Michele Zappavigna-Lee & Jon Patrick

School of Information Technologies, University of Sydney, Australia

Literacy, Tacit Knowledge and Organisational Learning

Organisational Learning is currently an important area of study in Knowledge Management, a research domain within the discipline of Information Systems. Literacy in this context involves how knowledge is constructed and deployed by participants in an organisation. A substantial component of this knowledge is applied and implicit in nature, referred to as 'tacit knowledge '. This kind of knowledge is dominantly conceived in the Knowledge Management literature as ineffable. Following Polanyi's (1966:4) notion that ""we know more than we can tell"", this literature disassociates this kind of experiential knowledge, integral to operating within an organisation, and meaning-making with language. In contrast, this paper characterises tacit knowledge as implicit meaning-making and essential to negotiating experience in an organisation, to construing oneself as a literate employee. This interest in implicitness parallels the focus in pragmatic studies on indirect meaning. The present paper demonstrates a methodology for eliciting tacit knowledge from the spoken discourse of organisational participants through directed interviews. These interviews involve a model of under-representation derived from SFL theory that is used to determine target sites in participant's discourse for elaboration. We argue that the participants may articulate what they know implicitly through patterns and features of language to which they do not directly attend. Hence analysis of language appears a means for understanding and eliciting their tacit knowledge. The present research provides a case-study demonstrating a practical application of such analysis. Our response is to extend Polanyi: ""we tell more than we realise we know"".