Peter Busch, Debbie Richards · 2008
Tacit knowledge definitions tend to be extremely varied. Some argue that tacit knowledge is precisely that. Others feel that only time and effort prevent all tacit knowledge from eventually becoming articulated. For the purposes of our research “tacit knowledge”, in practice at least, encompasses a medium ground, being comprised of articulable and inarticulable subsets. Along the lines of Weber (1997), we have formalised a meaning for this “tacit knowledge ” and for comparison have completed a content analysis of the literature to determine what other researchers understand “tacit knowledge ” to mean.
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Thornton, Tim · CLOK (University of Central Lancashire) · 2022
This chapter sets out an account of tacit knowledge as conceptually structured, situation specific practical knowledge. It sets this out against two claims from Michael Polanyi which conjoin the idea that we know more than we can tell with the suggestion that knowledge is practical. Any account of tacit knowledge which attempts to respond to Polanyi’s first claim faces a twofold test of adequacy. It must be tacit and it must be knowledge. To count as knowledge some content must be known but that puts pressure on its tacit status. What stops such a content being put into words? I reject Polanyi’s attempt to answer this based on a distinction between focal and subsidiary awareness. And I reject Harry Collins’ process-based approach that looks more to ontology than epistemology or reference more than sense. By equating tacit knowledge with conceptually structured, situation specific practical knowledge or know-how, I show the respect in which it remains tacit. Although it can be expressed in demonstrations, and is related to concepts, it cannot be expressed in words alone.
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2004
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Encyclopedia of Curriculum Studies · 2010
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Encyclopedia of Evaluation · 2005
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Neil Gascoigne, Tim Thornton · 2014
Tacit knowledge is the form of implicit knowledge that we rely on for learning. It is invoked in a wide range of intellectual inquiries, from traditional academic subjects to more pragmatically orientated investigations into the nature and transmission of skills and expertise. Notwithstanding its apparent pervasiveness, the notion of tacit knowledge is a complex and puzzling one. What is its status as knowledge? What is its relation to explicit knowledge? What does it mean to say that knowledge is tacit? Can it be measured? Recent years have seen a growing interest from philosophers in understanding the nature of tacit knowledge. Philosophers of science have discussed its role in scientific problem-solving; philosophers of language have been concerned with the speaker's relation to grammatical theories; and phenomenologists have attempted to describe the relation of explicit theoretical knowledge to a background understanding of matters that are taken for granted. This book seeks to bring a unity to these diverse philosophical discussions by clarifying their conceptual underpinnings. In addition the book advances a specific account of tacit knowledge that elucidates the importance of the concept for understanding the character of human cognition, and demonstrates the relevance of the recommended account to those concerned with the communication of expertise. The book will be of interest to philosophers of language, epistemologists, cognitive psychologists and students of theoretical linguistics.
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Encyclopedia of Leadership · 2004
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Sidney G. Winter · Palgrave Macmillan eBooks · 2014
The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Strategic Management has been written by an international team of leading academics, practitioners and rising stars and contains almost 550 individually commissioned entri
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SGARBI, Marco · ARCA (Università Ca' Foscari Venezia) · 2006
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Alexander M. Walker · European Journal of Epidemiology · 2017
Information that is not made explicit is nonetheless embedded in most of our standard procedures. In its simplest form, embedded information may take the form of prior knowledge held by the researcher and presumed to be agreed to by consumers of the research product. More interesting are the settings in which the prior information is held unconsciously by both researcher and reader, or when the very form of an "effective procedure" incorporates its creator's (unspoken) understanding of a problem. While it may not be productive to exhaustively detail the embedded or tacit knowledge that manifests itself in creative scientific work, at least at the beginning, we may want to routinize methods for extracting and documenting the ways of thinking that make "experts" expert. We should not back away from both expecting and respecting the tacit knowledge the pervades our work and the work of others.
