Knowledge and Practice in Business and Organisations

Kevin Orr, Sandra Nutley, Shona Russell, Rod Bain, Bonnie Hacking, Clare Moran

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317377924
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Knowledge Capital
• Index: Business

Knowledge and Practice in Business and Organisations contributes to scholarly understanding of knowledge and practice, mapping the conceptual terrain, providing a critical review of debates in the field and setting out key theoretical perspectives. Knowledge and practice are explored in a range of organisational and policy settings through six context-specific discussions. The collection helps shape the field, identify areas for future research inquiry, and suggest implications for practitioners.

The range of sites of inquiry represented in the book (e.g. craft working, accounting, public sector organisations, creative industries, health care, and so on) make the book distinctive, enabling the reader to connect debates and ideas from across a range of sectors and disciplines. The book charts different currents of debate which have hitherto tended to remain unconnected.

In one accessible volume, this book provides an excellent introduction to a set of concepts that have animated scholarly conversations across a range of disciplines and provides cases and examples of practices which come from beyond any one particular sector. Aimed at researchers and academics in the field, this book is valuable source, helping define and progress the scholarly debate.

1
Introducing the Aims, Background and Content of This Book

Kevin Orr, Rod Bain, Bonnie Hacking, Clare Moran, Sandra Nutley and Shona Russell

How is what we know shaped by what we do, and how is what we do shaped by what we know?

The central aim of this book is to contribute to scholarly understanding of knowledge and practice in organisational and policy settings, through a blend of conceptual and empirical discussion. It offers a guide for readers interested in considering questions such as how we know what we know, what the relationship between knowledge and practice is, and what ways of knowing our everyday ways of ‘doing things’ rely on. In addressing such questions, the book provides an introduction to concepts and debates that have animated scholarly conversations across a range of disciplines. These include debates on whether knowledge is best understood as a product or a process; whether some forms of knowledge and ways of knowing should be valued more highly than others; whether practices should be understood simply as what people do, or more widely as what they say, too; and whether practices are part of everyday life or the very substance of that life. To illustrate these debates and understand how they have played out in different settings and enquiries, the book includes cases and examples of knowledge and practice relationships from a variety of sectors and enquiry approaches.

The first part of the book guides readers to and through the relevant conceptual terrain and provides critical reviews of debates in the field. It sets out key theoretical perspectives on knowledge, on practice and on their interrelationships. The second part of the book then offers context-specific discussions of knowledge and practice. The range of contexts explored (e.g., craft working, accounting, public sector organisations, creative industries, healthcare, and so on) enables readers to connect debates and ideas from across a variety of sectors. They can examine knowing and practicing in settings that are often overlooked by books on management and organisation studies. The third part of the book integrates the insights on knowledge and practice from earlier chapters and reflects on their implications for action. The book ends with a provisional conceptual map of the emerging knowledge and practice terrain, some reflections on the process of producing this book, and suggestions for future directions of enquiry and action.

The process of planning and producing this book was distinctive in its collective and collaborative nature, and we next discuss this process and its implications for the approach taken. We then introduce some of the different ways in which the core concepts of knowledge and practice are defined and used in the book. This is followed by a more detailed explanation of the scope, structure and content of the book. Finally, we suggest different ways of reading and using the book.

Accounting for our own Practice: Who we are, and why and how we Wrote this Book

The book emerged as an idea from discussions among members of the Knowledge and Practice research group in the School of Management at the University of St Andrews. This is one of five thematic research groups at the School that seeks to foster individual and collective scholarship around particular research themes rather than traditional functional specialisms (which in business and management schools tend to include various combinations of accounting, finance, human resources, international business, marketing, operations management, organisation studies, services management, and strategy). The thematic groups are connected by the School’s overall commitment to the concept of ‘responsible enterprise’ and to engaging with a breadth of sites of organising and practising. The Knowledge and Practice group has around 40 members who stretch beyond the boundaries of the School, including colleagues from other disciplines within the university, and other institutions.

