4.2 The Importance of Context: What Context and Whose Context?

There is an argument that places “context” in the role of the most important aspect in any definition or understanding of knowledge. Cambridge University scholar Mark Thompson and his colleague, for instance, propose context to be an embedded knowledge element, and that this is what Michael Polanyi meant when he described the structure of knowledge as containing a “personal coefficient.” According to this formula, knowledge, or knowing, is meaningless without its context, and that context is specific and unique to the individual. But where does this context come from, and how does it emerge?

For some, context is personal, while others, for instance, Charles Despres, Daniele Chauvel, and Ganesh Bhatt, seem to be positioning context as a referent to environment or culture. From the standpoint of context as personal, which position Polanyi arguably adopts, for knowledge to have meaning, it must be filtered through the mesh of the individual’s beliefs, experiences, expectations, and so forth. These may be organizationally shared meanings, or they may be unique to the individual. For instance, Mark Thompson and his colleague understand context from an organizational perspective, seeing it as comprising the shared meanings and experiences of organization members, implying an “organizational cultural context.” Similarly, Davydd Greenwood and his colleague define knowledge as inherently collective (“knowing”), socially constructed, and distributed, embedded in the individual’s understanding of how to act in the world, all of which can be interpreted as representing “context.” Based on these accounts, it is clear that the notion of “context” is used in a broad and sometimes ambiguous sense. As something of a tangential indulgence, an interesting perspective on “context” can be drawn from psychological studies of memory.

The topic of memory has one of the longest traditions in psychology, and Alan Baddeley has made it his particular field of expertise. In his book Essentials of Human Memory, based on decades of research, Baddeley hypothesizes that we store our knowledge in a mental structure known as “semantic memory,” and much of this is not capable of expression in words. This rings considerable bells with Michael Polanyi’s perspective on tacit knowledge. For Baddeley, context is not so much the influence of the external environment, but rather our interpretation of it using the tools of our stored knowledge. For instance, referring to our interpretation of words, knowledge of the world that exceeds in most cases the boundaries of words’ meaning is essential to understanding. This has correspondence with Paul Duguid’s formulation of an uncodifiable substrate, which tells us how to use the “code.”

Taking an example of context at work, Baddeley reports on a number of studies by Endel Tulving, whom he describes as one of the most significant contributors to our understanding of memory retrieval. In one of these, participants were presented with a word to be remembered (the target word), simultaneously associated with a “cue word,” which had a loose association with the former: for example, if “city” was the word to be remembered, it might be associated with “dirty” or “village.” In retrieval tests, the findings persuasively demonstrate that participants given the cue word were far more able to accurately retrieve the target words than those who were not. In this sense, the cue word acts as a kind of context. In the broader sense, context informs and influences meaning—our understanding and interpretation of our knowledge of the world. In other words, sensemaking is context driven.

In a more elaborate experiment of context-dependent memory recall, Baddeley and his colleague, D.R. Godden, got divers to learn word lists in one of two environments: underwater or on dry land. Their findings show that words were more accurately recalled when divers were in the environment in which the original learning took place and worse in the opposite environment. It was not the physical environment that was doing the influencing, but rather the participants’ interpretation of it. Remove the context, and you remove the “sense.” To quote a story recounted by Baddeley and his coworker, a man is found to be an expert dancer in a small room containing a trunk, around which he must negotiate his moves. With the trunk removed, his performance became compromised.

The intention of including these couple of examples from psychology is to point to these topics of research and investigation as a source of relevance and interest for the present discussions.

So what has all this to do with a KM perspective on context? According to Kenneth Gergen, “(S)seeing is a theory-laden undertaking” (1991: 92). This understanding of context (here conceptualized as the context of observation), both in terms of cueing access to stored knowledge and as binding knowledge to experiential, cultural, environmental, and social factors, renders it unique to the individual. People may well share common knowledge within an organization, for instance, and they may even coconstruct knowledge. However, no two people will ever possess identical knowledge, but shared elements of context enable a platform for shared meaning. As an idea, this is not so very far apart from many of the formulations around knowledge discussed in KM.

