Knowing work: Cultivating a practice-based epistemology of knowledge in organization studies

Abstract

While knowledge theorists give attention to knowing in practice, two common habits in the empirical literature, which we call knowledge inherency and skepticism, serve to re-center certain practitioners. The sites in which we study knowing thereby remain limited, hindering a fuller practice turn. We argue that this enduring tendency is problematic because it inhibits our understanding of ‘communicative knowledge’ – a form of knowing central to the contemporary economy. Yet communicative knowledge is persistently relegated to secondary status through a logic that is simultaneously gendered and classed. We thus suggest a more thorough shift toward the study of ‘knowledge in work’ (Thompson et al., 2001), wherein such a priori associations are suspended, and all practitioners de-centered, in the interest of understanding specific forms, systems, and relations of knowledge entailed in situated practices of knowing. The second half of the article develops specific empirical strategies for doing so. The strategies are meant to enable grounded analysis of knowing practices in various lines of work to interrogate how these may be different to practices with which we are more familiar, as well as inquiry into similarities between these familiar practices and new ones in order to destabilize the link between knowledge and certain practitioners.

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