Nothing is Concealed: De-centring Tacit Knowledge and Rules from Social Theory

The concept of "tacit knowledge" as the means by which individuals interpret the "rules" of social interaction occupies a central role in all the major contemporary theories of action and social structure. The major reference point for social theorists is Wittgenstein's celebrated discussion of rule-following in the Philosophical Investigations. Focusing on Giddens' incorporation of tacit knowledge and rules into his "theory of structuration", I argue that Wittgenstein's later work is steadfastly set against the "latent cognitivism" inherent in the idea of tacit knowledge and tacit rules. I also argue that the idea of tacit knowledge and tacit rules is either incoherent or explanatorily vacuous.     

试论企业隐性知识管理

隐性知识在企业知识中占绝大部分比例 ,隐性知识不易编码和传播 ,不易被其他企业仿制或窃取 ,是形成企业核心竞争能力的基础。企业隐性知识分为四个层次 ,各个层次的隐性知识可以流动和转移。我国企业隐性知识有效管理的主要措施是 :建立促进隐性知识共享的高效机制 ,自上而下的企业文化渗透 ,形成自下而上的知识拉动型流动 ,采取相关技术促进隐性知识创造和共享。     

The Knowledge Spectrum: A Framework for Teaching Knowledge and its Use in Social Work Practice

For students, educators play a pivotal role in identifying andexplaining the knowledge that can guide social work practice.Yet there is an absence of educational tools that can assistthe educator with this objective. The knowledge spectrum frameworkis an innovative tool that was developed to explain the possibilitiesof what can inform social work practice. As a tool, it can beutilized to show that knowledge use in practice is a dynamicprocess, illustrating that knowledge can be created, modifiedand discarded by practitioners. The framework can also be utilizedto capture the complexity of knowledge used by recognizing boththe tacit (unconscious) and explicit (conscious) domains, therebyidentifying different knowledge use possibilities. Strengtheningstudents’ and/or practitioners’ ability to recognizeand identify the basis of their professional behaviour is criticalfor clear, knowledge-guided practice.     

Sustainable social work: Modelling knowledge production,transfer, and evidence‐based practice

Gray M, Schubert L. Sustainable social work: modelling knowledge production, transfer, and evidence‐based social work This article is a first attempt to present a model of knowledge production and transfer in social work, drawing on the expanding literature on knowledge production. It highlights features of knowledge production in social work, such as the diverse contexts in which knowledge is developed and applied. It argues that knowledge production by itself is not enough. Equally important is knowledge transfer and implementation. The literature on knowledge production highlights problems with the implementation of actually existing knowledge and the potential resistance to this implementation as highly important issues for social work research. It leads to a greater awareness of the context in which knowledge is produced and applied and creates a bridge between traditional informal and tacit ways of knowing in social work and the demands of evidence‐based practice.     

