3 Explicit Knowledge
3.3 The Transactional Theory of Reading
(Rosenblatt, 1994). She also and significantly emphasized that readers “bring”
their present concerns to a reading event, and it is this combination of the effects of past experiences with projected future or expectations that she saw as critical to understanding what a reader got from the transaction with a text. A reading process is thus an “experience shaped by the reader under the guidance of the text” (Rosenblatt, 1994, p. 12) through which meaning emerges for the reader. It is not, as knowledge management authors would have it, a process whereby readers decode meaning/knowledge from a text.
The centrality of the reader’s activity for Rosenblatt is brought out in this passage suggesting that “text”
designates a set or series of signs interpretable as linguistic symbols.. . .The visual. . .signs become verbal symbols, become words, by virtue of their being potentially recognizable as pointing to something beyond themselves.. . .in a reading situation “the text” may be thought of as the printed signs in their capacity to serve as symbols.
(Rosenblatt, 1994, p. 12).
All that a document such as this book actually contains is marks on paper that can signify something to a reader (documents also contains spaces between marks, but normally these are not significant, except in so far as without them, the marks could not be discerned). Whether they can signify anything other than being marks depends on a host of other conditions, such as the reader’s ability to read; whether they can make sense of the script, and so on. Given all these conditions, whether or not they do signify something, and what they signify, depends on the reader’s background, and their present concerns. The above quotation from Rosenblatt carries clear echoes of the indexical hypothesis (Glenberg & Robertson, 1999), which in Rosenblatt’s case, was due to her semiotics, taken from Peirce and Dewey (Rosenblatt, 1994).
Rosenblatt underscored the idea that the reader’s actions shape the reading event by introducing the notion of “stance” and the distinction between aesthetic and efferent readings (Rosenblatt, 1994, 1998). Stance refers to the “attitude of mind” the reader “adopts” during a reading (Rosenblatt, 1994, pp. 73–75) which is conditioned by previous experiences, and by expectations. The word “heart” for example will have different associations for different people, depending on their experiences, and culture. Stance ranges along a continuum from aesthetic to efferent. In the aesthetic stance, the reader reads for her or himself, for an inner world of experience and feelings.
In the efferent stance a “scientific or expository” (Rosenblatt, 1994, p. 35) reading takes place that is instrumental to some other activity the reader is engaged in. It is being undertaken to find out something of use (Rosenblatt, 1994, 1998). In an aesthetic reading, preponderant attention is given to “the affective aspects” of the process; in an efferent reading, attention is given
“to the cognitive” (Rosenblatt, 1998, p. 893) although, she stressed, both are always present in any particular reading. She developed these concepts partly
to challenge assumptions about types of text, pointing out that you could read the instructions on, for example, a fire extinguisher to analyze the rhetorical devices employed; to enjoy the language used; to find out how to put out a fire, and so on (Rosenblatt 1994, p. 79). It is the reader’s purpose, in the context of their past experiences and present intentions and expectations, that will affect how they treat a text, and thus what they will “get” from it.
To say that readers rather than writers determine what is “in” the text overstates the argument. Rosenblatt’s emphasis on the role of the reader partly reflects the initial context of her work when text was seen as determinant (Rosenblatt, 1994). She did not, however, intend that a reader is entirely free to construct whatever meaning they wished from a given document. The action of reading necessarily involves language, and in so far as language “is at once basically social and intensely individual” (Rosenblatt, 1994, p. 20;
see also Cowley, Moodley, & Fiori-Cowley, 2004) any meaning an individual constructs in and from a reading event is thus also a socially constrained one. Throughout her work Rosenblatt insisted not only on the importance of what the reader made of the text they were working with, but also that their interpretation is likely to be constrained by the reader’s history and context.
Further, she insisted we can evaluate readers’ judgments even in less precise areas such as literary transactions (Rosenblatt, 1994, 1998). To return to her fire extinguisher example, the reader of the instructions, being a normal member of their society, can read; can understand the kind of language in which such instructions are couched; and given a fire, and being a good citizen of a society which values material property, considers it meaningful to act to put the fire out.
This section has barely scratched the surface of the issues concerning explicit knowledge which as was indicated are contiguous with those of communication through language in general, to survey which would necessarily take us into the wider realm of linguistics, communication studies and the like. Sufficient has been indicated, however, to suggest that it is na¨ıve to assume that explicit knowledge is an unproblematic concept. The consensus that it is knowledge in linguistic form (in words) takes us, once we abandon the almost unavoidable container metaphor (“in”), to the suggestion that what is put into words depends on the context of verbalization, as does understanding of what has been put into words. Thus the Japanese engineers’ and Russian scientists’ documents were adequate to their contexts but could not be used by others working in different contexts—either due to specific forms of training, or work arrangements and practices. Rosenblatt’s transactional theory of reading takes us further along this idea that documents do not and cannot “contain”
or “transfer” knowledge. Instead, documents are only containers of marks that readers can interpret in light of their experiences and expectations, thus constructing meaning. This is particularly so in the case of efferent reading, the kind of most concern in management circles. For relevant models to develop this idea we could look to semiotics rather than to the mathematical theory of communication for assistance. Doing this would also help to appreciate
commonalities underlying tacit knowledge/knowing and explicit knowledge processes (Gourlay, 2004a; for a useful review of semiotics in this broad context, see Whitson, 1997).