From Organizational Learning to Practice-Based Knowing

From organizational learning to practice-based knowingSilvia Gherardi

Introduction

The literature – and the community of scholars – concerned with organiz-ational learning has grown enormously in the last 30 years. This does notmean, however, that the topic has been explored satisfactorily; nor does itmean that we know today much more about organizational processes ofknowledge handling than we did 30 years ago (Easterby-Smith, 1997; East-erby-Smith et al., 1998). The quantity of literature is inversely proportionalto its quality because of the biases from which it has suffered since its begin-nings. These biases can be summarized as follows.

• Learning is interpreted mainly in terms of a realist ontology: consequently,scholars ask themselves who, how, where and when organizations learn.

• Learning is assumed to be synonymous with change: if a significantchange is produced, learning has taken place. But this is to ignore thefact that many organizational changes occur without any learningtaking place, and – vice versa – that learning processes may not giverise to change. In any case, there is no benefit to be had from treatingthe literature on organizational change as literature about learning.

• Learning has been taken to be an independent variable which influencescertain of the principal features of organizational performance (forexample, competitiveness). Thus, the existence of the learning organiz-ation has been institutionalized, which also presupposes its opposite:the non-learning organization. A quasi-object has been socially con-structed, and now its properties are measured while its metaphoricalorigins are forgotten.

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The main aim of a practice-based theorizing on learning and knowing (Gherardi, 2000) is therefore to dispel the most entrenched of these biases andto propose a different interpretative framework. Given this goal, a number ofmethodological choices must be made which can be summarized as follows:

• Learning is an interpretative device. It enables construction of a repre-sentational system that can be used to analyse the organizational pro-cessing of knowledge: how it is produced, how it circulates, how it isinstitutionalized, what emancipatory (or otherwise) contribution it canmake to society. A constructivist ontology therefore is appropriate.

• If learning is not to be synonymous with other concepts, it requires anobject that marks it out and which is empirically circumscribable.Learning is enacted within the boundaries of a domain of knowing anddoing: a practice.

• Learning cannot be compartmentalized into levels and divided upamong different scientific disciplines to produce areas of individual,group, organizational and inter-organizational learning. These may beheuristically useful distinctions as long as we bear in mind that know-ledge circulates among and unites these various levels, and that any dis-tinction into levels is purely arbitrary.

Accordingly, the concept of organizational learning – which entails a collec-tive subject which learns – may be replaced with that of learning-in-organiz-ing (Gherardi & Nicolini, 2000), a term which denotes the activity thatmobilizes the knowledge used and usable in organizing. Therefore, it is theorganizing that enacts subjects (individual, collective, organizational andinstitutional), objects and the relations among them around a practice. Themetaphor of knowing as enactment conveys the idea of a network sociallywoven around a domain of knowledge. This metaphor is grounded in anactor-network sensibility and in concepts like ‘knowing-as-displacing’ (Law,2000) or learning in the face of mystery (Gherardi, 1999). At the heart liesthe image of enactment as ‘an occasion in a location, a set of actions with aseries of effects’ (Law, 2000: 349). The knowledge, the subjects and theobjects of knowledge may be understood as being produced together withina situated practice. The heuristic value of the concept of practice resides inthe possibility of articulating spatiality and facticity.

Practice articulates spatiality

Two largely interchangeable linguistic artefacts circulate in the same dis-course: ‘situated knowledge’ and ‘social learning’.

Human Relations 54(1)1 3 2




The adjective ‘social’ points to the localization of learning andknowing, not in the mind of the individual but in collective subject, a subjectthat simultaneously thinks, learns, works and innovates (Brown & Duguid,1991), which means that knowing is not a separate activity – neither in thelife-course, nor in restricted domains, nor by type of activity.

This figure of discourse enjoys the support of an array of old and dis-tinguished allies: symbolic interactionism, the ‘workplace studies’ of theChicago School, ethnomethodology, and the critical ethnography of work.This more strictly sociological tradition contributes to a definition of ‘social’where learning and knowing are mediated by social relations.

In an article comparing the findings of activity theory, symbolic inter-actionism and computer-supported cooperative work, Susan Leigh Star(1995), in order to illustrate the anti-reductionist approach to knowledge dis-tinctive of workplace learning, cites Becker’s celebrated study of 1953–4,which set the standard for qualitative sociology. Becker studied the use ofmarijuana by jazz musicians as a group process. Mere drug taking was notenough; instead, the group culture was the primary medium of the coachingprocess, which proceeded through a series of stages: (1) learning to smokethe drug properly; (2) learning to connect bodily sensations with the use ofthe drug, and (3) learning how to enjoy those sensations. If one step were notactivated, the person would not become a marijuana user.

