John King / Moving knowledge across institutional boundaries / 1

Moving knowledge across institutional boundaries

The same characteristics of knowledge localized, embedded and invested in practice that enable problem solving within communities make sharing knowledge between communities difficult (Carlile 2002, p.442). Carlile and Rebentisch (2003) examine the conditions that make knowledge sharing across the boundary of a community difficult by examining the properties of knowledge which generate boundaries. Drawing on their empirical studies of how different organizations and technical specialities work together to solve problems by drawing upon their respective stocks of knowledge, they argue that problems in reaching agreement occur due to the novelty, dependency and specialization of knowledge. Novelty arises when additional knowledge is required because the knowledge currently available to a group is no longer adequate for their needs; as a result, they seek knowledge from outside the group. If the knowledge to be integrated is complex, it will have interrelationships with many different sources of knowledge, creating multiple dependencies. Groups which have developed unique tools, practices and symbols to manage a domain of complex interdependent knowledge will be specialized, resulting in differences between sources of knowledge. As the amount of difference increases, the amount of effort required to share and make judgements about each groups knowledge increases. In order for groups to make assessments about each others knowledge, or justify their knowledge to each other, they must be able to represent what is and what is not known and identify the dependencies (Carlile 2004). Carlile (2004) attempts to resolve the incompatibility between three different perspectives of boundaries (p.555) by examining three competing perspectives on knowledge boundaries. An information processing approach, rooted in Shannon & Weavers theory of communication (Shannon & Weaver 1949; Weaver 1949), focuses on knowledge as a thing to store and retrieve. An interpretive approach emphasizes the importance of establishing shared meanings (Dougherty 1992). A political or pragmatic approach that acknowledges how different interests impede knowledge sharing (Carlile 2004, p.555) is founded on the pragmatism of William James (James 2004).

Transferring information
Shannon and Weavers information theory is a mathematical treatment of various characteristics (noise, capacity, coding) which determine the technical transmission of information (Shannon & Weaver 1949). Weavers contribution (Weaver 1949) is to separate out three levels of communications problems: technical (how accurately the symbols of communication can be transmitted), semantic (how precisely the transmitted symbols convey the desired meaning) and effective (how effectively the received meaning affects conduct).

John King / Moving knowledge across institutional boundaries / 2 Information theory posits that in order for information to be transmitted, both sender and receiver must hold in common a finite set of symbols, what Shannon and Weaver call an alphabet, but which is better defined as a repertoire (Reddy 1979). The common repertoire is an a priori shared context (Reddy 1979, p.303) enabling transmitted signals to be differentiated from each other and from signal noise. For Reddy (1979), the critical point in information theory which has been missed by many scholars of communication is that the message to be transmitted is not contained in the signals which are sent and received, because without the existence of a pre-established repertoire the signals could not be differentiated. Reddy argues that ordinary language users mistakenly draw upon a conduit metaphor when describing language. The conduit metaphor involves the figurative assertion that language transfers human thoughts and feelings (p.287, italics in original). In this metaphor, ideas and feelings are either transferred from human minds into words and subsequently extracted by listeners or readers, or transferred into a kind of ambient space between human heads (p.291). Because communication theorists are also ordinary language users, Reddy asserts, they have unwittingly accepted the conduit metaphor. As a result, they mistakenly objectify meaning, placing it within language, which leads them to think that communication is straighforward and focus almost exclusively on the roles of the message sender and receiver in encoding and decoding information rather than on the shared repertoires necessary for the reconstruction of meaning. This tends to lead people to blame miscommunication on receivers of information, who are assumed to be either stupid or malicious, rather than on the lack of an adequate shared repertoire.

Data, information and knowledge

Bell (2008 pp.lxi-lxiv) makes an important distinction between data, information, and knowledge. Data is an ordered sequence of items, events or statistics, such as the name index in a book. Information is an arrangement of items which establishes a context showing relationships between the item, presenting them as organized topics, such as the subject index of a book. In order to understand knowledge, Western philosophers such as Quine start from the individual, from the position of the knower, and argue that knowledge is justified true belief. Yet Quine found this definition problematic: Knowledge connotes certainty; what shall we count as certain? (quoted in Bell 2008 pp.lxii). The Cartesian quest for certainty, for how each individual can achieve certain knowledge about the world, has failed to show how knowledge can be shared, how it can be possible for two people experiencing identical situations to reach the same conclusions and access a common stock of concepts and judgements. The classical philosophers Plato and Aristotle make a distinction between knower and known (Bell 2008). They reject the standpoint of the knower, which is seen as being imperfect and untrustworthy. Instead they ask what it is that can be known, and reply

