Maybe Aristotle was right to optimistically assert that ‘all men by nature desire to know’ (Aristotle, 2006:3), but it is doubtful whether he could have anticipated the drastic changes the concept of ‘knowledge’ would undergo in the course of time. Philosophers such as Toulmin (1990), MacIntyre (1985), and Feyerabend (1999), among others, have helped us see how radical the change has been. Roughly, until the Middle Ages knowledge was conceived in essentially classical Greek (particularly Aristotelian) terms: knowledge was primarily self-knowledge and the search for the virtuous life; it did not so much imply the exercise of the individual cognitive faculty as the ability to participate effectively in a larger collective; it was context-dependent and infused with values. By contrast, with the mechanization and secularization of the world in the modern age, knowledge acquired a strongly utilitarian meaning. It gradually became identified with abstraction, general principles, and the ability to obtain results; it no longer incorporated ultimate values but acquired descriptive neutrality. Phronesis gave way to episteme, and praxis to theoria. Peter Drucker (1993) usefully pointed out that one of the key events that reflected the changing meaning of knowledge in the eighteenth century was the publication of Encyclopedie in France (edited by Diderot and d’Alembert between 1751 and 1772). For the first time knowledge ceased to reside in the heads of certain authoritative individuals. It was extracted from socio-material practices, taking instead the form of a manual, which contained generic statements, describing how the world works. In Drucker’s words, the Encyclopedie ‘converted experience into knowledge, apprenticeship into textbook, secrecy into methodology, doing into applied knowledge’ (Drucker, 1993).
The increasing decontextualization of knowledge in the modern age has led to theoretical (or codified) knowledge acquiring a central place in the functioning of modern (especially, late modern) societies. Daniel Bell aptly captured this change as follows:
Knowledge has of course been necessary in the functioning of any society. What is distinctive about the post-industrial society is the change in the character of knowledge itself. What has become decisive for the organization of decisions and the direction of change is the centrality of theoretical knowledge—the primacy of theory over empiricism and the codification of knowledge into abstract systems of symbols that, as in any axiomatic system, can be used to illustrate many different and varied areas of experience.
(Bell, 1999: 20) (italics in the original)
Indeed, it is hard today to think of an industry that does not make systematic use of ‘theoretical knowledge.’ Products increasingly incorporate more and more specialized knowledge, supplied by research and development departments, universities, and research and consulting firms; and organizational processes, ranging from production to logistics and marketing, are increasingly based on systematic research that aims to optimize their functioning (Drucker, 1993; Mansell and When, 1998; Stehr, 1994). Late modernity is the age of theoria par excellence. Or is it not?
If one takes a closer look at how theoretical knowledge is actually used in practice, one will see the extent to which theoretical knowledge itself, far from being as self-sustaining and explicit as it is often taken to be, is actually grounded on tacit commitments. Even the most theoretical form of knowledge, such as pure mathematics, cannot be a completely formalized system, insofar as it is based for its application and development on the skills of mathematicians and how such skills are used in practice (Collins, 2001). To put it differently, theoretical knowledge necessarily contains a ‘personal coefficient’ (Polanyi, 1962: 17). Late modern knowledge-based economies certainly make great use of codified forms of knowledge, but that kind of knowledge is inescapably used in a non-codifiable (non-theoretical) manner. Ironically, it is the rapid proliferation of theoretical knowledge that has made us reflexively aware of its tacit presuppositions.
The significance of tacit knowledge and/or cognate concepts (i.e. intuition, know-how, procedural knowledge) for the functioning of organizations has not escaped the attention of organization and management theorists since the early days of the field. This has been especially so in the work of practitioners who systematically reflected on their practice (Barnard, 1968; Follett, 1924; Vickers, 1983) as well as in the research of some leading organizational scholars who took cognition seriously (Argyris, 1999; Schön, 1983; Simon, 1965). However, ‘tacit knowledge’ did not really take off before the mid 1990s with the publication of Nonaka and Takeuchi’s (1995) influential The Knowledge-Creating Company (for more recent formulations, see Nonaka and von Krogh, 2009; Nonaka et al., 2006). Ever since then the concept has decisively entered the management theory and practice vernacular.
