Technical Work

Tacit knowledge, local knowledge, private knowledge

One idea which keeps coming up again and again is the notion of "tacit knowledge" developed by Polanyi. Some kinds of knowledge can’t be articulated: how, for example, do we recognize a face? We all do it, but try explaining how it happens to someone else. Polanyi’s argument is that much technical and craft work relies heavily on such tacit knowledge, which is why it must be taught through apprenticeship and example, not simply via textbook.

Polanyi contrasted tacit knowledge with knowledge that is codifiable: knowledge which can be transmitted from one person to another indirectly, without "hands on" interaction and demonstration. In practice, knowledge is codifiable if it can be learned from written documents.

Many authors have used Polanyi's idea in a way which confounds three distinct notions. The first is tacit knowledge in Polanyi’s original sense: knowledge which can’t be articulated. The important point about such tacit knowledge is that it can’t be codified or formalized (or at least, doing so is impractical).

The second notion, routinely confounded with inarticulate knowledge, is local knowledge. Local knowledge is knowledge of particular circumstances: the way things work at one time and place. Knowing where to hit the soda machine in the office basement in order to make it give back your money is local knowledge. Knowing that it’s a good idea to move into the left lanes as you pass the jail in San Francisco on eastbound I-80 in rush hour is local knowledge. Knowing who shouldn’t be seated next to whom at a dinner party you’re planning is local knowledge. None of these is tacit knowledge, because in each case, the knowledge can easily be passed to someone else.

The standard example used to illustrate the idea of tacit knowledge is the notion that laboratory procedures (especially new ones) can't be taught via textbook, but must be shown via hands-on, face-to-face contact. This is often true, but it's a bad example just because the situation confounds these two ideas.

The third notion often mixed up with the idea of tacit knowledge is private knowledge. Everyone has knowledge that no one else does; but that doesn't, by itself, make the knowledge inarticulate. Inarticulate knowledge is typically private, of course, but the reverse is hardly necessary. Local knowledge is knowledge about a particular time and place, knowledge of a particular subject-matter. Private knowledge is knowledge held solely by a person or group, i.e., by particular knowers.

Why bother with the nit-picking distinctions? There are several reasons, beside a taste for clarity and an aversion to research by bumper-sticker. When we tease out the different kinds of knowledge involved in most examples, we find that tacit knowledge is much less important as a factor in organizing affairs. Certainly, there are things which we can recognize but not define; pornography is a famous example. But local and private concerns are not, in general, inarticulate. Hence, the inarticulate character of some knowledge can't be used to define, defend or privilege local or private concerns.

One such sort of concern often treated this way is rights, especially rights in property. Such rights are always local, often private, and never inarticulate. Treating property rights as somehow constituted or privileged by "tacit" knowledge (as, for example, Virginia Postrel does here) is simply to add confusion to a difficult series of research and policy problems. There are many other examples of this confounding; it's worth some effort to avoid them in the future.

Polanyi, M. The Tacit Dimension. New York: Doubleday, 1967

Tracking distributed debates

I've noticed something about the way things happen on the web: when a debate starts, people chime in from all sides in many different formats, and pretty soon the debate is (literally) all over the place. So there's no way to track a debate systematically, or to reconstruct its course in detail. You can probably get the main points OK, but you can't reconstruct the detailed history.

Of course, this is true for debates outside the web as well, and for the most part, it always has been. Except for the narrowest kind of technical debate, confined to the pages of one or two specialized academic journals, debates have always become highly distributed, with pieces of the field ignoring one another simply because they don't know of one another's existence.

Yet this seems to be more of an issue on the web; or at least, it feels that way. I started off idly imagining that all this wonderful technology of RSS feeds and aggregators and trackbacks and pings should somehow result in a log which catalogs all the "he said/she said" in some neat orderly fashion. And then I thought: How would I do it if I were watching a debate in the field? There's no conventional procedure; I could try some sort of sequence analysis (see Abbott 1995 for a review), but those techniques are about analyzing data in a formal way once you've got it in some appropriate form. So here's a nice methods problem: how can we capture, represent, and store the sequence and organization of a debate on the web, as automatically as possible? What would we have to do?

Ultimately, of course, we'd like to be able to say something about debates. When do they become polarized into irreconcilable camps, when do they get resolved quickly, and when do they drag on over long periods without much progress? When do they stay confined to a few participants, and when do we get "piling on", where seemingly everyone finds it necessary to have a public opinion? Lots of work to do.

Abbott, A. 1995. “Sequence analysis: New methods for old ideas.” Annual Review of Sociology 21: 93-113.

Back from Vienna

The ISHPSSB meetings in Vienna were a resounding success. The program was rich and varied, and the facilities were excellent. We met on the campus of the old University in downtown Vienna. The campus is a series of courtyards, each enclosed by classroom buildings. The largest courtyard contains several restaurants serving beer and pretty good meals, as well as a small supermarket. The setting thus perfectly encouraged the milling conversation which has worked so well in the past.

