Abstract
The development and maintenance of organized cooperative work practices require, as an integral feature, what can loosely be termed ‘didactic practices’ or ‘mutual learning’ (giving and receiving instruction, advice, direction, guidance, recommendation, etc.). However, such didactic practices have not been investigated systematically in CSCW. Michael Polanyi’s notion of ‘tacit knowledge’ vs. ‘explicit knowledge’, which plays a key role in the area of Knowledge Management, would seem to offer an obvious framework for investigating didactic practices in CSCW. But as argued in this article, the notion of ‘tacit knowledge’ is a conceptual muddle that mystifies the very concept of practical knowledge. The article examines the historical context in which the notion of ‘tacit knowledge’ was devised, the purpose for which it was formulated, its original articulation, and the perplexing ways in which it has been appropriated in Knowledge Management. In an attempt to gain firm ground for our research, the article towards the end offers a general analysis of the concept of ‘knowledge’, informed by the work of Gilbert Ryle and Alan White. Overall, the article argues that a framework based on the notion of ‘tacit knowledge’, or on similar conceptions devoted to categorizations of kinds of knowledge, impairs the for CSCW essential focus on actual work practices: instead of focusing on forms of symbolism, what is required is to focus on uncovering the logics of actual didactic practices in cooperative work.
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Notes
The fieldwork was part of a project investigating ‘autonomous production groups’ in manufacturing, funded by the Federation of Danish Industries and the Federation of Danish Industrial Workers with a view to developing requirements for IT infrastructures for such work organizations. (For summaries of findings, cf. Odgaard, et al. 1999; Carstensen, et al. 2001; Carstensen and Schmidt 2002).
Michael Polanyi was born in Budapest in 1891 from Jewish-Hungarian parents. He studied medicine in Budapest and was a member of the radical Galileo Circle along with Georg Lukács and Karl Mannheim. During the First World War, he served as a physician in the Austro-Hungarian Army. But after the war he switched to chemistry and worked as a scientist at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, associating himself with, inter alia, Max Planck, Albert Einstein, and Erwin Schrödinger. Taking stock of the ominous developments of the early 1930s, he moved to Britain where he was granted a chair in physical chemistry at the University of Manchester. Later, in 1948, a personal Chair of Social Studies with limited teaching duties was created for him, enabling him to pursue his philosophical work. Founder, together with John R. Baker, of The Society for Freedom in Science, Polanyi played a central role in rebuilding the conservative movement after the deluge of proletarian revolution, economic collapse, and fascism, in collaboration with prominent figures such as Friedrich von Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman, and Karl Popper. Polanyi died in Oxford in 1976. (On Polanyi’s life and work, cf. Baker 1978; Prosch 1986; Mitchell 2006; Nye 2011).
Nikolai Bukharin was born in Moscow in 1888 and became embroiled, as a student, in revolutionary politics during the revolution of 1905. Having joined the Russian Social Democratic Party in 1906, he spent his youth as a professional revolutionary, partly in jail, partly in banishment, and partly in exile in Western Europe and the US. Because of this career, he never finished his studies of economics at Moscow University but nevertheless became an accomplished economist and sociologist on his own accord. In the course of the Russian Revolution in 1917, he emerged as a leading politician, editor of Pravda and president of the Communist International, but also in the 1920s a leading intellectual in economic, social, and cultural affairs. Due to his opposition to Stalin’s draconian policies of industrialization and collectivization, he fell from power in 1929 and withdrew from active politics. From 1930 he worked as head of planning of scientific research under the All-Union Council of National Economy and as director of the Institute for the History of Science and Technology under the Academy of Sciences, until 1934 when he briefly served as editor of Izvetia. He was arrested in February 1937, subjected to intense interrogation, and — after an infamous show trial — executed 15 March 1938. (On Bukharin’s life and work, cf. Cohen 1973; Medvedev 1980; Larina 1988; Kemp-Welch 1992).
When Polanyi met Bukharin in Moscow in the spring of 1935, Bukharin was a dead man walking. The Great Terror — in the course of which practically the entire political elite, large sections of the intellectual and military elite, and untold numbers of workers and peasants would be murdered — had already been set in motion with the assassination of Kirov on 1 December 1934 (Conquest 1968), and Bukharin knew that he was one of its primary targets (Cohen 1973). It is thinkable that Bukharin, in his conversation with his visiting West-European scholar, therefore, as a precaution, expressed himself less candidly than he would otherwise.
