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“The Art of Knowing”: Social and Tacit Dimensions of Knowledge and the Limits of the Community of Practice

2005; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 21; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/01972240590925311

1087-6537

Paul Duguid,

Political Economy and Marxism

Community of practice theory is inherently a social theory. As such it is distinct from more individualist accounts of human behavior, such as mainstream economics. Consequently, community of practice theory and economics favor different accounts of knowledge. Taking a community of practice perspective, this article challenges economists' attempts to reduce knowledge to information held by individuals and to reject tacit knowledge as mere uncodified explicit knowledge. The essay argues that Polanyi's notion of a tacit dimension affected numerous disciplines (including economics) because it addressed aspects of learning and identity that conventional social sciences overlooked. The article situates knowledge, identity, and learning within communities and points to ethical and epistemic entailments of community practice. In so doing it attempts to limit, rather than expand, the scope of community of practice analysis and to stress the difference, rather than the commonalities, between this and other apparently congenial forms of social analysis. KEYWORDS: codificationcommunities of practiceeconomicsknowledgemethodological individualismpractice theorysocial capital Notes 1It is this sustenance and reproduction of practice through the opposing demands of continuity and displacement that gives CoPs their interdependent tension and dynamism. Nonetheless, the notion has repeatedly been applied to transient, cross-functional teams and miscellaneous work groups. See, for example, Nonaka (1994) Nonaka, Ikujiro. 1994. A dynamic theory of organizational knowledge creation. Organization Science, 5(1): 14–37. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]. 2 Hables Grey (2002) Hables Grey, Chris. 2002. The political implications of information theory, digital divide, culture and human-computer interface design and the revolution in military affairs., New York: Columbia University. Paper presented at the SSRC Summer Institute, Information Technology and Social Research: Setting the Agenda [Google Scholar] portrays information as a fundamental particle. The commonplace notion that there is an ascendancy from data through information to knowledge appears regularly in the economics literature (Ancori et al. 2000 Ancori, Bernard, Bureth, Antoine and Cohendet, Patrick. 2000. The economics of knowledge: The debate about codification and tacit knowledge. Industrial and Corporate Change, 9(2): 255–287. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). Tuomi (2000) Tuomi, Ilkka. 2000. Data is more than knowledge: Implications of the reversed knowledge hierarchy for knowledge management and organizational memory. Journal of Management Information Systems, 16(3): 103–118. 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"Open source" software offers intriguing modern parallels (Bollier, 2004 Bollier, David. 2004. Who owns the sky? Reviving the commons.. In These Times, March 29 http://www.inthesetimes.com/comments.php?id=631_O_1_O_C(accessed February 18, 2005). [Google Scholar]). 25Coleman (1988) is quite explicit. His aim is "to import the economist's principle of rational action for use in the analysis of social systems proper … the concept of social capital is a tool to aid in this" (p. 97).