John King / Moving knowledge across institutional boundaries / 3 that it is the innate forms of objects, their ideal qualities what we now call concepts and theories. Knowledge of what an object is comes from placing the object whether a scientific finding or an item on the evening news into a theory or context. Knowledge comes from verified theories. This view of knowledge is predicated on the active involvement of the knower with what is to be known. It involves knowing for Polanyi (2012) personal participation is the universal principle of knowing which involves judging. In Bells (2008 pp.lxiv) example, knowledge may be obtained by the serious reader who, in making her own analytic index of a book, is required to make judgements about how the information on each page relates to the whole and to her own pre-existing knowledge. In order to make judgements, she must implicitly or explicitly employ a theory of the subject (the book) which accounts for the relations between items (the content of the book). Tsoukas and Vladimirou (2001) argue that the exercise of judgement involves two things. Firstly, it requires the capacity to draw a distinction so that an object of consciousness is split into two or more parts. In order to make a distinction, the relevant qualities of the object must be brought to mind; this requires that a cognitive operation be performed on a representation held in consciousness, modifying or transforming it so that its constituent parts are available for inspection. In doing so, write Tsoukas and Vladimirou (2001, p.978), cognizing subjects re-arrange and re-order what they know, thus creating new distinctions and, therefore, new knowledge. Secondly, judgements presuppose that the person making a judgement dwells within a domain of action which supplies criteria for evaluation. In the absence of the standard for comparison which a domain of action provides, meaning cannot be assigned to each part of the object, and so no distinction can be made. In Polanyis (2012) example of a medical student learning to interpret X-rays, the blotches on the screen only coalesce into identifiable objects once the student learns to apply categories and distinctions made meaningful by the practices of a community of radiologists.

Establishing shared meaning

Carlile (2004) argues that where knowledge to be shared is novel, the currently available, culturally understood symbolic repertoire no longer has capacity to represent the differences and dependencies that must be qualified in order for the knowledge be understood and accepted. The tacit, background assumptions and dependencies which validate the knowledge are shared by members of a culturally similar community, in the form of a within-group shared repertoire, but are not shared by actors who are culturally dissimilar. This leads to the formation of an epistemic boundary because [p]eople engaged in different practices tend to maintain different assumptions, outlooks, and interpretations of the world, and different ways of making sense of their encounters (Brown & Duguid 1998, p.207), resulting in the formation of conflicting interpretations of the same information. Each group

John King / Moving knowledge across institutional boundaries / 4 exists in a thought world with an intrinsically harmonious perspective which does not overlap with perspectives held by outsiders (Dougherty 1992, p.187).

Typification

Schtz (1967) asks how the establishment of shared meaning is possible given the impossibility of accessing the consciousness of others or the meanings that others assign to objects. Drawing upon the work of American pragmatists, he puts forward a theory to account for how intersubjective meaning is constructed. Schtz argues that individuals develop reciprocal typifications by interacting and communicating with others within a common domain (R. E. Meyer 2008). Typifications enable people to structure everyday life by abstracting the essential features of an action, person or situation; in the absence of typifications, reality would be experienced as an overwhelming, undifferentiated stream of perception. Typifications vary across a continuum from the specific to the abstract, for example from the role-type of best friend to the anonymous British public opinion (Berger & Luckmann 1966). Face-to-face interaction is supported by and generates reciprocal typifications which enable each participant to understand how to relate to the other. Meanings are created in the public domain in the context of collective situations and activities (Toulmin 2009, p.58), generating sets of typifications generalizations and theorizations which are applied in public by members of a community. The public nature of the use of typifications makes them available for prospective members to learn and to apply in similar situations.

Sharing knowledge within a community of practice

Brown and Duguid (2001) employ the communities of practice perspective to explain why knowledge is sometimes leaky and easily shared, and sometimes sticky and immobile. They question accounts which attribute the leakiness or stickiness of knowledge to properties of knowledge itself, observing that the same knowledge may prove to be simultaneously sticky and leaky, as in the case of the Graphical User Interface developed at Xerox PARC but successfully commercialized by Microsoft and Apple. Problems requiring the development of new knowledge are often tackled by people located in communities which benefit from the solution, they argue, and communities that apply knowledge are likely to store it for future use. Furthermore, being part of a community helps people to grasp new knowledge through the social affordances dynamic ways of interfacing with knowledge which existing members provide (Cook & Brown 1999).