Abstracts

The concept of ‘tacit knowledge’ as the means by which individuals interpret the ‘rules’ of social interaction occupies a central role in all the major contemporary theories of action and social structure. The major reference point for social theorists is Wittgenstein's celebrated discussion of rule-following in the Philosophical Investigations. Focusing on Giddens' incorporation of tacit knowledge and rules into his ‘theory of structuration’, I argue that Wittgenstein's later work is steadfastly set against the ‘latent cognitivism’ inherent in the idea of tacit knowledge and tacit rules. I also argue that the idea of tacit knowledge and tacit rules is either incoherent or explanatorily vacuous. Scholars of the emotions maintain that all anger requires an object of blame. In order to be angry, many writers argue, one must believe than an actor has done serious damage to something that one values. Yet an individual may be angered without blaming another. This kind of emotion, called situational anger, does not entail a corresponding object of blame. Situational anger can be a useful force in public life, enabling citizens to draw attention to the seriousness of social or political problems, without necessarily vilifying political officials. In the first half of this paper I show how H. L. A. Hart's theory of rules can resolve, or at least clarify, a central methodological problem in legal anthropology that was first posed in Llewellyn and Egebel's The Cheyenñe Way In the second half I explore and develop Hart's theory (a) of rules, and apply it to problems of agency and behaviourism in legal anthropology, and (b) of legal development, and apply it to the problem of rule-scepticism in legal anthropology as it is posed in Roberts and Comaroffs Rules and Processes and elsewhere. As human beings, we share many historically developed, language-game interwoven, public forms of life. Due to the joint, dialogically responsive nature of all social life within such forms, we cannot as individuals just act as we please; our forms of life exert a normative influence on what we can say and do. They act as a backdrop against which all our claims to knowledge are judged as acceptable or not. As a result, it is not easy to articulate their inadequacies in a clear and forceful manner. However, within most of our forms of life, we have a first-person right to express how our individual circumstances seem to us. And by the use of special forms of poetic, gestural talk—talk that can originate new language-games—we can offer to make our own ‘inner lives’ public. In this paper, I want to claim that this is just what Wittgenstein is attempting to do in his later philosophy: by use of the self-same methods that anyone might use to express aspects of their own world picture, he is offering us his attempts to make the background ‘landscape’ of our lives more visible to us. These methods are explored below. Proponents of the view that social structures are ontologically distinct from the people in whose actions they are immanent have assumed that structures can stand in causal relations to individual practices. Were causality to be no more than Humean concomitance correlations between structure and practices would be unproblematic. But two prominent advocates of the ontological account of structures, Bhaskar and Giddens, have also espoused a powers theory of causality. According to that theory causation is brought about by the activity of particulars, in the social psychological case, individuals of some sort. Consistence would demand that structure be those individuals. But neither Giddens nor Bhaskar wish to reify structure to the extent that would fit it for a role as a powerful particular. If only human beings can be powerful particulars in these contexts, the only way that structures can be real must be as properties of conversational (symbolic) interactions. Human action is social just in so far as people direct themselves to engage well in joint activities with others.     

On Acting Against One's Best Judgement: A Social Constructionist Interpretation for the Akrasia Problem

Akrasia is a philosophical concept meaning the possibility to perform actions against one's best judgement. This contribution aims to clarify this phenomenon in terms of a social construction, stating it as a narrative configuration generated by an observer. The latter finds himself engaged in justifying a “problematic” line of action with regard to specific cultural beliefs referring to the self, the others and the behaviour. This paper intends to make explicit the assumptions underlying the traditional definitions of akrasia when, paradoxically, an agent performs an action not in accordance with his/her best judgement. In the transition from modern to post‐modern psychology, we here propose an interpretation of the phenomenon in psychological terms, envisaging akrasia as a narrative form functional to the identity processes and to the social dynamics of the structures of contemporary societies. Implications in the psychological practice will be taken into account.     

Knowledge representation by schemata in financial expert systems

This paper introduces the notion of knowledge structuring by schemata. A schema is a chunk of knowledge which generalizes the idea of functional dependence between pertinent concepts (objects). The rules are closely related to the schemata. Moreover the schemata are organized in a hierarchical network which takes into account the relative importance of the concepts. Examples are given in the financial field and the consequences with regards to knowledge engineering are discussed.     

Re‐conceptualising the link between research and practice in social work: A literature review on knowledge utilisation

Despite the recent movement towards greater research use in many areas of social work, criticisms persist that decision making in practice is seldom informed by sound research evidence. Discourse about the research‐to‐practice gap in social work has tended to focus on the feasibility of evidence‐based practice for the profession, but has rarely drawn from the broader knowledge utilisation literature. There are important understandings to be gained from the knowledge utilisation field, which spans more than six decades of interdisciplinary research.This article introduces the wider knowledge utilisation literature to a social work audience. It considers the potential of this body of literature to facilitate research use in social work, as well as conceptual issues that may be hindering it from informing improvements to research utilisation in practice.     

Do psychologists understand honor cultures when they operationalize them?

This paper brings the thought of philosopher and world-class chemist Michael Polanyi to bear on psychologists' study of honor cultures. After reviewing some fundamentals of Polanyi's outlook on science and persons, the paper develops a heuristic involving two dimensions to the process of knowing others—one that is integrative, another that is affective—in which seeing with honor cultures only characterizes one side of the intersection between these dimensions. This leads on to consideration of the Honor Ideology for Manhood scale (Barnes, Brown, & Osterman, 2012), an operationalization of honor in the southern U.S. that misses understanding because of impairments it naturally suffers as an instrument of detachment. The possibility follows that understanding as seeing with another culture most readily succeeds when that culture's way of life is personally indwelt so that the psychologist directly encounters what its members can speak of and only convey by showing. The distinction Polanyi makes between explicit and tacit knowledge informs this proposal, and his vision of apprenticing—such as occurs between masters and pupils in the training of a science or an art—is presented as an exemplary form of such encounters.     