The conference caused quite a stir, partly due to Bukharin’s presence, partly because the Soviet physicist Boris Hessen presented a paper (Gessen 1931) in which he explained Newton’s Principia in terms of the social, political, and economic context that gave Newton ‘the possibility of indicating the new roads’ for science and technology, the ‘source’ of his ‘genius’. Hessen was arrested and shot in 1936 but his paper is deemed ‘one of the most famous papers ever presented at a history of science meeting’ (Graham 1985, p. 705). (The circumstances and proceedings of the conference are described in Werskey 1971; Graham 1985). — Polanyi was well aware of the conference and thought of it as something akin to the dragon’s nest: ‘A movement denying the justification of pure science was started in England in 193I by a group of Soviet delegates, including Bucharin and Hessen’ and had ‘been carried on since with considerable success by a number of able writers, mostly Marxists’. In Polanyi’s view, the result of this was, that ‘the idea of pure science is considered to-day as obsolete and reactionary by most of the scientists who take an active interest in the position of science in society’ (Polanyi 1941, p. 428).
It belongs to the story that the incipient science planning system under discussion at the April 1931 conference — with broad participation of ‘scientific workers’ and establishments in generating and coordinating plans — evaporated in the wake of the Great Terror (Lewis 1979, 1992). Similarly, the pioneering science studies that had begun in the 1920s were largely abandoned as empirical social sciences died out under Stalinism. The Institute of the History of Science and Technology, headed by Bukharin from 1930, was disbanded in 1937. When the institute was reestablished after the war, ‘it displayed its continuing trauma over its predecessor’s fate by staying away from discussions of the social and political context of science’, which, as Loren Graham rightly notes, is quite ironic (Graham 1993, p. 143). It is double ironic that when science studies were ultimately picked up again, in the 1960s, it was under inspiration from Western scholars (such as, e.g., Bernal 1939; Price 1963). (Cf. also Lubrano 1976).
As Larry Laudan puts it: ‘Michael Polanyi’s claim that the methods which scientists use in their research cannot ever be made fully explicit and thus that there will always remain an ineliminable tacit dimension to theory evaluation and testing […] appears to be unargued hogwash. If there are methods or standards which scientists use (and Polanyi does not deny this much), then there is always the in-principle possibility of describing those methods in linguistic form. To deny this, as Polanyi is committed to, is equivalent to asserting that certain facts of the matter will forever elude linguistic characterization. Since Polanyi does not hold that there are generally matters of fact about the natural world which can never in principle be described, why should we accept without further ado his claim that our methodological actions fall in this category? Methodologies, recall, are nothing but theories, and it is a bit unseemly to hold that our theories about the world can be made explicit, whereas our theories about how to interact with that world defy all verbal description.’ (Laudan 1986, p. 352).
Nonaka is probably the most cited author in ‘knowledge management’ literature. His book on the Knowledge-Creating Company, written in collaboration with Takeuchi (1995), has received more than 25,000 citations (according to Google Scholar), far more than Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, Karl Marx’ Capital, Max Weber’s Economy and Society, or Emile Durkheim’s Division of Labor.
This is not a caricature of Nonaka’s argument. In an article published at the same time in Organization Science, Nonaka stated: ‘While tacit knowledge held by individuals may lie at the heart of the knowledge creating process, realizing the practical benefits of that knowledge centers on its externalization and amplification’ (Nonaka 1994, p. 20. — Emphasis added). — That is, the expert swimmer cannot ‘realize the practical benefits’ of his ‘tacit knowledge’ of the art of swimming by staying afloat and reaching shore without drowning but only by ‘externalizing’ it! Was Nonaka perhaps trying to talk about ‘practical benefits’ for the corporation? Even so, one would think that the ‘tacit knowledge’ exhibited in assembling diesel engines is of some ‘practical benefit’ to the owners of a marine propulsion enterprise. (It is noteworthy that the article has received almost 10,000 citations).
