Do we really understand tacit knowledge?

This paper advances the claim that tacit knowledge has been greatly misunderstood in management studies. Nonaka and Takeuchi’s widely adopted interpretation of tacit knowledge as knowledge awaiting “translation” or “conversion” into explicit knowledge is erroneous: contrary to Polanyi’s argument, it ignores the essential ineffability of tacit knowledge. In the paper I show why the idea of focussing on a set of tacitly known particulars and “converting” them into explicit knowledge is unsustainable. However, the ineffability of tacit knowledge does not mean that we cannot discuss the skilled performances in which we are involved. We can discuss them provided we stop insisting on “converting” tacit knowledge and, instead, start recursively drawing our attention to how we draw each other’s attention to things. Instructive forms of talk help us re-orientate ourselves to how we relate to others and the world around us, thus enabling us to talk and act differently. Following Wittgenstein and Shotter, I argue that we can command a clearer view of our skilled performances if we “re-mind” ourselves of how we do things, so that distinctions, which we had previously not noticed, and features, which had previously escaped our attention, may be brought forward. We cannot operationalise tacit knowledge but we can find new ways of talking, fresh forms of interacting and novel ways of distinguishing and connecting. Tacit knowledge cannot be “captured”, “translated”, or “converted” but only displayed and manifested, in what we do. New knowledge comes about not when the tacit becomes explicit, but when our skilled performance is punctuated in new ways through social interaction. Presented to Knowledge Economy and Society Seminar, LSE Department of Information Systems, 14 June 2002