Where the Sidewalk Ends: The Limits of Social Constructionism

The sociology of knowledge is a heterogeneous set of theories which generally focuses on the social origins of meaning. Strong arguments, epitomized by Durkheim's late work, have hypothesized that the very concepts our minds use to structure experience are constructed through social processes. This view has come under attack from theorists influenced by recent work in developmental psychology that has demonstrated some awareness of these categories in pre‐socialized infants. However, further studies have shown that the innate abilities infants display differ in systematic and theoretically significant ways from adults' explicit knowledge. This paper moves beyond the constructionist/nativist dichotomy by outlining the complex relationships between innate intelligence and explicit knowledge. I end by suggesting that there are four, distinct ways the social world influences thought‐ facilitation, division, specification, and construction.     

Explaining robust additive utility models by sequences of preference swaps

As decision-aiding tools become more popular everyday—but at the same time more sophisticated—it is of utmost importance to develop their explanatory capabilities. Some decisions require careful explanations, which can be challenging to provide when the underlying mathematical model is complex. This is the case when recommendations are based on incomplete expression of preferences, as the decision-aiding tool has to infer despite this scarcity of information. This step is key in the process but hardly intelligible for the user. The robust additive utility model is a necessary preference relation which makes minimal assumptions, at the price of handling a collection of compatible utility functions, virtually impossible to exhibit to the user. This strength for the model is a challenge for the explanation. In this paper, we come up with an explanation engine based on sequences of preference swaps, that is, pairwise comparison of alternatives. The intuition is to confront the decision maker with “elementary” comparisons, thus building incremental explanations. Elementary here means that alternatives compared may only differ on two criteria. Technically, our explanation engine exploits some properties of the necessary preference relation that we unveil in the paper. Equipped with this, we explore the issues of the existence and length of the resulting sequences. We show in particular that in the general case, no bound can be given on the length of explanations, but that in binary domains, the sequences remain short.     

A Motivational Theory of Roles,Rewards, and Institutions

In this paper, we attempt to rehabilitate the notion of role by linking sociological role theory to recent work on motivational, affective, and cognitive neuroscience specifying the internal mechanisms behind motivated action. We argue that there is nothing inherently problematic or retrogressive in the idea of “role,” once its link to a purely normative account of motivated action is severed. Instead, by conceptualizing roles as emerging and persisting around structured reward systems, we are able to incorporate contemporary motivational science such that rewards become the proximate causal mechanisms currently missing in role theory. Consequently, a key implication of our argument is that the best way to link role, action, and structures is by reviving the idea of institutions as literal reward systems, which allows us to envision roles as the mechanisms via which the pursuit and delivery of rewards and goal-objects are routinized. Implications for a motivational theory of roles, rewards, and institutions is discussed.     

Consultation,for a Change? Engaging Users and Communities in the Policy Process

The process of consultation has become integral to the development, implementation and evaluation of a raft of UK health and social policies. However, the current bewildering patchwork of area–based initiatives means that, in many localities, it is impossible to evaluate the outcomes of particular targeted initiatives, let alone make sense of local planning consultations, Best Value reviews and (multi–agency) service reviews which run concurrently. The cumulative effects of this consultation "overload" threaten to swamp both local authorities and their service users. Consul–tation is itself a crucial yet deeply problematic process. There is an official view which holds that an "old" model of consultation—often tokenistic and unrepresentative—is being replaced with a "new" one. This paper examines and challenges that view in relation to the key policy areas of housing, social services and policing. It also pays particular attention to, and problematizes, the notion of "hard–to–reach groups", which is so dominant in the discourse of consultation. The paper argues that developing appropriate tools and recognizing that consultation is a process—not an event—are essential starting points in addressing these problems. The next step is to reconcile the principles of both evidence–based policy and user–led services into a strategic (and "joined–up") framework. But, when all this is accomplished, we still need to question the political and fiscal contexts in which policy–making takes place and within which the process of consultation is itself bounded.     

A Critique of an Epistemic Intellectual Culture: Cartesianism,Normativism and Modern Crises

The so‐called epistemological turn of the Descartes‐Locke‐Kant tradition (Rorty) is a hallmark of modern philosophy. The broad family of normativism constitutes one major response to the Cartesian heritage building upon some version of the idea that human knowledge, action and sociality build fundamentally upon some form of social agreement and standards. Representationalism and the Cartesian picture more generally have been challenged by normativists but this paper argues that, even where these challenges by normativism have been taken to heart, our intellectual culture remains fundamentally epistemic in certain problematic senses. Two problems are highlighted: first, normativism remains functionally Cartesian, for human action and sociality appear as processes driven by the shared understandings by competent contributors (regardless of how these are constructed naturalistically), and second, normativism is unable to account for forms of human action and sociality other than those occurring in the relatively small worlds of normatively regulated conceptual spaces of mutual access and listening. These points are illustrated by an applied discussion of the blind spots of normativist accounts of the emerging environmental and the on‐going economic crises.     

Collective‐unconscious apologetics of plutocracy and oligarchy: Chicago economics' ideological preferences revealed by the sociology of knowledge

The article places and analyzes the Chicago school of economics within the framework of Mannheim's sociology of knowledge or ideas that posits and documents social determinants of ideas and ideologies. This framework reveals the Chicago school as the explicit or implicit ideology and utopia of plutocracy, oligarchy and aristocracy in the sense of apologetics of these social classes and/or systems, thus being the class form of ‘apologetic economics’. Specifically, first, Chicago economics reveals itself as the collective‐unconscious apologetics of plutocracy, oligarchy and aristocracy. Second, it appears as the ‘collective‐conscious’ apologetics in this respect. In addition, it come close to the mostly covert collective‐unconscious or conscious apologetics of theocracy and fascism. The article aims to contribute to a better understanding of the social, in particular class, factors of Chicago and related schools of economics and generally of economic ideas, theories and policies by applying Mannheim's sociology of knowledge, especially its emphasis on the collective unconscious as the source of ideology.     

Judged knowledge and ambiguity aversion

Competence has recently been proposed as an explanation for the degree of ambiguity aversion. Using general knowledge questions we presented subjects with simple lotteries in which they could bet on an event and against the same event. We show that the sum of certainty equivalents for both bets depends on the judged knowledge of the class of events. We also elicited the decision weights for events and complementary events. We found a similar effect of knowledge on the sum of decision weights.     

The generational bargain

This paper builds on the notion of a bargain or contract across the generations. It argues that the idea of a generational bargain is helpful when thinking about a range of problems in economic and social policy, from pension reform to the extended family. The standard bargain (usually implicit) is that the working generation makes transfers of human capital to the young and consumption to the old on the understanding that other generations will behave in a similar way. Thus there are at least three generations involved in the process. The paper examines the roles of altruism and of self-interest in generational transfers and the stability of the bargain against "bad" behaviour by particular generations and against fractures in the generational cluster.     

Causes as explanations: A critique

This paper offers a critique of the view that causation can be analyzed in terms of explanation. In particular, the following points are argued: (1) a genuine explanatory analysis of causation must make use of a fully epistemological-psychological notion of explanation; (2) it is unlikely that the relatively clear-cut structure of the causal relation can be captured by the relatively unstructured relation of explanation; (3) the explanatory relation does not always parallel the direction of causation; (4) certain difficulties arise for any attempt to construct a nonrelativistic relation of causation from the essentially relativistic relation of explanation; and (5) to analyze causation as explanation is to embrace a form of causal idealism, the view that causal connections are not among the objective features of the world. The paper closes with a brief discussion of the contrast between the two fundamentally opposed viewpoints about causality, namely causal idealism and causal realism.Work on this paper was supported in part by a National Science Foundation grant.     

职权为什么必须被行使?——为"职权"的法律意义而辩

在我国的法理学中,法院等国家机关的职权被认为具有"必须被行使"这个含义,理由就是"不行使就是违反法定义务、要受到制裁"。这种解释的背后隐藏了一种独立于法律的事实意义上的国家(机关)观念,一方面只是一种职权的政治学、社会学概念,另一方面又与现今普遍被接受的法治理念相悖。因此,需要一种符合法治理念的国家观,并以此为基础重新解释职权的法律性质,确定一种职权的法律概念。