17.1 A MANAGEMENT PRACTICE IN SEARCH OF AN OBJECT

Using an approach drawing on discursive psychology, discourse in organizational settings is analysed for how the thematic categories of trust, identity, risk and context are made live, and with what, if any, influence and effect on what are understood as knowledge sharing meeting/forum contexts. In particular, will such an analysis inform an understanding of these thematic categories as tacitly invoked phenomena, and can these themes be shown to be co-relational?

(Summary of indicative research questions, Chapter 11)

This project started out with a view of knowledge management (KM) as a problematic field characterized by its range and scope of debates and issues (see Chapters 1–4). One might even go so far as to describe it as a management practice in search of an object, in more ways than one. In spite of the broad often competing perspective and theory, there is a persistent theme of knowledge as embedded in or as constituting social interaction within which the “knowing how–knowing that” formulation is considered to be the most important. This led to the speculation that relocating the sphere of interest onto everyday organizational discourse would create the opportunity for studying knowledge work in action. With a particular interest in organizational knowledge sharing (KS), a critical review and analysis of KM research and theory identified a number of factors considered to be influential, in one direction or another, on those types of activities. These were subsequently mapped to the thematic categories of trust, risk, identity, and context. Recall that the latter of these is positioned as the corroborating phenomenon for the relationship between trust, risk, and identity in KS practices, as discussed in Section 8.6.

Taking these themes as the subject, the research reported in the previous five chapters draws on discursive psychology (DP) for both a theory and a methodology for the investigation of KS actions in organizational meeting and online discussion forum discourse. As outlined toward the end of Part One, the research also acknowledges an understanding of tacit knowing as the cognitive “input” resulting from the unconscious, automatic abstraction of information from the environment, which has been shown in studies of implicit learning to be influential on action (the “output”). Lines of connection are drawn between this and the formulation of “knowing how–knowing that” promoted by, for instance, Paul Duguid among others in the KM field. Central to this formulation is the idea that knowing how makes knowing that actionable, with the former representing the “uncodifiable substrate” that informs the use of codified knowledge (the “code”) to borrow Duguid’s terms once again. Tying these points together, it is suggested that the (extended) discursive psychology methodology reveals tacit knowing (knowing how) as an accomplishment in discourse in social interaction—the output mentioned earlier.

Reprising a caveat included in the Introduction, and laid out in more detail in Chapter 9, it is important to differentiate between the concept of knowledge adhered to here and the dualist version of knowledge seen so prominently in the KM field. In referring to “tacit knowing” and “knowing how,” a distinction is not being drawn nor acknowledged between these and explicit knowledge. Knowledge is approached here as a holistic concept comprising both tacit (know how) and explicit (know that) fragments, with the sum of both constituting knowledge. One does not exist without the other.

The principle claim is that the research findings show how these thematic categories are invoked by speakers in meetings where the aim is to share knowledge, that they are corelationally and locally situated. More to the point, they are shown to influence the direction and scope of KS actions. The substance on which these claims are based can be seen in the findings of the focus on context as a generic theme, in which trust, risk, and identity are shown to be invoked by speakers in KS action.

Before establishing the aims, objectives, and directions of this chapter, it is worth a brief pause to reflect back on the KS factors (see Table 1) that underlie the thematic categories.

What is immediately clear is that not all of these (19 in all) could be said to be present in the data. Some are obvious in their absence: “values placed on mentoring,” for instance, and the “time–costs” implication. Interestingly, the analysis that shows up the greatest number of KS factors is “context” (12: as one might expect), with that showing the least being “risk.” Trust has the next highest number present (9). This assessment is not in the least scientifically done, but, as a “gist” picture, one interpretation might be as follows: trust, risk, and identity are pervasive concerns of speakers engaged in KS actions, with trust shown to be the most significant, and risk, the least.

This picture can, fortunately, be easily dismantled. There is sufficient evidence to support the thesis of trust as corelational with risk (see, for instance, Section 8.4 and Chapter 13). There is also sufficient evidence to support the notion of constructed identity as pretty much foundational and fundamental to the accomplishment of discourse in social interaction (see Sections 6.4 and 8.2, and Chapters 14 and 15). Even, for instance, in the attempt to write scientifically and objectively, the subjective creeps in. Recall Margaret Wetherell’s simple but effective insight that to speak (to utter, to write) is to speak from a position of personal beliefs, agendas, values, experiences, preferences, knowledge, and so on. Discourse is a subjective accomplishment.

