Week 2: Cook 7 Brown (1999) Bridging Epistemologies: The Generative Dance between Organisational Knowledge and Organisational Knowing

Organisation Science, Vol. 10, No. 4. pp.381-400.

Epistemology = questions what knowledge is and how it is acquired.

Treating knowledge as something people possess = the "epistemology of possession". But this way of understanding knowledge does not take into account the knowing that resides in the practice  of groups and individuals. Hence the authors argue that "knowing as action calls for an "epistemology of practice"".

The authors argue that there are four different types of knowledge, explicit, tacit, individual and group, each distinctly different from the other and with each fulfilling a function that the others cannot. 'Knowledge' and 'knowing' are also understood as distinctly different, with knowledge positioned as a tool of knowing, and with each enabling the other. If knowing is interpreted as one aspect of the way in which we interact with each other and physical world, then the interaction between knowing and knowledge "can generate new knowledge and new ways of knowing". The authors label this interaction a generative dance, and believe it to be a powerful driver of innovation in organizations.

Of particular significance is the authors' statement that "harnessing this innovation calls for organizational and technological infrastructures that support the interplay of knowledge and knowing". The use of social media tools in organizations can be seen as constituting precisely this sort of infrastructure, as these tools enable employees and managers to access, manage and make use of the "intellectual capital" of the organization. Cook and Brown's work also positions the need to understand knowledge and knowing as core competencies, and it can be argued that effective use of social tools for knowledge management and curation is increasingly a key element in supporting effective work and innovation in organizations.

'Explicit' knowledge can be understood as "knowledge that can be spelled out or formalised"
'Tacit' knowledge is "associated with skills or know-how"
The authors highlight Nonaka's belief that although individuals' tacit knowledge may constitute the centre of the process of knowledge creation, practical benefits are only reaped when individuals externalise this knowledge.

Cook and Brown observe the tendency in the literature around organizational knowledge to privilege 'individual' over 'group' knowledge, and 'explicit' over 'tacit' knowledge, and to treat all knowledge as being the same. Ultimately, they believe that failing to acknowledge the distinctions between different types of knowledge severely limits the ability to assess how individuals and groups acquire, maintain and apply competencies.

The authors give an example in the form of the sentence "Robert is fixing cars". This sentence indicates both a knowledge that Robert possesses and an action informed by that knowledge. In terms of knowledge, an accurate account of what Robert is doing requires acknowledgement of both his knowledge and the actions which stem from this. That which is possessed is referred to by the authors as 'knowledge', and that which constitutes action is labelled 'knowing'. While individuals and groups make use of both explicit and tacit knowledge in what they do, Cook and Brown argue that "not everything they know how to do...is explicable solely in terms of the knowledge they possess".

Cook and brown believe that unpacking the relationship between these two epistemologies enables a clearer understanding of:

• "how individuals and groups can draw on tacit and explicit knowledge simultaneously
• how what individuals know tacitly can be made useful to groups
• how explicit instructions can be made more useful aids for the development of tacit skills"(1999: 383).

They authors also explain the generative aspect of this relationship between possession and practice - what they refer to as the 'generative dance' - by stating that "the source of new knowledge and knowing lies in the use of knowledge as a tool of knowing within situated interaction with the social and physical world" (1999: 383). In other words, the application of knowledge in a given situation and context leads to the creation of new knowledge. The ability to identify and make use of this 'dance' is deemed essential in understanding key aspects of learning, innovation and effectiveness.

Explicit vs Tacit knowledge

Cartesian logic - "I think therefore I am" - has informed the conventional understanding of knowledge and the idea that knowledge "is something that is held in the head of an individual and is acquired, modeled, and expressed most accurately in the most objective and explicit terms possible" (1999: 384). But Cook & Brown argue that the dominance of the traditional Cartesian epistemology has hampered a clearer understanding of the distinction between 'tacit' and 'explicit' knowledge. They give the example of riding a bike, stating that explicit knowledge alone would not enable a person to ride - the person would also need the tacit knowledge acquired from having applied that knowledge in the given situation of trying to ride.

Individual vs knowledge

Week 8: "Isms" in information science: constructivism, collectivism and constructionism

Talja, S., Tuominen, K. and Savolainen, R. (2004)

Constructivism, collectivism and constructionism differ in their views of knowledge and language.

• Constructionism takes discursive practices as its research object and perceives the production of knowledge in discourses as the primary context for information behaviour and knowledge organisation.

• Collectivism takes professions and knowledge domains as its research object and sees the information and communication practices of professions and domains as the promary context for information behaviour and knowledge organisation.

• Cognitive Constructivism takes individual searchers and their interaction with information retrieval systems as its research object and takes the view that work tasks provide the primary context for information behaviour.

Constructivism: a view in which an individual mind constructs reality but within a systematic relationship to the external world (Gergen, 1999) e.g. Piaget.

Social Constructivism: while the mind constructs reality in its relationship to the world, this mental process is significantly informed by influences from societal conventions, history and interaction with significant others (Gergen, 1999: 60). e.g. Vygotsky and later works of Bruner.

Cognitive Constructivism: sees knowledge production as the creation of mental models. HUmans cannot be 'given' information which they can immediately understand, instead they must 'constructu' their own knowledge. An information user is not a passive information processing system but actively makes sense of the surrounding reality and attaches personal meanings to information.

Social Constructionism: the primary emphasis is on discourse as the vehicle through which the self and the world are articulated. (Gergen, 1999: 60) e.g. Bakhtin, Wittgenstein, Foucault. Constructionism sees language as constitutive for the construction of selves and the formation of meanings. Constructionism speaks of discourses, articulations and vocabularies, and replaces the concept of cognition with conversations. We produce and organise social reality together by using language. The main assumption of constructionism is that the boundaries of social knowledge are set by discourses that categorise the world and bring phenomena into view.

Collectivism: the core assumption of collectivism is that it is a mistake to psychologise issues like relevance and user needs as users are social and cultural beings. Collectivist approaches emphasise that information processes should be seen as embedded in social, organisational and professional contexts. hey shift attention from individual knowledge structures to "knowledge-producing, knowledge-sharing and knowledge-consuming communities" (Jacob & Shaw, 1998: 142).

Activity theory: suggest that an individual lives within a world that is at once physically, socially and subjectively constructed, and that living and actin in this world constitutes knowledge (Jacob & Shaw, 1998: 142).

Table 1: Major features, influences and representatives of cognitive constructivism, collectivism & constructionism

Taylor (1986: 35) stated that it is predominantly "organisation that provides the context and establishes the tasks and responsibilities form which problems, and hence, information needs, are generated". He argued that different professions are socialised into their own world views, i.e. CEOs define and solve problems in the same way in Miami and Helsinki, and that the information behaviour of teachers is similar in Pretoria and Portland (Taylor, 1991: 227). According to Taylor professions are the builders of their specific information universes.

"Knowledge is formed through a dialectical relationship between a community and its members... mediated by language and influenced by the history of the specific [domain]" (Hjorland and Albrechtsen, 1995: 407).

Table 2: Major fields of application of cognitive constructivism, collectivism and constructionism in Information Systems: