Customer Reviews

Tacit Knowledge in Organizations

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I loved the book because I am currently struggling with a corporate program of "tacit knowledge management" and I have been looking for something precise for more than three years. Our corporation has more than 72.000 employees, and we needed very precise categories of what kind of tacit knowledge can be preserved in our organization. The book provides an amazingly precise framework, that we currently use in our company.

Philippe Baumard is seeking to stake out a distinctive domain - the use of tacit knowledge by top managers. Knowledge, especially tacit knowledge, provides sense-making frameworks within which top managers process information and make decisions. When sense-making frameworks prove ineffective - as they inevitably do in some situations - top managers misinterpret problems and they find themselves unable to generate successful actions.

I refer to this book on almost a daily basis. While it can be obscure, it the most thought-provoking and well-researched book I have found in the field of organizational psychology to date. The sections on the use of tacit knowledge to usurp existing knowledge or information systems bring theory headlong against existing practices and peer practics.

The process of generating knowedge is triggered off by the articulation of ambiguous, implicit insights into concepts, which are successively inscribed into more explicit and concrete forms of organizing. Such activities and practices have to do with "doing" as much as wth "knowing". Our activities are open-ended for they cannot be captured in rules, reciptives or normative models. Such insights are the forte of Philipe Baumard's book.