What, then, can be concluded from this brief retrovisit to the source KS factors? Arguably, the only conclusion that can be drawn is that the KS factors, as sourced from research and theory in the KM field, are for the most part far too specific to the context in which they are originally situated. Moreover, factors such as people’s natural tendency to store and hoard their knowledge and the inhibiting effects of an absence of incentives to share simply do not figure (with the exception of the speculative discussion in Section 13.5) in the present analyses. Collectively what the KS factors did do, though, was prompt an interest in trust, risk, and identity.

The aim of this chapter is to discuss the research findings relevant to the detailed indicative research questions (first stated in Section 11.5.1), which are used as a framework to guide the discussions. Drawing from this, the next section explores the potential implications of these findings in relation to the key issues and debates in KM (see Chapters 1–4) leading to some future directions for the development of these ideas, and for further research. (The reader is referred to Section 11.5.1 for a reminder of the validation procedures that the present research has employed and Section 11.6 on its potential limitations.)

17.2 FINDING MEANING

In the environment of organizational KS, how are matters of identity, trust and risk constructed as live issues and concerns of speakers?

Taken as a whole, the findings represent a rich and intricate, even bewildering range of discursive devices and strategies which speakers routinely use in their everyday discourse. In the present case, the invoking of trust, risk, and identity as accomplishments in social interaction are shown to work as displays of knowledge of mutually shared understanding of the context and meeting precepts in which those discursive actions take place. A further feature to draw attention to is the implicit nature of these actions: these discursive accomplishments are not the outcome of conscious goal-directed linguistic behavior. That would suggest a distinction between thought and discursive action and inner minds as the “driver behind the wheel” of language. Even the most measured and careful utterance (and there are several examples of this in the data) is a complex mesh of probing the context, sense-making informed by tacit knowing, and a sophisticated orientation to shared understanding.

What is also clear is that while there is a certain amount of consistency in the display of discursive devices and strategies between the different analyses, there is also a great deal of diversity. Bearing in mind the claim that shared understanding is essential to sharing knowledge (see Chapter 16), it is even more bewildering to think that speakers possess an innate understanding of, and ability with, such an extensive communicative “tool set.”

A key finding is that in instances of social interaction where the objective and purpose is to share knowledge, speakers (“speakers/participants” collectively refer to speakers in meetings and forum contributors) are shown to invoke identity, trust, and risk as live concerns. That is, KS is shown to be contingent to these three contexts and more than likely, vice versa. As a caveat, this is not to suggest that these are the only KS influencing discursive contexts—a wider research focus might well reveal others. As a first observation, though, it is quite clear that at the outset of all of the interactions analyzed here few of the speakers explicitly refer to these contexts (one exception being Chapter 16, Extract 3). So how do they emerge in the action? The first research question is concerned with how speakers go about the business of constructing these particular thematic categories: what discursive tools (devices and strategies) are mobilized, and how can such tools be shown to have the effect of constructing trust, risk, and identity as speakers’ live concerns? A consideration of some of the more prominent and commonly deployed of these serves to clarify the findings in respect of these enquiries.

It is suggested that such matters or themes are influencing in the context of KS—how and with what effect for speakers and their business?

This is an interesting question, and if shown to be substantiated, it would have particular ramifications for organizational practices of KS and the “knowing how–knowing that” formulation. It is claimed that the analyses and their findings suggest four ways in which KS is influenced by the speakers’ invoked contexts of trust, risk, and/or identity. The first concerns blame attribution, the second implicates actions of consensus, the third concerns the scenarios of financial accounting in Chapter 13, and the fourth centers on the role reversal actions in Chapter 14. The following discussions unpick each of these in turn.

It is also suggested that these themes work corelationally—how is this displayed in discourse in social interaction and with what effect?