Many members of the Knowledge and Practice group currently work, most of their time, in an academic setting, but our ideas are steeped in longstanding and ongoing engagement with practitioners and policymakers from other settings—dialogues that are highly generative, and a central part of our own practices and approaches to knowledge creation and practice development. Moreover, many of us have worked for extended periods in other public, private or third sector settings.

Members of the group share an interest in knowledge and practice, but the nature of their interests, the contexts in which they explore these interests, and their approach to studying or acting to improve knowledge and practice links differ. As members heard more about the work of others, they felt there was much that could be learned by documenting, sharing and comparing these differences. The idea of doing this via writing a book on knowledge and practice became a focal point for mobilisation, something that colleagues committed to with enthusiasm. We were soon immersed in an 18-month schedule of writing retreats, workshops and seminars to develop chapters and carry out editorial and review responsibilities. This was a coalition of the willing and the interested, and for long, if not unbroken, stretches there was a great deal of passion too. The group included PhD students, emerging and mid-career researchers, professors, long-standing members of the School, and colleagues who had more recently joined. It encompassed experienced academic writers and those newer to the game, including those on the cusp of their first publications. Some were closer to debates about knowledge and its use, while others were more committed to enquiries about practice. Approaches also varied in terms of the explanatory, critical or normative goals of group members. It was often quite the carnival.

One ambition for the book was outward looking: it was conceived as an intellectual project that could draw together and represent group interests in a way that contributes to international scholarly discourse about knowledge and practice. Another driver for the enterprise was a local goal. We had faith that the process of producing the book—in particular, developing its coverage, authorship and intellectual approach through generative dialogue and discussion—could be used to nurture scholarship and a sense of community within the Knowledge and Practice group itself.

In relation to the second goal, much has already been achieved. For example, a strong sense of collective responsibility for the overall shape and content of the book developed amongst many members of the group. They were not just concerned about their own chapter. For this reason, when we use phrases such as ‘our approach’ here and in the concluding chapter, we are referring not just to the editorial team but also to the wider group of authors, and to those PhD students and faculty who acted as engaged and critical readers.

The Pluralistic Approach of the Book

Our early conversations established that we wished to discount the unlikely prospect of producing a unifying text that would dissolve intellectual differences between the authors (or arrive at a corporate stance—‘the St Andrews school’ of knowledge and practice). Instead, one of our governing instincts was that we could produce a book which benefited from the diversity of approaches to the subject matter. Members of the collective had different starting points in relation to career stage and history, area of research, epistemological position, methodological preference and so on. We had to navigate differences between us in terms of explanatory, normative and critical stances, and attitudes to—and experience of—applied research and engaged scholarship. We hope that ultimately readers find this diversity enriches the conversations in the book.

We regard universities, and our own School of Management, as inclusive sites for intellectual enquiry, which should welcome a range of theoretical and methodological orientations. It therefore seemed inappropriate to privilege one theory over another, not least as it risked colleagues finding themselves on the wrong side of a particular intellectual dividing line. We felt the project would be diminished by this loss of voice and alternative perspective. There is much to be gained from engaging with different ways of thinking about knowledge and practice, whether that is, for example, through power and politics, practice theory, or identity work lenses. We were struck by the opportunity for collective learning to occur through the process of pooling individual knowledge and airing the diversity of perspectives on knowledge and practice. Developing the book offered us the chance to embrace the dialogue that followed from sharing drafts and engaging in discussion at workshop meetings and awaydays. We discussed connections and divergences, and how they could be represented. The content of many chapters evolved substantially due to a growing awareness of the pluralism that animates the group and the book.

Defining Knowledge and Practice

In the light of all we have said thus far, it should come as no surprise that we have not used a narrow definition of either knowledge or practice in defining the scope and focus of the contributions in this book. The many ways of understanding both these terms are explored in Chapters 2 and 3 respectively. Subsequent chapters in the book go on to exemplify differences in interpretation and use.

