3 Explicit Knowledge
3.2 Reading Research
Reading research seems an obvious place to look to understand some aspects of explicit knowledge processes, but the large body of research into reading (see Ruddell, R. B., Ruddell, M. R. & Singer, 1994; Smith 1994) has also been overlooked by knowledge management researchers, perhaps because much of it focuses on young children, and on teaching literacy. Nevertheless a good deal of research in this field also concerns the reading process more generally.
Reading researchers, like those in many other fields of human behavior, have yet to reach a consensus, but most would agree that it would be a mistake to treat reading as an unproblematic process, and that it involves complex psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic processes. Smith (1994, pp. 221–222) suggests that the many models of reading largely fall into two groups emphasizing either determination by the reader (the “inside-out” or top-down perspective) or by the text (the “outside-in” or bottom-up perspective). It is evident that knowledge management research takes an extreme “outside-in”
perspective, regarding knowledge as contained in documents and transferable along with the transfer of documents. Studies by Lam (1997) of engineers, and by Collins (2001a) of scientists illustrate some of the shortcomings of this view.
Documents in Work
Lam (1997) studied product design, focusing on the role of graduate engineers, in a Japanese-British engineering partnership in which managers wanted to
establish co-operative working and knowledge sharing. While the Japanese engineers found it possible to learn from the British documents, the British found it difficult if not impossible to learn from the Japanese, and so cooperation foundered. Lam found that the British engineers expected to receive detailed designs and blueprints in line with their graduate training experiences which had involved early specialization and subsequent work experiences where they had been put to work in their specialist areas immediately after recruitment. Given specialization and consequently a relatively rigid division of labor between engineering specialisms, and between engineers and others in the design process, the British firm placed a high premium on clear, unambiguous documentation as the means for controlling work processes.
The Japanese engineers apparently had similar formal training, but their subsequent work experiences were quite different. As was common in many Japanese firms, they were not set to work immediately in specialist areas, but spent time developing a wider understanding of the firm as a whole by working in different departments. In the product development area, they joined comparatively large teams, comprised of people from a variety of specialisms, bridging the gap found in British firms between design and manufacturing.
While the Japanese design engineers were responsible for planning and product design, they did not produce a complete documented product which they handed over to manufacturing. Instead, product development was characterized by strong cross-functional linkages and reciprocal flows of information and exchange of ideas across phases of development and functions and roles. In particular production and manufacturing staff had an active role to play in the overall development process, providing input to the design, not just implementing the designers blueprints.
According to Lam, the Japanese managers felt they were not good at producing documentation, and lacked a high level language to describe their designs. That they could understand the British engineers’ documents belies the latter, and the feeling that they were not good at documenting their work is also questionable. In so far as the Japanese had been, and continued to be, successful, then their documentation must have been adequate. What this study indicates, however, is that what counts as meaningful documentation depends on the context of its production and use. Documentation functional for and appropriate to activities where the total cognitive work is loosely distributed in a social group (Hutchins, 1995) as amongst the Japanese engineers, may be inappropriate where there is a relatively rigid division of labor and tasks, and cognitive processes are thus more compartmentalized (British engineers). Of course, in so far as the latter set of processes might be “contained” within the former, documents produced within and for a compartmentalized division of labor will be understandable by people working in the same field with work processes like those of the Japanese engineers, hence their ability to make use of the British engineers’ documents.
Collins’ (2001a) study of scientists involved in measuring the quality of sapphires provides further support for these contentions. For several years prior to the late 1990s Russian scientists claimed to have succeeded in making the particular measurements at room temperature, something no one else had done. They published their results in scientific journals, but when these could not be replicated, and for a variety of scientific and other reasons, their account was dismissed. Subsequently the Russians were able to demonstrate their success to a team of British scientists, following which the two groups worked together to refine the experiments and develop their understanding of what was involved in success (and failure).
As scientists the Russians implicitly wanted to communicate to their peers since they would be concerned that their claims should be accepted, so we can rule out lack of adequate language (or intentional obfuscation) as issues here.
We must also infer that the Russians’ accounts were adequate for their own practices since they could presumably use them. The issue here, it turned out, was that the Russians did not fully understand how their results had been achieved because they assumed aspects of their experimental set-up that turned out to be critical for success were irrelevant to the results. It was only through detailed experimentation, both with measuring sapphire quality, but more important, with the experimental method itself, carried out jointly by the British and Russian scientists, that they could identify just how they had succeeded. As Collins put it, in this process “For both parties the science was slowly emerging and turning knowledge that no one knew they could or should express, into something that could be articulated as the importance of previously unnoticed parts of the procedure became revealed.” (Collins, 2001a, p. 80). Collins’ earlier study of laser development illustrating a similar difficulty suggests this example is not an isolated one (Collins, 1974, 2001b).
These cases clearly show that it is at best na¨ıve to think that documents unambiguously carry knowledge “embedded” in them by their authors, or that authors could anticipate the conditions under which they might be read.
Instead it seems more useful to regard documents (at least those like the ones discussed above) as products of particular divisions of labor, “fitting” the needs of those engaged in such processes, and shaped by the authors’ cognitive and other limitations. Readers should indeed reorganize themselves cognitively and practically to meet the implicit contextual conditions of documents they use, as is evident in certain approaches to studying history (e.g., Thompson, 1968). Readers’ ability to “extract” knowledge from documents is likely to depend on a combination of prior knowledge and experience with what the documents refer to, and the extent to which specific documents “fit” the division of tasks and patterns of interacting with whatever the documents are ostensibly about that the reader is familiar with. One model of the reading process that helps to elaborate this is the transactional theory of reading.