And quite rightly so: tacit knowledge underlies all skillful action, an important feature of organizational life. Organizational members know lots of things about what they do although, paradoxically, when they are asked to describe how they do what they do, they often find it hard to express it in words (Ambrosini and Bowman, 2001; Cook and Yanow, 1996: 442; Eraut, 2000; Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995; Harper, 1987; Tsoukas and Vladimirou, 2001). Gregory (1999: 198), for example, an outstanding salesman, describes his frustration at being unable to teach other salesmen in the classroom. What is true of selling is also true of practicing law (Spaeth, 1999), medicine (Patel et al., 1999) and management (Hatsopoulos and Hatsopoulos, 1999). Effective performance depends on knowledge that cannot be explicitly formulated in full.
Although the importance of tacit knowledge is now widely recognized, and in spite of several studies that have sought to further explore the concept, there are still several misunderstandings surrounding it. The main one is that tacit knowledge is still mostly seen on the conversion model: as knowledge awaiting its conversion to explicit knowledge. The prevalent conceptualization has been a cognitivist one (Varela et al., 1991): tacit knowledge is thought to be a cognitive state awaiting its symbolic representation—its conversion to explicit knowledge. In that sense, tacit knowledge is merely a weak form of explicit knowledge; we simply need to retrieve it. Of course, in so far as tacit knowledge is a mental phenomenon, it should be accessible to consciousness (Searle, 1992). However, there are non-cognitivist ways in which tacit knowledge may be accessed, but these have not been widely explored in management studies (cf. Sandberg and Pinnington, 2009; Yanow and Tsoukas, 2009).
Nonaka and his associates certainly deserve credit for having done the most to bring tacit knowledge to our awareness, but their conceptualization has had its problems, as several researchers have pointed out (Cook and Brown, 1999; Gourlay, 2006; Styhre, 2004; Ribeiro and Collins, 2007; Tsoukas, 1996; Tsoukas and Vladimirou, 2001). Although it could be argued that conceptualizing something as elusive as tacit knowledge is bound to be problematic, this need not be the case. Tacit knowledge remains intractable only within a cognitivist framework that sees cognition as a computational program that operates on symbolic representations (Cleeremans, 1997: 226). In such a framework there is no space for tacit knowledge since the latter cannot be symbolically represented. By contrast, within a phenomenological framework (such as the one adopted here), tacit knowledge has a special place: it is a sine qua non condition for explicit knowledge to exist. We get access to tacit knowledge through action and in retrospect. Aspects of tacit knowledge may be articulated, which, however, is not the same as ‘converted’ or ‘translated’ to explicit knowledge. To paraphrase Weick (1995: 18), we do not know what we know until we see what we have done.
The purpose of this chapter is to suggest a phenomenological (mainly Heideggerian) perspective through which tacit knowledge may be viewed. Such a framework, I will argue, dispels the misunderstandings that have arisen and suggests a more fruitful way forward. I will first explore the nature of tacit knowledge by drawing primarily on Polanyi (the inventor of the term, whose philosophy largely follows a phenomenological, especially Heideggerian, line of thinking) and secondarily on more recent phenomenological philosophers, notably Dreyfus and Taylor. Then I will explore how tacit knowledge has been understood in management studies. More specifically, I will critically explore how Polanyi’s phenomenological understanding of tacit knowledge has been interpreted by Nonaka and Takeuchi, the two scholars who, more than anyone else, have helped popularize tacit knowledge in management studies, and whose interpretation has been adopted by several management authors (see for example, Ambrosini and Bowman, 2001; Baumard, 1999; Boisot, 1995; Davenport and Prusak, 1998; Devlin, 1999; Dixon, 2000; Dyck et al., 2005; Leonard and Sensiper, 1998; Spender, 1996; von Krogh et al., 2000; for exceptions see Brown and Duguid, 2000; Cook and Brown, 1999: 385 and 394–395; D’Eredita and Baretto, 2006; Gherardi, 2006; Gourlay, 2006; Styhre, 2004; Kreiner, 1999; Ribeiro and Collins, 2007; Tsoukas, 1996: 14; 1997: 830–831; Wenger, 1998: 67). Following this I will flesh out a phenomenological understanding of tacit knowledge, focusing on how the latter may be articulated, and will conclude with a summary of the argument.