There are so many instances where the analyses show the corelational way in which the contexts of trust, risk, and identity are worked up in discourse that they seem to be mutually dependent: that one context cannot “be” without the others. This has a couple of implications, the most significant of which is that these are contexts which the speakers themselves construct as corelational. That is, if trust is invoked—implicitly or explicitly—by one speaker, it is shown to be common knowledge and understanding that risk, for instance, is also implicated. This might, in fact explain how speakers go to such lengths to formulate their accounts as authentic and trustworthy, as we touched on earlier. They are effectively engaging in risk management. This raises a further question: if trust, as an example, is invoked by a speaker without any corelational context of risk and identity, then will it still be orientated to as “trust” by cospeakers?

Paradoxically, however, as the analysis is concerned with the interpretations and sense-making actions of speakers—what they display as shared understood contexts in interaction—this would be difficult if not impossible to substantiate as it would rely on the researcher interpreting a particular construct as being present in the discourse and then showing how cospeakers do not orient to this construct. While analysis is concerned with what is not present in any given set of data, to rely on the interpretation of one speaker, which is not shown to be comparatively shared as understood by other speakers, would result in a potentially invalid analysis. It could also be argued that the fundamental corelational nature of these contexts is such that it would be hard to even imagine a situation in which speakers might collaboratively “do trust” without simultaneously invoking risk and identity as concerns.

Arguably, the most that we can do is accumulate enough cases of corelation to warrant the claim. There is no particular pattern in the data for how speakers display these contexts as corelated. However, a few instances from the data serve as good examples.

In the first, participants in the discussion forum are shown to invoke their identity as expert with appropriate rights to be “heard” as such and as trustworthy (Chapter 15). At the same time, they are shown to display previous contributors as giving insufficient accounts, thus working up a warrant for the necessity of additional explanation. Those additional explanations are explicitly conjured as emanating from the speaker’s experience and knowledge. So, in this case, identity and trust are constructed corelationally, designed to achieve a particular effect: the “I’m the expert because I know more than he does” strategy. The risk element—which in the analysis is related to the public, online nature of the forum—can be seen particularly in how two contributors delicately call one another’s accounts into question while at the same time attending to matters of politeness and face-saving (e.g., Section 15.6). Recall the way that one contributor quite delicately and explicitly scripts his disagreement with a previous contributor (see Section 15.6, Extract 5) in a container of parentheses, conjuring the sense of an “aside” directed only to that contributor. This is an interesting case, which shows how people are willing to debate topics publicly but are nonetheless reluctant to do outright disagreement and argument in such public arenas.

As a further and more complex example of this type of action, recall how Roger, in the actions prior to Extract 3 (Section 16.4), raises a topic of concern with his colleague, John, in the first of the two senior management meetings. He then proposes that it is something that can be dealt with “probably outside of this meeting,” a move that John explicitly resists. It can thus be inferred that while Roger seeks to avoid public disagreement, John works to keep it firmly in the public eye of the other meeting members. It is subsequently speculated that John may have deliberately worked to ensure Roger’s topic stays on the meeting’s agenda, as he is shown to use this as the springboard to launch into an even more “inflaming” topic. In these displays, all three contexts are shown to work relationally and, in fact, quite forcefully, with the result that KS becomes highly contested.

Continuing with this particular meeting analysis, which takes on the characteristics of a courtroom drama scenario (Section 16.4.1), this contains one of the few examples of explicit identity construction in the data: Roger displays himself as alarmed by the events brought about by the actions of John’s team. Consequently, blame is displayed as a live concern for both participants, which in fact becomes the rhetorical object of subsequent interactions. Throughout, speakers are shown to use several rhetorical devices to script themselves and their accounts as more trustworthy than the other (epistemic primacy, for instance).

It has earlier been claimed that trust, risk, and identity are shown to have an influencing effect on KS actions. The corelational nature of these contexts has an effect, which is perhaps even more obvious. Trust, risk, and identity, as contexts mutually invoked by speakers, do more than influence: they mediate KS, either positively or negatively. All of these interactions, including those in the discussion forum, are concerned with the sharing of knowledge, with trust, risk, and identity interpreted as discursive thematic actions that are integral to this accomplishment. This explains the effects of influence discussed earlier.

The final question considers whether these accomplishments can be understood as tacitly done.