In terms of knowledge, we are interested broadly in what we know, how we know it, and in ways of knowing. In some parts of the literature, knowledge is treated more as an object (to be found) and at other times the word ‘knowing’ is preferred because it is viewed as a process (to be engaged with). As discussed in Chapter 2, these differences matter because they shape the knowledge in (or knowledge into) practice ‘problem’ that is at the heart of this book.

In relation to practice, we are curious about what people (individually and collectively) do and say in work-related contexts. We are also interested in how these doings and sayings are produced and reproduced. Some contributors talk in terms of practice settings, the sites in which activities take place and ideas are applied in producing products and services. Others view practices as the very substance of social and organisational life.

Epistemology clashes amongst academics—the varying assumptions about the nature of knowledge, its roots, its relationship with practice—add further complexity to these conversations. Are knowledge and practice separate or intertwined? How can we understand the interrelationship and the direction of influence between the two? Knowledge and practice are popularly described as two separate entities—we see this in the oft-posed question of how to put knowledge into practice, or invitations to think through the practical implications of a theory, or allegations against academics that they generate impractical knowledge, and so on. For some, therefore, practising and doing are quite separate from knowledge and knowing. However, for others, in particular those adopting a practice theory perspective, the social world consists of practices and knowing is a social process collectively accomplished, and therefore the two—knowing and practising—are mutually implicated. In this book, we see authors who are committed to practice theory and its assumptions about the inseparability of knowledge and practice, those who are closer to describing a somewhat more dualistic relationship in which the key challenge is the mobilisation of knowledge into practice, and still others who emphasise the significance of politics, power and identity in different sites of knowledge and practice.

The different perspectives on knowledge and practice have implications for how we describe individuals and their roles. The language of knowers and doers is often implicit in many discussions of knowledge and practice, especially when knowledge is seen to emanate from research. This casts researchers as the knowers, and practitioners or policymakers as the doers. On the whole, we prefer to think in terms of academic practitioners and other practitioners, both of whom are knowers too.

Scope and Coverage of the Book

The contexts covered in the book embrace a rich array of practice settings offering a wide spectrum of settings within which to consider knowledge and practice issues. The selection reflects the orientations, knowledge and engagements of the individuals who came together to write the book. Our School’s commitment to ‘responsible enterprise’ signals our belief that knowledge and practice takes place in a wide variety of organisational spaces and eschews the notion that the only sites worthy of attention are those where profits are made or a bottom line achieved. The choice of context-specific chapters therefore communicates the belief that what happens in these spaces matters, and will interest and engage the general reader as much as the sectoral specialist. Our examples are drawn from the UK but they relate to global debates and international conversations about knowledge and practice.

Structure and Content of this Book

The book is structured around three main parts—A, B and C—and each fulfils a particular role in the overall story. These three parts and chapters contained therein are explained and summarised below to help guide readers through the book, and provide further insight into the issues discussed and the settings explored.

Part A: Mapping the Conceptual Landscape

The five conceptual chapters act as critically engaged reviews of the major ideas and perspectives on knowledge and practice that are to be found in the social science literature. They are written in order to introduce, in an accessible way, a set of intellectual resources and reference points relevant to the subsequent explorations and commentaries in the book. In keeping with the overall approach of the book, the chapters avoid outlining ‘one best way’ of theorising knowledge, practice and related concepts. They instead map the lines of debates, looking across different fields and disciplines in order to provide an appreciation of the scope and depth of scholarly enquiry about knowing and practising.

In Chapter 2, ‘Understanding Knowledge and Knowing’, Tricia Tooman, Cinla Akinci and Huw Davies help us begin our journey by guiding us through the increasingly complex conceptual terrain in which a consensual definition of knowledge continues to be elusive, and perhaps illusory. Their review of literatures they describe as ontologically, epistemologically and methodologically ‘eclectic’ shows how terms used to account for knowledge and knowing are used in divergent and often incompatible ways. The authors provide an authoritative treatment of the suite of ideas about knowledge and knowing that play through the wider literature and the subsequent chapters of the book. The contribution of the chapter is to set out the assumptions that underpin these diverse and distinctive approaches to knowledge, and in doing so it sets the conceptual scene for the chapters that follow.

