Reading: Nature of knowledge and knowing: Most cited paper

(Health warning: this is from a report published in 2010 and citation counts may have changed)

Most cited paper – contribution to theory (p.67)

Abstract from Haridimon Tsoukas, E. Vladimirou (2001)

Abstract: Organizational knowledge is much talked about but little understood.  In this paper we set out to conceptualize organizational knowledge and explore its implications for knowledge management.  We take on board Polyani’s insight concerning the personal character of knowledge and fuse it with Wittgenstein’s insight that all knowledge is, in a fundamental way, collective.  We do this in order to show, on the one hand, how individuals appropriate knowledge and expand their knowledge repertoires, and, on the other hand, how knowledge, in organized contexts, becomes organizational.  Our claim is that knowledge is the individual capability to draw distinctions, within a domain of action, based on an appreciation of context or theory, or both.  Organizational knowledge is the capability members of an organization have developed to draw distinctions in the process of carrying out their work, in particular concrete contexts, by enacting sets of generalizations whose application depends on historically evolved collective understandings.  Following our theoretical exploration of organizational knowledge, we report the findings of a case study carried out at a call centre in Panafon, in Greece.  Finally, we explore the implications of our argument by focusing on the links between knowledge and action on the one hand, and the management of organizational knowledge on the other.  We argue that practical mastery needs to be supplemented by a quasi-theoretical understanding of what individuals are doing when they exercise that mastery, and this is what knowledge management should be aiming at.  Knowledge management, we suggest, is the dynamic process of turning an unreflective practice into a reflective one by elucidating the rules guiding the activities of the practice, by helping give a particular shape to collective understandings, and by facilitating the emergence of heuristic knowledge.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-6486.00268/full

What Crilly et al said about it:

“Tsoukas & Vladimirou (2001)’d theoretical overview of the literature makes an important connection between knowledge and organisation.  People learn in communities of practice, communities of practice have shared rules and, through their application, the organisation becomes a set of rules, leading to an abstract notion of ‘organisation-as-theory’.  The collective sense of meaning confers norms, so that organisation-as-theory becomes organisation-as-network in which organisation is conceived as “a densely connected network of communication through which shared understandings are achieved” (p.981).

In the study of the Customer Care Department at Panafon, help-desk operators used intuition and uncodified learned knowledge to answer customer queries.  Tsoukas and Vladimirou observed that individuals do not understand generalised rules or codified knowledge until they are able to test them against personal experience; they “comprehend the general by relating it to the particular they are confronted with”.  The consequence for organisations is that, the manage this aspect of organisational knowledge, “a company must strive to sustain a spirit of community at work, to encourage employees to improvise and undertake initiatives of their own, as well as actively maintain a sense of corporate mission” (p991).

This extract is taken from the end of Chapter 5: Nature of knowledge and knowing from

Reading KM0001: SDO knowledge mobilisation literature review (6) Crilly T, Jashapara A, Ferlie E (2010) “Research Utilisation & knowledge mobilisation: A scoping review of the literature” Report for the National Institute for Health Research Service Delivery and Organisation programme HMSO