Our local host was the Konrad Lorenz Institute in suburban Altenberg. Gerd Müller (Chair), Werner Callebaut (Scientific Manager), Astrid Juette (Executive Manager) and the staff of the Institute did an outstanding job of making the meeting exceptionally pleasant and effective.

All in all, it's clear that both the Society and the research area are strong and getting stronger, with new members, new ideas, and new procedures all promising.

ISHPSSB in Vienna

Tomorrow, I'm off to the ISHPSSB meetings in Vienna. ISHPSSB is the International Society for the History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Biology. The abbreviation is usually pronounced "Ish-ka-bibble", but nobody seems to know why. The Society's web site is here, and the program (with abstracts) can be downloaded here. This year's program is the biggest we've ever had.

I especially enjoy these meetings because they are so very interdisciplinary. The relations between specialties at most academic meetings often reminds me of an airport waiting lounge or maybe (when things are going well) a football game. At ISHPSSB it's much friendlier and more cooperative; like a junior high school prom, tentative but optimistic.

My paper is about modes of research, which is a major theme in my work. Here's the abstract:

Many of the changes in evolutionary biology which took place around the turn of the 20th century have been described in terms of a conflict between two competing ways of doing research (e.g., as "naturalists" vs. "experimenters"). Often, the debates have been described in terms of a new and better way of doing science replacing an older one. This paper proposes an alternative way of thinking about these events.

There were three, not two, modes of conducting research active around 1900: the historical-comparative, the causal-analytic, and the mechanical-elucidative. Each mode had its own typical way of framing problems, theorizing and handling data, although each made at least occasional use of others approaches as well.

In each mode, some researchers were pushing forward with new theories and methods, while others were lagging behind. The organization of the debates which took place at the time were therefore much more complex than a simple division between older/less scientific and newer/more scientific. Instead there were multiple overlapping debates in which work in the different modes was often misunderstood and misrepresented.

What is technical work?

Some kinds of work are so tricky or complicated that practitioners can't guarantee results; they can only promise "best efforts" and (perhaps) "best practices". I'm not thinking here about work like farming or fishing, where the unpredictability of nature is a large part of what happens. Rather, I'm concerned with tasks whose character is inherently tricky or unpredictable.

So technical work is work that requires a fair amount of expertise to carry out, and whose results are inherently unpredictable.

Every occupation involves some technical work, because dealing with people is technical work, and every occupation deals with people. Some occupations have technical work at their core: the traditional learned professions (medicine, law, and clergy), military officers, the fine and performing arts, the various kinds of engineering, architecture, science. Many of traditional crafts are also technical work at the core: making musical instruments, for example. And some occupations often deal with people's identities in fundamental ways, even though they aren't considered professions; much of police work is like this, for example.

My focus is on the tasks, not the people who carry them out or the occupational categories. Keeping these things separate lets us frame a whole series of interesting questions. For example: how do tasks get assigned to occupations, and what sorts of issues arise as a result? The boundaries among academic disciplines, for example, is one phenomenon which I'm particularly concerned with. Boundaries among professions is another example; Andrew Abbott's book on the subject is especially interesting.

Andrew Abbott. 1988. The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Susan Abrams

Susan Abrams, the University of Chicago Press editor for the history, philosophy, and social studies of science, died on 29 June.

In a career of 24 years with the Press, Susan built the finest and most extensive list of books in the area. Along the way, she made a substantial and invaluable contribution to science studies. Every great editor makes a contribution to her field by seeking out and encouraging promising authors and their works. Susan did a lot of that, and the size, depth, and quality of the list she built reflects her efforts. What isn't so clear from the weight of the catalog however, is her habit of seeking out younger scholars and graduate students, and encouraging them even when she knew they wouldn't have finished manuscripts for years. At meetings, she also organized sessions designed to explain the publishing process to younger scholars.

Her position made her one of the few people with a wide range of acquaintance in all of the specialties which came together a generation ago to form science studies. At a time when some historians, philosophers, and sociologists thought of one another as pathogens rather than colleagues, she made a point of connecting scholars to one another, patiently encouraging the cross-disciplinary connections needed to build a real discipline. That sort of institution-building rarely makes it into the official accounts, but it is critical to the formation and strength of a field.

And now she's gone, and our meetings will be duller, dimmer affairs.

Press release

About this blog

This blog is about the social organization of technical work; primarily science (natural history and evolutionary biology especially) but also various kinds of computing work, with side trips into other technical specialties.

My focus is on analyzing the similarites and differences among different specialties: how they recognize and solve problems, how they relate to other specialties and the rest of the world, how these relationships shape the content of their work.

Along the way, I’ll mention some of my own specialty’s problems, especially issues of method: how do we go about identifying and analyzing the important properties of work organizations? What are the trade-offs among abstraction and generalization on the one hand, and careful description on the other?

This is all very ivory-tower sort of stuff. I promise to keep it dull, and useful only to those who need it.