Addressing the tacit knowledge gap in knowledge systems across agential realism

Past literature has claimed that knowledge systems can enhance or facilitate the creation, retention, transfer and application of tacit knowledge. While this paper agrees that this objective is realizable, it argues that the literature has so far failed to successfully operationalize this, since at the core of the models published to date lies the flawed epistemological assumption of knowledge ‘conversion’ – more specifically, tacit to explicit knowledge conversion. This paper proposes the alternative epistemology of agential realism which allows us to reframe tacit knowledge within knowledge systems, whereby humans and machine are coupled together (intra-act) to enhance and retain tacit knowledge creation and sharing without putting undue emphasis on its conversion and storability into an explicit form – thus, agential realism allows tacit to remain as tacit. In addition, this critical-conceptual paper proposes nascent examples of human-machine or knowledge system configurations which have affinities or potential affinities with an agential realist approach.