John King / Moving knowledge across institutional boundaries / 5 To understand how why the knowledge moves more easily between members of a community than between people who do not share membership of a community, Brown and Duguid (2001) develop a practice account of the movement (and non-movement) of knowledge which draws upon the distinctions made by Polanyi (1983) between tacit and explicit knowledge and by Ryle (2009) between knowing how and knowing that. Polanyi and Ryle argue that both forms of knowledge are independent and irreducible to each other, that knowledge (in Polanyis terms) is two dimensional. Tacit knowledge is the unarticulated background to explicit knowledge. Because knowledge always has a tacit, practical dimension, it cannot be wholly separated from practice. If tacit knowledge, embedded in practice, is always associated with explicit knowledge, it is also implicated in the movement of knowledge from person to person. Tacit knowledge cannot be directly exchanged one cannot be told how to ride a bicycle, only shown and so in order for knowledge to flow, some form of shared practice must be established in order to appropriately contextualize the knowledge which is to be shared. Only by first spreading the practice in relation to which the explicit makes sense is the circulation of explicit knowledge worthwhile, argue Brown and Duguid (2001, p.204), Knowledge, in short, runs on rails laid by practice. Whilst they point out that this is not such a fragmentary conclusion, because by being human, we all engage in a great deal of similar practice, practices which are shared by members of a community but not by others generate conditions at the boundary of the community that make the sharing of knowledge difficult.

Pragmatism: use determines meaning

In the pragmatist conception of truth, the validity of a hypothesis is tested by referring to the use to which it is put. Pragmatism originated as a method for settling metaphysical disputes, for example between science and religion, by clarifying hypotheses through the identification of their practical consequences (James 2004). In order to assess an object such as a hypothesis, or claim to knowledge, we need only consider what conceivable effects of a practical kind the object may involve what sensations we are to expect from it, and what reactions we must prepare (James 2004, p.22). James (James 2004) illustrates the pragmatic method with the following anecdote:
Some years ago, being with a camping party in the mountains, I returned from a solitary ramble to find everyone engaged in a ferocious metaphysical dispute. The corpus of the dispute was a squirrel a live squirrel supposed to be clinging to one side of a tree-trunk; while over against the tree's opposite side a human being was imagined to stand. This human witness tries to get sight of the squirrel by moving rapidly round the tree, but no matter how fast he goes, the squirrel moves as fast in the opposite direction,and always keeps the tree between himself and the man, so that never a glimpse of him is caught. The resultant metaphysical problem now is this: Does the man go round the squirrel or not?

John King / Moving knowledge across institutional boundaries / 6 In order to resolve the dispute, James asks what is practically meant by going round the squirrel. If what is meant is that the human passes from the north of the squirrel to the east, then to the south, then to the west, and then back to the north, then clearly the man does go round the squirrel; on the contrary, if what is meant is that the human moves from being in front of the squirrel to being to on his right, then behind him, then on his left, and finally in front again, then the man does not go round the squirrel. The conclusion is that the truth of the hypothesis rests upon the meaning of the verb to go round , which depends upon the use to which it is being put. Use varies according to the context individuals are acting within and the theory they are using to structure the world. Individuals use knowledge based on context when they proceed in every day life to act in a way that is appropriate to the performance of a role in a given situation. For example, if a person exclaims, This costs the earth! they may be communicating their knowledge that either the sales price or the environmental cost of an object is high, and this will be clear to both speaker and listener dependent on whether they are in a shop or at a protest rally. Individuals use knowledge based on theory when they apply a framework of knowledge, a set of general or abstract principles extracted from a context. Choosing a theory and applying it in a new context involves judgement, and the capacity to make such judgements is knowledge, write Tsoukas and Vladimirou (2001, p.979). Individuals use knowledge based on theory when they apply a generalization to a specific setting. For example, in order to appraise whether an item is worth purchasing, a person may implicitly apply a theory of value which confers a rough estimate of the average price of similar items. When individuals draw upon generalizations produced by or specific to a collectivity in the course of making a judgement within a context, or in the application of a theory, they are using the knowledge of the collective. It is through use that understanding, or personal knowledge, is generated. As Tsoukas and Vladimirou (2001, p.989) argue, drawing upon Gadamer (2004), individuals understand generalizations only through connecting the latter to particular circumstances facing them; they comprehend the general by relating it to the particular they are confronted with. Learning within a community occurs when the categories and meanings produced by a community are applied to the specific situation an individual, occupying a recognized role, is faced with; whether she is an operator routing a telephone call or an academic writing a paper. At the same time, the judicious application of a theory or typification to a specific situation generates new knowledge and experience which may be drawn upon in future. If the new use knowledge is habitualized, by being repeatedly used, and shared, because it has been used by a person recognized as a member of the community, it becomes part of the stock of knowledge in the possession of the community. In order to share knowledge with a member of another community who, by dint of being from a community with different practices and purposes, wishes to use knowledge in a different way, Carlile (2004) argues that knowledge must be transformed. In his anecdote, James (2004) goes on to explain how he makes the quarrelling groups aware of the

John King / Moving knowledge across institutional boundaries / 7 dependencies of their knowledge by observing that the knowledge of one group uses cardinal points as its frame of reference, whereas the second groups knowledge is expressed in egocentric coordinates. The observation enables the two forms of knowledge to be transformed into one another. The process that enables this to occur is theorization.