What is going on is not just a (dramatic) relocation but a transformation of the organization of production: ‘Since the 1980s […] the global organization of production and distribution within key industrial sectors has intensified’. While multinational corporations have been central to this development, they ‘have not simply expanded overseas to ensure market access: they have done so to rationalize the corporate production process through transnationalization’ (Held, et al. 1999, p. 267). A key and increasingly important feature of this process of global organization of production is the formation of production networks of varying topologies. Thus, already in 1995, about 30 pct. of world trade in manufactures ‘consisted of some form of global production-sharing operation’ (Yeats 2001, pp. 129 f.). (For a study of coordinative challenges faced by an enterprise caught up in production networks, cf. Schmidt et al. 2009).
It should be noted that Brown and Duguid 3 years later (2001) abandoned the idea that the problems of making ‘knowledge’ ‘circulate’ can be explained in terms of different kinds of knowledge. They now argued that ‘knowledge leaks in the direction of shared practice’ but ‘sticks where practice is not shared’ (p. 207). This does not do much to clarify things, however. For how are we supposed to determine the degree to which a ‘practice’ is ‘shared’? Is this not just giving another description of the explanandum and offering it as the explanans?
‘[Ryle’s] The Concept of Mind is one of those books that is often cited by people who haven’t read it but read about it, and think they know what is in it. They have read that it epitomizes two woefully regressive schools of thought that flourished unaccountably in mid-century but are now utterly discredited: Ordinary Language Philosophy and Behaviorism. Yes, and imbibing alcohol will lead you inexorably to the madhouse and masturbation will make you go blind. Don’t believe it.’ (Dennett 2000, p. xiv).
Alan White (1922–1992) was a Canadian-English philosopher, a junior colleague of Ryle’s, whose work is of the greatest relevance to the conceptual problems of studies of practices. However, in the words of Peter Hacker, White’s ‘work has not had the influence it merits’. Focusing in his work on the philosophy of psychology and social science, he ‘was the most skilful developer of Rylean and, to a lesser degree, Wittgensteinian ideas in philosophical psychology’. His The Nature of Knowledge (1982) was an ‘exhaustive investigation of the concepts of knowledge, knowing how and knowing that, the objects of knowledge, and the relation of knowledge to belief. If anyone surpassed Austin in subtlety and refinement in the discrimination of grammatical differences, it was White’ (Hacker 1996, p. 314, n. 103). (For a succinct summary of White’s analysis of the grammar of the concept of knowledge, cf. Bennett and Hacker 2003, pp. 148 ff.).
Or consider this: When asked by the mayor how he knew the suspect had intent to rape, inspector Callahan, a.k.a. Dirty Harry, replies: ‘Well, when a naked man is chasing a woman through an alley with a butcher’s knife and a hard-on, I figure he isn’t out collecting for the Red Cross!’. As the mayor then comments: ‘He’s got a point’, the point being that Harry’s knowledge claim was in accordance with, let’s call it, the epistemology of determining criminal intent in the domain of law enforcement.
John Dewey’s authority is sometimes (e.g., Cook and Brown 1999) invoked in justification of conceiving of ‘knowing as action’ but this is misrepresentation: Dewey was talking about the ‘act of knowing’ in the context of his analysis of the attainment of knowledge as rooted in practice, as opposed to the received epistemology of the contemplative spectator (Dewey 1929). That is, Dewey’s reasoning on this issue was congenial with that of Bukharin and with that of the later Wittgenstein.
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Acknowledgments
This article has had a long gestation period. I had for a long time been struggling with Polanyi’s notion of ‘tacit knowledge’ in my efforts to be able to give adequate accounts of the skilled practices I observe in my fieldwork, when I was prompted to organize my thoughts on these issues by an invitation to give a talk at a COST Exploratory Workshop on ‘Knowledge Management in Contemporary Europe’ in Bruxelles in May-June 2010. After the workshop, I was invited to submit an article for a special issue of Information Society devoted to this topic, but as I came to realize that my thoughts were still not sufficiently clarified, I eventually withdrew the manuscript. I would like to express my gratitude to the organizers of the COST workshop for the invitation and to the editors and reviewers of that special issue; to the editors of the present special issue of the CSCW Journal and the anonymous reviewers; and to Liam Bannon, Eli Gerson Dave Randall, Signe Vikkelsø, Ina Wagner, and other colleagues and friends who have read and commented on the manuscript. — The research has been supported by the FASIT, IDAK, CosmoBiz, and CITH projects.
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Schmidt, K. The Trouble with ‘Tacit Knowledge’. Comput Supported Coop Work 21, 163–225 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-012-9160-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-012-9160-8