In Chapter 3, ‘Understanding Practice(s) and Practising’, Rod Bain and Christopher Mueller provide an overview of key theoretical perspectives on practice. They consider and explain the ‘turn to practice’ that has taken place in social science, a shift that has occurred in social theory, empirical social science, and management and organisation studies. Perhaps confusingly, this turn has led to a myriad of ways of theorising and engaging with practice and so the contribution of the chapter is to map these ideas and approaches in ways which provide a foundation for different readings of the book. The chapter examines theories seeking to conceptualise practice, and the lines of debate between these different theories. It also discusses empirical work that has sought to access practice. It acts as a companion to Chapter 2 and engages with the question of how we might think about the relationship between knowledge and practice, or knowing and doing. Its consideration of issues such as researchers’ positions and theoretical commitments help an engagement with the approaches taken by other contributors to this volume, not least in the empirical chapters which make up Part B of the book.

Chapter 4, ‘Power, Knowledge and Practice’, introduces a further conceptual dimension to the book. Christopher Mueller, Alina Baluch and Kevin Orr explore connections between theories of knowledge and of practice and their assumptions about power relations in the social world. They highlight power as an everyday phenomenon that mediates, and is mediated by, processes of knowing and doing. The chapter maps different ways in which power has been theorised in social science and applies these understandings to the ideas about both knowledge and practice set out in Chapters 2 and 3. The contribution of the chapter is to identify the benefits of viewing the three concepts—knowledge, power and practice—in conjunction with each other. It sets out the implications of understanding that power is implicated in both knowing and doing, and so begins a thread of thinking that runs through later chapters.

Chapter 5, ‘Perspectives on Knowledge Work’, explores the rise of literatures on knowledge work and knowledge workers, emerging from scholarship on post-industrial society, knowledge creating companies, communities of practice and organisational knowledge. Toma Pustelnikovaite and Shiona Chillas discuss the spectrum of conceptualisations of knowledge work—considering whether, for example, it is a separate category of work, or all work is knowledge work. A contribution of the chapter is to explain how at the centre of these discussions is a debate about what knowledge is valuable, to whom and why. The authors track the reconfiguration of the social order from artisanal empirical knowledge to the rise of higher-educated specialist workers, and the shift in many spheres of the economy from manual to mental labour. Following on from Chapter 4, their critical analysis accentuates the political and power dynamics in this arena—how, for example, knowledge work can be de-knowledged by managerial interventions which drive down its economic value, or the bargaining power or status of those knowledge workers in relation to competing professions or groups.

In Chapter 6, ‘Identity, Knowledge and Practice’, Nic Beech, Gail Greig and Louisa Preston explore how we might understand and research the links between practice and identity, and what this implies for our understanding of knowledge. “What do we do?” and “who are we?” are related questions—...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• 1 Introducing the Aims, Background and Content of This Book
• Part A Mapping the Conceptual Landscape
• 2 Understanding Knowledge and Knowing
• 3 Understanding Practice(s) and Practising
• 4 Power, Knowledge and Practice
• 5 Perspectives on Knowledge Work
• 6 Identity, Knowledge and Practice
• Part B Context-Specific Discussions of the Relationship between Knowledge and Practice
• 7 Sensing Bodies The Aesthetics of Knowing and Practising
• 8 Everyday Creative Development Practices in Advertising
• 9 Mind the Gap! Exploring Academics' and Professional Practitioners' Views of Accounting Knowledge
• 10 Negotiating Knowledge through Boundary Organisations in Environmental Policy
• 11 Organising to Connect Academic Knowledge and Practice in Healthcare
• 12 Philanthropy Knowledge, Practice and Blind Hope
• Part C Integrating the Insights on Knowledge and Practice and Their Implications for Action
• 13 Knowledge Mobilisation Creating, Sharing and Using Knowledge
• 14 Co-producing Knowledge and Practice
• 15 Further Voices, Future Actions
• 16 Concluding Reflections Exploring and Mapping the Knowledge and Practice Terrain
• Index