It is proposed that these matters are accomplished tacitly as psychological phenomena, with the implication that speakers orient to them as live matters consequent to their understanding of what is going on in the environment (analogous to the automatic, unconscious abstraction of structures and patterns in the environment): how is this displayed and oriented to in discourse?

An important aim of the research is to use the analysis of discourse to show how the various discursive actions, in particular the invocation of trust, risk, and identity, are accomplished tacitly by speakers—both in their scripting and displayed understanding of other speaker’s utterances. Drawing from the study of Implicit Learning, tacit knowing is understood as the product of the unconscious and automatic abstraction of information from the environment and its contents. This is deployed equally automatically and unconsciously in mediating the individual’s sense-making of their context of action, which is shown to influence their own action. Reprising the “knowing how–knowing that” formulation, knowing how, which can be thought of as the “tacit fraction,” is the unspecifiable foundation that makes knowing that actionable and meaningful. Added to this, language is approached as action orientated and consequential for speakers and recipients. The interest in the tacit fragment stems from the field of KM’s attention to the concept of tacit knowledge as a phenomenon of value and as integral to the actions of KS and creating, among others.

A first observation, touched on earlier, is the near absence, with only one or two exceptions, of speakers making explicit reference to contexts of trust, risk, and identity. The interpretation of the discursive action, and the displayed invocation of these contexts, is entirely made through bringing to the fore those contexts which speakers themselves collaboratively and implicitly construct as live concerns. For example, in the two sales and marketing meetings, neither of the two chairs explicitly states the high-stakes nature of the interaction nor mandates that the delivery of participants’ accounts must attend to accuracy, truth, trustworthiness, and authenticity in order to be acceptable. These features, it is claimed, are constructed as integral to their reports and as an unstated requirement on those subsequently made by other meeting participants. In this way, the actors display a shared understanding of a context of high stakes and the necessity of staying within the parameters of acceptability—the shared and displayed understanding of the meetings’ precepts.

A second observation is that these displays of the tacit fragment—shared understanding of context—could not be shown through conventional research methods. It is only through the application of the methodology (and similar methodologies) used here that discourse can be shown to be action orientated, with function and consequence—the majority of which is arguably performed by the actors on what might be termed an unconscious level. Recall Max Boisot’s theory that KS is the consequence of resonance being achieved between the repertoires of different speakers. In his study of KS, M Max Evans also finds shared vision (and trust) to be important influencing factors. If shared vision and resonant repertoires are determinants of KS, it is highly unlikely that conventional methods of investigation would demonstrate this. However, the discourse analysis method adopted in the present study is particularly geared toward how such psychological phenomena, at once both hidden from sight but in plain view, are done as collaborative accomplishments. Even when speakers are shown to be engaged in some serious arguing, they are, despite this, shown to be working collaboratively: it takes two to argue.

It is worth bringing in a particular point concerning the data from Company A. The sales and marketing meeting actions can be seen as a role model for KS as effectively and efficiently done. However, the same company’s project management meeting actions bring to the fore a particular problem concerning dealings with another department within the same firm. This is particularly compounded by the displays of intrateam member support and loyalty, an example being the “gisting and elaboration work” displayed by the project leader. In other words, a kind of “them and us” is implicated, with connotations of between departmental (horizontal) KS issues.

In the same organization, the first of the two senior management meetings brings a sense of “them and us” more bluntly to the fore, with the organization (“them”) scripted as acting irrationally. Then, in second meeting, there is the “ghost” of a contextual difficulty: the decision to use a particular technology on a project, knowing that the technology was not ready to use. It is not stated explicitly that this refers to another person who is not present in the meeting nor is the decision to use this technology explicitly described as being wrong. Instead, it is constructed by Roger as the excuse to “slow down” the project start-up. John’s suggestion that another technology could have been used, the weak acknowledgement of this given by Roger, and the denial by a third speaker that the choice of this particular technology was in fact the reason for “slowing down” the project, combined with Roger’s moves to change the topic, suggest an “uncomfortable truth.” Decisions are perhaps not within the governance of the meeting members. This leads to the speculation that the members of the senior management team lack the power to make important decisions: all they are entitled to do is to make recommendations to a higher level of the business (could this be the level at which the decision to use technology known to be not ready was taken?). This is displayed by at least one member as problematic and can also be seen as a further kind of “them and us.” This has implications for bottom-up (vertical) KS problems.

