Written primarily for academics, Organizational Knowledge may also entice managers who value a new perspective in interpreting how learning occurs within companies.
Authored by the University of Trento’s Silvia Gherardi with collaborator Davide Nicolini, it is in essence an ethnographic study of safety practices in corporate settings. The idea of safety within the context of the construction industry, for example, can be interpreted as an organizational practice, and it leads Gherardi to illustrate how learning, knowing, and organizing are carried out.
As she explains, knowing in practice means “knowledge is studied as a social process, human and material, aesthetic as well as emotive and ethical, and that knowledge is embedded in practice, as the domain where doing and knowing are one in the same.” Intrigued by what the idea of safety represented, Gherardi determined that safety is indeed a social value maintained by a body of institutional knowledge, accompanied by a set of situated practices that include all levels of society and are supported by prescribed legal precepts.
Think of how information about safety is conveyed to a novice on a building site. To Gherardi this transfer of knowledge is the “texture” that is integral to knowing in practice.
Gherardi situates her theoretical framework in the context of prior research, distinguishing it from two other approaches based on psychology and knowledge management (the latter relying on the economics of knowledge and information technology). Knowing in practice is an emerging perspective for analyzing organizational learning and knowledge, and this book provides a good entry point for both scholars and practitioners.