It is worth noting that Nonaka and his colleagues feature the importance of context in their theory of the knowledge-creating firm in various guises. In 1994, Nonaka proposes a cycle of knowledge in the form of a continuous spiral in which the tacit becomes the explicit, and vice versa, which is performed on the stage of social practice. In a later work, along with coworker Noboru Konno, this idea is developed through the introduction of “Ba”—a uniquely Japanese concept of social space that can be physical, mental, or virtual—drawing on the ideas of a Japanese philosopher. The point is that in this monumentally influential theory, “social practice” can be equated to what others would call “context,” but this aspect of the theory tends to be overlooked. We now turn to social action in more detail.

1.4.3 A Preference for “Knowing” as Action

Writing in the mid-1990s, the start of Snowden’s second generation of KM, Professor Frank Blackler proposed a rather radical departure from the “traditional rational-cognitive” formulations of knowledge. What he argued for was that it would be more appropriate to approach knowledge as action that people do rather than something that they possess—thus “knowing” rather than knowledge, action rather than commodity. Central to this argument is the idea that if “knowing how” is located in action, then a direct link is created between action and knowledge.

Blackler argues that the traditional conception of knowledge as abstract, disembodied, and formal is unrealistic. Instead, he proposes five “images” or types of knowledge, building on work by H. Collins published 2 years earlier: embrained, embodied, encultured, embedded, and encoded. Note that Blackler’s interpretation of encultured knowledge as socially constructed and open to negotiation, which is consequently heavily dependent on language, introduces a “discursive” aspect. The difficulty with Blackler’s arguments stems from an apparent contradiction between suggesting a move toward viewing knowledge as action and his primary observation of a shift away from embodied and embedded knowledge toward the other knowledge “images.” It is not clear whether Blackler is arguing for a reversal of this shift or not. The original work by Collins is worth a visit in its description of two types of human action—regular and behavior-specific acts: he argues that the former underlies tacit knowledge and is centered around “rule following” and “rule establishing,” which are hard to describe and transfer, whereas the latter are decontextualizable. He also implies the action orientation of discourse. This idea is increasingly developed as the present work progresses and represents the “main event” in Part Two.

As we saw earlier, a preference for “knowing” as opposed to “knowledge” finds support elsewhere, notably in the works of Davydd Greenwood and his colleague and Paul Duguid. These scholars particularly link the idea of “knowing” to tacit knowledge, which, similarly to Collins work, underlines its action orientation. Such a conceptualization of knowing has obvious implications for KM’s project.

Not unexpectedly, the relationship between “know how” and tacit knowledge—if indeed there is one—has attracted its share of debate and contradiction. On one side of the debate, “know how” is explicitly mapped to tacit knowledge: they are one and the same. The opposite side denies such a relationship: for instance, Stephen Gourlay, in his criticism of Nonaka and his colleagues’ conceptualization of knowledge and their knowledge creating model, proposes that “know how” and “know that,” rather than equating to tacit/explicit, represent two different types of behavior—everyday and reflective. In contrast, John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, for instance, map “know how” to tacit knowledge, ascribing it with the same properties (not easily transferable, a product of experience). Interestingly, they also note that “know how” is embedded in practice. Such a perspective is not surprising given the importance and emphasis that Brown and Duguid place on communities of practice in the development of new knowledge. The reader’s attention is drawn to Gourlay, Brown, and Duguid’s use of the terms “know how” and “know that,” compared with, for instance, Greenwood and his colleague and Duguid’s (writing several years later) preference for the term “knowing.” Practically and arguably, the only difference between these lies in the inference of action in “knowing,” and the potential for reification in consideration of “know how” for instance.

What we have seen thus far is a multifarious, often confusing, display of perspectives on the structure of knowledge, so much so that it is little wonder if the majority of those interested in KM adopt the, by comparison, simple and clear-cut tacit–explicit dualism. There are two more principle themes to consider in the present discussion of the nature of knowledge, before we might attempt to draw some conclusions—semantic frameworks for knowledge and the hierarchy of knowledge—mentioned earlier in this chapter.