The following section discusses the research findings in relation to debates and issues in KM summarized and synthesized in Chapter 9, drawing some implications for KM in general.

17.3 RELATING THE FINDINGS TO DEBATES AND ISSUES IN KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT

On a practical note, as the focus of the present research has been exclusively on organizational meeting and online discussion forum discourse, the findings can only realistically be seen from those perspectives. Other types of organizational discourse that could be used in future similar projects include KS practices in the context of mentoring and learning and employee exit interviews, for instance, even the contents of “knowledge repositories” such as “expert biographies,” project reports, and consumer surveys. Those, and many other instances, would represent valid, relevant, and potentially advantageous lines of future research. For now, however, the discussions reprise some of KM’s principle concerns in the light of the present findings.

17.4 FUTURE DIRECTIONS

If there is one simple truism that could be drawn, it is this: knowledge work (however you choose to describe and understand it) is an accomplishment of the social interaction between persons, their environment, and its contents, which axiomatically positions discourse—talk and text—in the top chair. Add to this the indexicality of language in the sense that meaning is contingent to the context in which it is embedded and that this context is the fabrication of the speaker, which emerges from and is influenced by their tacit knowing or practical knowledge or knowing how. (Tautology, as should be clear by now, is rife in the field of KM.) What is also true is that discourse, as the source and site of knowledge work, has been somewhat neglected. So, when it was stated that this project has the aim of shifting the focus of interest onto the site of language, what was being proposed in reality was a recognition of the values and advantages to be gained by moving the sphere of interest and action to a much deeper level of organizational action, to the level at which everything transpires.

So what for future directions? There are a couple of directions for further research which we will come to in a moment. In general, it is hoped that the ideas and research findings laid out in these pages will inspire a greater interest in discourse as an organizational resource in KM. Language is, to paraphrase Benjamin Whorf’s proposition, “the best show that man puts on.” It is also hoped that the practice of KM can be steered away from an insistence on process and technology and back in the direction on which it was originally set back in the 1990s by (no irony intended) Ikujiro Nonaka when he argued that the focus of analysis should be on how an organization interacts with its environment and the ways in which it creates and disseminates “information and knowledge.” And all that involves people and discourse. There is a lot to be done.

To complete these discussions, a few specific suggestions for lines of future research. It was suggested at the end of Chapter 6 that the “sense-making” paradigm promoted by Christian Madsbjerg and his colleague, for instance, could potentially offer a vocabulary more suited to the study of the organization and its concerns, which might be adapted for use in DP projects with a focus in these directions. While this has not been explored here, research and development may lead to a more useable terminology and would address the issues raised earlier (Section 17.3.2).

In the earlier discussions around criticism of the “one-size-fits-all” approach, a potential paradox is indicated. From any direction, differences in culture, organization, team, and individual would suggest that such an approach will simply not be effective. But the present research findings suggest that there are commonalities in discourse constructed and shared in interaction. This is not a reference to a commonly shared technical vocabulary within a given team, for instance, but refers to discursive action accomplished at the tacit level. The present research is limited to a small number of organizations and an online discussion forum: a larger scale study would focus on teams in a variety of cultures, multinational organizations, for instance, and multinational teams who come together to solve particular problems, or to take part in particular joint exercises. Such a project would build on the present findings, and those from the (much) broader discourse analysis field, to develop a closer understanding of how and whether discursive action at the tacit level—and the kinds of shared displays of the contexts of trust and identity, for example—is accomplished from a cross-cultural perspective.

Finally, a third potentially fruitful topic for research would be a project aimed at developing a methodology to enable a robust and valid comparative analysis of knowledge outcomes as an accomplishment of discourse in interaction. Directions likely to produce some interesting results could be research comparing outcomes between different teams, and comparing those from the same team over a period of time, perhaps starting with the initial setup of the team. Of course, the key to this particular project’s success lies in the definition of “knowledge outcome”—that is perhaps not so difficult because, in reality, a knowledge outcome is determined by the individual case by case. What is problematic—and something that perhaps should be now consigned to the archive of historic but no longer needed management practices—is the idea of attempting to measure knowledge outcomes and the success or failure of KM as a whole.