The Meaning of Tacit Knowledge

Abstract

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. December 2002 5In that research, an examination of 68 recently published documents, the following appeared the most widely cited as explaining what tacit knowledge entails.The terms are as follows, in descending order of groundedness.The terms given are subjectively coded 'themes' that have been derived from the literature, rather than direct terms, as they exist per se.We provide only those codes that have a groundedness of greater than 2 instances in the literature here: Knowledge (80); Individuals (50); Organisational domain ( 46); Skill (35); Non-Codification (28); Non-verbal (27); Experience (26); Context specific (24); Intuition (20); Learned (16); Know how (15); Not formal (13); Action (12); Expertise (11); Culture (10); Contingency based (9); Environment (9); Externalisation (9); Knowing (9); Not easily communicated (9); Practical (9); Sub-consciousness (9); Understanding (9); Cognitive (8), Internalisation (8); Mental models (8); Not directly taught (8); Not easily transmitted (8); Process (8); Abilities (7); Apprenticeship (7); Low environmental support (7); Management (7); Practice (7); Society (7); Two dimensional (7); Behaviour (6); Beliefs (6); Conscious (6); Direct contact (6); Face to face transfer (6); Goal attainment (6); Inferences (6); Learning by doing (6); Maxims (6); Non-awareness (6); Pattern recognition (6); Perceptions (6); Procedural in nature ( 6); Routine (6); Subjectivity (6); Tasks (6); Technology (6); Values (6); Common sense (5); Decision making (5); Embodied (5); Implicit (5); Implied (5); Information (5); Judgement (5); No idea (5); Not easily codifiable (5); Sharing (5); Taken for granted (5); Unconscious (5); Everyday situations (4); Interaction (4); Job knowledge (4); Know more than we can tell (4); Not easily formalised (4); Not formal instruction (4); Others (4); Physical control (4); Riding a bicycle (4); Rule (4); Schema (4); Time (4); Touch sensitivity (4); Wisdom (4); Abstraction (3); Access constraints (3); Awareness (3); Communal (3); Competitive advantage (3); Embedded (3); Emotions (3); Experientially established cognitive structures (3); Focal awareness (3); Groups (3); Holism (3); Ideals (3); Importance of language (3); Information retrieval (3); Insight (3); Learning by using (3); Meaning (3); Mind (3); Motor skills (3); Observation (3); Oneself (3); Particular uses/particular situations (3); Performance (3); Practical intelligence (3); Procedures (3); Resistance to revelation (3); Rules of thumb (3); Selective comparison (3); Semantics (3); Sense perception (3); Transmission (3).

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