Lave and Wenger’s (1991) study refers to other social worlds – mid-wives, tailors, alcoholics anonymous – but highlights the same phenomenon.Knowledge resides in social relations, and knowing is part of becoming aninsider in a community of practice. Another study carried out within theactor-network framework examines the social worlds of marginals and arts:Emilie Gomart and Antoine Hennion (1999) compare the worlds of musicamateurs and drug users to develop a sociology of attachment. Their aim isto describe the devices with which amateurs are able to put their passion intopractice. A love of music and a love of drugs (although the former is posi-tively valued while the latter is not) display similar conditions for the onsetof addiction. Both involve entry into a world of powerful sensations, of being‘under the influence’ of something else, of accepting loss of self-control. Ineach case, attachment takes the form of self-abandonment, which is remi-niscent of Polanyi’s (1958) notion of knowing as surrender to an artwork.Gomart and Hennion imply that there are techniques, settings, devices andcollective carriers that make this active dispossession possible. Instead offocusing on the subject, in the same way as Becker refused to focus on theobject ‘drug’, they consider the mechanisms by which this kind of ‘activepassion’ is enacted. In a practice, knowledge is mediated by social relationsand knowing is part of a surrendering to a social habit.

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Once the concept of social is detached from the mental and individual,and attached to that of knowing in practice, numerous routes open up. Thesubject is shifted further towards the subject-network described by Gomartand Hennion (1999). Learning as object of study moves to consideration ofknowing as something that simply ‘happens’, and to the question of ‘how’ ithappens. Knowledge may thus become once again coloured by pathos andnot only by logos (Gagliardi, 1990). Activity and passivity enable each other(Gomart & Hennion, 1999), knowing in a passive way (Gherardi, 1999) maybe legitimized, and the world of the sensible and corporeal becomes an instru-ment of knowledge as in the aesthetic understanding (Strati, 1999) oforganizational life.

Consequently, when the locus of knowledge and learning is situated inpractice, the focus moves to a social theory of action that addresses activityand passivity, the cognitive and the emotional, mental and sensory percep-tion as bits and pieces of the social construction of knowledge and of thesocial worlds in which practices assume meanings and facticity.

In articulating the ‘where’ of knowledge, the figure of practice employsa second adjective: ‘situated’.

The main characteristic of so-called ‘situated learning theory’ (SLT) hasbeen its discussion (Lave, 1988; Brown et al., 1989) of the concept of‘context’, in polemic with traditional cognitive theory (TCT) which regardscontext as the container of decontextualized knowledge (impersonal,detached, asocial, apolitical, ahistorical, immaterial). Interesting in thisregard is Fox’s (1997) comparison between TCL and SLT, and the demar-cation line between modernism and postmodernism. Consistent with amodernist project is the view of context as pre-given, although the effects ofobjective social structures are not determined but take shape within socio-economic relations. On the other hand, the concept of context as ‘emergent’is more in keeping with a postmodernist project. ‘In the postmodern view,“context” is no longer “out there” in the messy, complex surface of an objec-tive world; rather, that very surface complexity and confusion are a projec-tion of language itself, the inconsistencies of its classifications, taxonomies,dichotomies, and more’ (Fox, 1997: 741).

Discussion of situated knowledge therefore extends to the use of con-versational analysis in computer-mediated contexts of activity and to inter-actions in which participants within a setting build frameworks of mutualaccountability as they become environments for each other (Goodwin &Goodwin, 1996). The interplay of context, interaction and mutual intelligi-bility can also be found in the production of single utterances (Goodwin &Goodwin, 1996: 70); indeed, these authors draw on the tradition of symbolicinteractionism and Heritage’s (1984: 242) conception of conversation as





‘doubly contextual in being both context-shaped and context renewing’. Onthis view, also, physical space – a shared workplace (Suchman, 1996: 36) –is not so much ‘a locale as a complex but habitual field of equipment andaction, involving intimate relations of technology and practice, body andperson, place and activity’. In Goffman’s (1971) terms, it is a situational terri-tory.

Actor-network theory and the sociology of science and technologyentirely dissolve the concept of context, although they retain the idea of situatedness. The former operation takes place when the action–system orsubject–action dichotomies are dissolved: ‘actors are network effects’; theyacquire the attributes of the entities which they include (Law, 1999). Thelatter operation comes about through the idea of ‘performativity’: if entities(human or non-human) achieve their form as a consequence of the relationsin which they are located, and if relations do not hold fast by themselves,then they have to be performed in, by and through those relations.

It would be an unpardonable oversight not to recognize the authorityof the feminist voice in discussion of ‘situated knowledges’ and in reveal-ing the androcentrism of both the structures and the practices of knowledgethrough which social experience has been understood. The alleged ‘objec-tivity’ of learning and science has strategically concealed their genderednature, as well as the power relations that determine what counts as know-ledge. The feminist critique of science, and that conducted internally to thesociology of science and technology (Harding, 1986; Fujimura et al., 1987;Haraway, 1991; Star, 1991; Mol, 1999), has helped to show that even ‘uni-versal’ knowledge is situated, and that feminist objectivity simply meansbodily situated knowledge. Some are not allowed not to have a body, andtherefore a limited point of view. The advantage of a ‘partial perspective’– the term is Donna Harraway’s taken forward by Marilyn Strathern (1991)– is that knowledge always has to do with circumscribed domains, not withtranscendence and the subject–object dichotomy. Strathern’s (1991) term‘partial connections’ links with the European tradition of the notions ofrelatedness, connectedness-in-action (Cooper and Fox, 1990), or ‘partiallyconnected’ knowledges. Cyberfeminism posits local but not particularistic,partial but not chaotic, knowledges, and resides at the centre of theparadox of postmodern subjectivity and of a nomadic subjectivity(Braidotti, 1994).