Theorization
Theorization is the self-conscious development and specification of abstract categories and the formulation of patterned relationships such as chains of cause and effect (Strang & J. W. Meyer 1993, p.492). It is a way of making sense of the world and constructing generalizations and typifications which with to structure experience. Theorization facilitates communication between strangers by providing a language that does not presume directly shared experience (p.499). Both knowledge producers and users employ theories in local and specific situations. As knowledge producers and users interact with each other and with peers, they construct shared theories of the world, the nature of the interacting pair, and the mutual relevance of different practices (p.493). Individualized or dyadic theories will not easily spread beyond the individuals who generate them, but globally available theorizations may be imported into local situations and made specific to a site, spreading more easily because they may be equally applied to multiple sites. Because theorization abstracts away from and diminishes the relevance of specific and local details, Strang and Meyer (1993, p.494) argue that behaviour based on global theorizations will be more homogeneous than it would if it was based on personal experience. For Strang and Meyer (1993, p.494), the effects of theoretical models cannot be divorced from consideration of how compelling these models are to relevant audiences. The degree to which a theory is compelling is dependent upon the degree to which it fits with institutionalized understandings whether it is built into standard and authoritative, rather than highly specialized and marginal, interpretations and schemas (p.495) in other words, whether it is compatible with the dominant logic of an audience. The presence of a fully integrated societal-level theoretical understanding of action and society an institutional logic facilitates the diffusion of theories which are consistent with and contribute to the logic, as in the case of fields of scientific investigation, and wherever a network of congruent theories forms a hegemonic cultural frame (p.500). Strang and Meyer (1993, p.494) argue that the presence of such a cultural frame enabled the project of modernization.

John King / Moving knowledge across institutional boundaries / 8 In Western society, and increasingly globally, scientists, intellectuals, policy analysts, and professionals are theorists who are culturally legitimated to produce global, complex, and highly integrated theories (p.493). This places them in a privileged position:
The sciences and the professions are central to the modernizing project. They are devices for turning local and parochial practices into universally applicable principles that can rationally be adopted by all sorts of superordinate authorities, implemented by subordinate ones, and copied by modern entities everywhere. As social rules and practices come under scientific and professional analysis, they become potential candidates for rapid diffusion in the modern system. (Strang & J. W. Meyer 1993, p.502)

As there is no one-to-one relationship between an institution and the meanings carried by the practices associated with it (Friedland & Alford 1991, p.255), it is not possible for social scientists to construct ahistorical abstract models of behaviour. Any such model will be situated within the dominant logic of the society at that time; as a result, write Friedland and Alford (1991, p.255), It is not accidental that public-choice theory has flourished and that one of its American champions has been crowned as a Nobel laureate at the same time that efforts are under way to disengage the state from major areas of distribution and production. Theories which are inconsistent with the institutionalized logic of a society will struggle to be adopted, but the situation is not without hope. Strang and Meyer (1993, p.495) describe a three stage process of institutionalization whereby a model moves from being a theoretical formulation to a social movement to an institutional imperative. Once a theorization is established within organizational routines, it is driven by those routines, and the theorist or her disciples become self-interested reformers or nascent professionals or agents of the state (p.495). A network of professions, practitioners and materials is required in order for the theories produced by social science to be successfully applied (Callon 2007). The work of scholars is set within an interdependent web of changing power balances between different groups within society; the effects of the work of social scientists is interwoven with that of other commentators, such as consultants and government agencies, so that it flows into and influences the work of other groups (Newton 2010). The professions are involved in a struggle to mobilize their own programs and to impose them on the world (Abbott 2013), working to define social categories, promote the schemes they use to organize the world and the principles by means of which categories are classified and divided, and struggling to impose their vision of the social world on society (Bourdieu 2005). The question to be addressed is therefore how social scientists respond to the conflicting institutional logics of different sectors of society, and how they are able to construct bridging theorizations which are compatible with multiple logics.

References

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