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Zhenhua Yu, The Polanyi Society · Tradition and Discovery The Polanyi Society Periodical · 2006
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Turner, Stephen · Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Social Sciences · 2013
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Paul Nightingale · RePEc: Research Papers in Economics
By illuminating the philosophical roots of the various notions of knowledge employed by economists, this Handbook helps to disentangle conceptual and typological issues surrounding the debate on knowledge amongst economists. Wide-ranging in scope, it explores fundamental aspects of the relationship between knowledge and economics – such as the nature of knowledge, knowledge acquisition and knowledge diffusion.
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Sidney G. Winter · Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks · 2018
As emphasized by Michael Polanyi, there are types of knowledge that cannot be conveyed effectively by means of language. The validity of this observation is particularly apparent in the case of the knowledge required to execute psychomotor skills, such as riding a bicycle. In strategic management, tacitness is generally seen as a barrier to the imitation of valuable knowledge, hence as a relevant factor in accounting for firm heterogeneity and potentially for the sustainability of competitive advantage. However, knowledge that is tacit may be transferrable nevertheless, though not by means of words exclusively.
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2002
We can argue that, so far, all of these developments have moved us progressively further away from the social, situated and embodied skills of ‘presence’ that are so crucially important in oral cultures. For many creative practitioners in the traditions of studio and stage it is here, at the level of embodiment itself, that we are likely to confront the rational limits of the intellectual tradition. The task of learning to ride a bicycle is often used to illustrate the gulf between text-oriented disciplines of theory and the practice-oriented disciplines that we find, for example, in the plastic arts. We all know that bookish knowledge alone cannot teach us how to ride a bike. Similarly, once we have learned to ride it, we cannot ‘say’ what we have learned, even though we may be able to say things about it. This example is not too distant from more intellectual pursuits, such as reading and writing, in which we unconsciously scan alphabetical characters with our eyes and make writing gestures with our hands.
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Véronique Ambrosini · RePEc: Research Papers in Economics
Abstract As mentioned in Chapter 1, a number of authors have argued that tacit knowledge plays a central part in the development of sustainable competitive advantage (for example Badaracco, 1991; Nonaka, 1991; Grant, 1993; Spender, 1993; Sobol and Lei, 1994). Quinn (1992), Badaracco (1991) and Clark (1987) suggest that because of the dynamic conditions of the market, competitive advantage is no longer dependent on investment in machinery, on the attribute of products or on tangible resources as these can be purchased or replicated. Hence Grant (1993) asserts that knowledge, and notably tacit knowledge, is now firms’ most strategically significant resource. He justifies this assertion by arguing, similarly to Quinn (1992), that because of the ability of competitors to acquire resources quickly the ‘sustainability of competitive advantage… requires resources which are idiosyncratic… and not so easily transferable or replicable. The criteria point to knowledge (tacit knowledge in particular) as the most strategically-important resource of the firm’ (Grant, 1993, p. 2). This opinion is shared by Sobol and Lei, who state that in the future firms will no longer compete on the attributes of their products but on the skills and capabilities they can deploy, so organisational learning and tacit knowledge will ‘become the only renewable and sustainable base for a firm’s activities. Tacit knowledge and skills are particularly important sources of future competitive advantage because they are difficult for competitors to see and imitate quickly’ (Sobol and Lei, 1994, p. 177).
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Rod Watson · Theory Culture & Society · 2006
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Ray, Tim · Open Research Online (The Open University) · 2008
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H. L. White · The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Design · 2016
The Hungarian chemist-philosopher Michael Polanyi (1891–1976) developed the concept of tacit knowledge as a considered response to the rigidities of scientific objectivism, which held that science was value-free and that there is no role for personal judgment. In contrast, Polanyi argued that scienc
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C.F. Delaney · 2018
Tacit knowledge is a form of implicit knowledge we rely on for both learning and acting. The term derives from the work of Michael Polanyi (1891–1976) whose critique of positivistic philosophy of science grew into a fully developed theory of knowledge. Polanyi believed that the ‘scientific’ account of knowledge as a fully explicit formalizable body of statements did not allow for an adequate account of discovery and growth. In his account of tacit knowledge, knowledge has an ineliminable subjective dimension: we know much more than we can tell. This notion of tacit knowing in science has been developed by Thomas Kuhn, has figured prominently in theoretical linguistics and has also been studied in psychology.
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