In a cultural context (the so-called ‘scientific community’), wheremasculinity is made invisible and normative by the values of ‘good research’,the deconstruction of the practices of knowledge production generates aconcept of knowledges situated within a politics of subjectivity (Calás andSmircich, 1996).





Practice articulates facticity

Practice connects ‘knowing’ with ‘doing’. It conveys the image of materiality,of fabrication, of handiwork, of the craftsman’s skill in the medieval bottegad’arte. From the Latin verb facere, Knorr-Cetina (1981) uses the term ‘fac-ticity’, and Bruno Latour (1987) that of the ‘fabrication’ of scientific factsand technical artefacts. Knowledge consequently does not arise from scien-tific ‘discoveries’; rather, it is fabricated by situated practices of knowledgeproduction and reproduction, using the technologies of representation andmobilization employed by scientists.

The sociology of science thus deposes scientific knowledge from thepedestal upon which positivism placed it. It asserts that scientific knowledgeshould be treated as a culture like any other form of knowledge, and there-fore that it too is subject to social control and social interests. The connec-tion between power and knowledge is thematized together with ethicalquestions and issues concerning social change. The metaphor of ‘ecologies ofknowledge’ (Star, 1995) allows us to locate knowledge production in an eco-system that rejects the dichotomies of functionalist thought, like thosebetween nature and society, and between the social and technical.

The study of knowing in practice can follow the same methodologicalprinciple stated by Latour (1987) for the analysis of science as practice:‘follow the actors’ in order to identify the ways in which they associate thevarious elements that make up their social and natural world. Latour drawsthis principle from ethnomethodology and from Hughes’s (1971) slogan‘follow the actors’: an injunction taken up by Callon (1980) and then byLatour (1987), who, to explain science in action, followed scientists and theirwork practices, as well as the specific practices of representation with whichthey described the world.

Practice conveys the contingent conditions and materiality of the worldinto knowledge, but if we look at how this materiality is described we finddifferent understandings of it. The material bases of every culture may beseen in two ways: on the one hand, objects are the materialization of ideas,tastes, fashions, trends and lifestyles; on the other, artefacts, too, have aninterpretative flexibility. Scholars of organizational culture use the term ‘arte-facts’ for all the visible expressions ‘which – while having an existence inde-pendent of their creators – call on the powers of comprehension of thedestinees, rather than on their capacity to experience formal qualities con-cretely through the senses’ (Gagliardi, 1990: 3).

This conception of artefacts partly connects with the semiotics ofmateriality (Law, 1999) or of relational materiality (Law, 1994), or again offunctional materialism (Blackler et al., 2000). Albeit with differing degrees





of emphasis, it is argued that practice is a bricolage of material, mental, socialand cultural resources. Not only are people active bricoleurs, but also theworld is not docile or passive. Actor-network theory insists on treatinghuman and non-human entities alike: they are all ‘actants’. Semioticians usethe notion of ‘actants’ to indicate that a hierarchy has not been establishedamong all acting things. Therefore, the problem is how to keep all theseelements in alignment, given that order is not given but is always an emer-gent process.

Conclusions

Different streams of research, traversing the boundaries of scientific disci-pline, are converging on an understanding (and a methodology) based on apragmatic theory of knowing that reframes traditional research into organiz-ational learning. Practice is the figure of discourse that allows the processesof ‘knowing’ at work and in organizing to be articulated as historical pro-cesses, material and indeterminate. The point is not to go in search of aframework which comprises all these reflections in a single space, but ratherto show how a practice-based theorizing arises from multiple perspectivesand negotiations, and how in so doing it delegitimizes a univocal narrativeof scientific authority.

In discussing how symbolic interactionism, activity theory, actor-network theory, sociology of science and technology may work togetherwithin a practice-based theorizing, I wish to outline a programme of empiri-cal research to study how knowing within the context of a workplace culturehas a jointly constructed and learnt meaning; in the sense that people,symbols, machines and things produce understandings which are simul-taneously structured and novel. To focus on analysis of knowing within asituated practice allows study of where knowledge is socially constructed andhow it is socially constructed both as activity and passivity.

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Silvia Gherardi is currently a full professor at the Dipartimento di Soci-ologia e Ricerca Sociale of the University of Trento where she teachesSociology of Organization. At present, her research interest is centredon organizational learning, the social foundation of learning and the com-munities of practice.[E-mail: [email protected]]




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From Organizational Learning to Practice-Based Knowing