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Comparative Review
Tacit Knowledge In Organizations PHILLIPE BAUMARD (trans. Samantha Wauchope). London: Sage, 1999. 264 pp. L55.00 (hbk), L18.99 (pbk). ISBN 0761953361 (hbk), 076195337X (pbk)
Knowledge In Organizations; Access to Thinking at Work JOHN SPARROW. London: Sage, 1999. 260 pp. L55.00 (hbk), L19.99 (pbk). ISBN 0803978286 (hbk), 0803978-294 (pbk)
In some ways Baumard's Tacit Knowledge in Organizations is a fascinating book. For one thing it bravely (some might suggest, imperialistically) puts the religious tradition of Taoism together with Carlos Castaneda's hallucinogen-influenced native American knowledge and Greek metis (cunning knowledge) to discuss organizational knowledge in what is an enthusiastically written third chapter with the evocative title: 'Exploring the non-expressive'. It also includes four organization case studies that prove interesting reading. And then there is the most intriguing feature of the book-its sheer nerve. Here is a book that is attempting to speak about the non-expressible, tacit and inexplicable forms of knowing in human organizing. No problem here of course, as such paradoxes can produce appealing work and generally I applaud Baumard's efforts on this. But academic power relations and the discursive practices of academic writing seem to drag down this effort.
Before briefly discussing how these conditions of production entrap the book, I should 'cut to the chase', so to speak, and suggest how I'd use it. This is not a book I'd recommend to undergraduate students nor one I'd put on a postgraduate course-reading list. If I was looking to excite students about 'knowledge management' or 'organizational learning' this would be some way down the list. It is a book I'd direct research thesis students interested in organizational knowledge toward. But in general terms it's a book for the library collection. There it may 'mature' into a crucial piece of theorizing about knowing and managing work organizations. This is clearly the desire embedded in the book. But it is highly constrained, and some might say repressed, by its conditions of production. This is after all a 'management' book. It comes to us from the American interpretive tradition in social science, has links to strategic management discourse and is based around the author's PhD research. It is not, and this would have given the book extra space to explore its themes, a funky New...