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This research identifies the forms of tacit knowledge frequently requested in the job descriptions of knowledge workers in a multinational automotive manufacturer's product development department. It then explores how and why the most requested forms of tacit knowledge are used in practice to achieve organizational goals.

This study follows a sequential mixed-methods approach to quantify the most frequently requested forms of tacit knowledge within internal job descriptions and then explores how and why this tacit knowledge is used. The first stage applies manifest content analysis to internal job descriptions to highlight the epitomes of tacit knowledge to identify the most frequently requested forms of tacit knowledge. The second stage employs semi-structured interviews to explore the use of the most frequently requested forms of tacit knowledge in practice.

The research indicated that the organization most frequently requested tacit knowledge in the form of skills and experience in the job descriptions of knowledge workers in the product development department. When the use and application of tacit knowledge in the form of skills were further explored in practice, it was found that tacit knowledge-based socially-focused skills were used, which was underpinned by the need to bring people together and align them towards a common goal to make things work; by enabling people to work together as a team; by developing and using networks; and acting as a required resource to support the development and integration in product development. Tacit knowledge in the form of experience was applied through the application of personally obtained experience to enhance development work by acting as a pacemaker for increasing efficiency and a sense of upcoming issues.

This work addresses the paucity of studies identifying tacit knowledge in large organizations and meets calls to investigate the processes and activities related to tacit knowledge in specific contexts.

This paper aims to describe the results of a qualitative case study of three beginning elementary teachers’ knowledge-in-practice of multicultural science education.

Data included interviews, focus group discussions, audio-recorded lessons and daily field notes through the course of a month-long summer science program. Data were coded deductively using a framework of receptivity and resistance, and then coded inductively to determine themes within each category of data.

Analysis revealed three key elements of teachers’ knowledge-in-practice: positive perceptions of teaching for social justice, practices that overlooked students’ perspectives and practices that discounted race and culture in science.

Insights from this case study respond to the well-documented need to address the gap between knowledge and practice in multicultural science education by revealing potential roadblocks and guideposts useful for bridging this gap.

Numerous studies have identified various unintended adverse consequences (UACs) of implementing health information technology (HIT). For example, UACs identified in the context of Computerized Physician Order Entry (CPOE) implementation include unfavorable workflow issues, generation of new types of errors, untoward changes in communication patterns, and problems of paper persistence.

However, gaps remain in understanding why UACs from HIT implementation occur, and how they may be overcome. The technology-in-practice (TIP) framework emphasizes the role of human agency (or individual action) in enacting structures of technology use (or technologies-in-practice) and other social structures within the organization. As such, given a set of UACs from HIT implementation, the TIP framework can help trace them back to specific actions (types of HIT-in-practice) and institutional conditions (social structures).

However, insofar as the TIP framework can help understand causes of UACs, it does not shed light on how they may be overcome through strategic action. By contrast, the knowledge-in-practice (KIP) framework, which emanates from both human resource and knowledge management literatures, helps understand how information and communication technologies (ICTs) such as “Intranets” and the “Virtual Office” can be used alongside existing HIT systems (e.g., CPOE) to create new social structures, generate new KIP, and transform HIT-in-practice.

This chapter integrates the TIP and KIP literatures to develop an integrated framework for understanding and overcoming the UACs from HIT implementation. The framework is applied to existing evidence on UACs from CPOE implementation, to explain why they occur, and how they may be overcome. The application and ensuing discussion provide insight into strategies for successful HIT implementation in healthcare organizations, as well as recommendations for future research.

This paper aims to develop a reliable and valid scale for measuring the underlying knowledge involved in work. To do so, it builds on the knowledge-in-practice (KIP) framework that suggests different types of work have different underlying knowledge characteristics. This allows us to answer two important questions: What are the underlying characteristics of KIP that are important to effectively manage a firm’s knowledge resources? How do we measure these characteristics? The answers help to build theoretical and empirical understanding of the construct of KIP.

The study uses a discovery-oriented survey design methodology to design the survey instrument, followed by a mixed-methods approach to validate the scale.

A new scale is developed for measuring the tacitness and learnability of the knowledge involved in work. It allows work units to be evaluated based on the underlying knowledge involved in different types of work.

The KIP scale can be used for measuring the type of knowledge characteristics in organizations. Academics can use this study as a basic model to explore knowledge across different contexts and focus on the different characteristics within and across work contexts.

The study provides a clearer and more granular understanding of knowledge in organizations that can be used as a guideline to refer to when measuring and assessing knowledge requirements.

Scholars have pushed to understand work from a knowledge and collaboration perspective. A measurement scale for the KIP framework provides a critical first step towards this outcome.

Health policies in England highlight the need for child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) to embed new knowledge in practice, yet evidence remains scarce about the services’ ability to learn from the external environment. This paper aims to present a critical analysis of the CAMHS’ ability to implement new knowledge through the lens of absorptive capacity, an organisation’s ability to identify, assimilate and use new valuable knowledge.

Sixteen semi-structured interviews were conducted with staff from the CAMHS department of a mental health organisation in England to explore the services’ absorptive capacity.

Professionals were identified having an impact on the main absorptive capacity components in the following ways: professional background and perceived reliability of knowledge sources appeared to affect knowledge identification; informal communication was found to facilitate knowledge assimilation and exploitation; trust was found to enable knowledge exploitation, particularly between senior management and frontline professionals. At an organisational level, team meetings and internal reporting were identified as enablers to knowledge assimilation and exploitation, while organisational hierarchy and patient data management systems were identified as barriers to knowledge assimilation. No organisational processes were found regarding knowledge identification, indicating an imbalanced investment in the main components of absorptive capacity.

Investing in these underpinning factors of absorptive capacity can assist CAMHS with capitalising on new knowledge that is valuable to service provision.

This study offers novel insights into the learning ability of CAMHS through the lens of absorptive capacity.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the enactment of safety routines in a transshipment port. Research on work safety and reliability has largely neglected the role of the workers’ knowledge in practice in the enactment of organisational safety. The workers’ lack of compliance with safety regulations represents an enduring problem that often involves first-level managers, who are willing to turn a blind eye toward divergent practices. The CHAT conceptual vocabulary and theoretical model is used to explore this issue.

A grounded, empirical study in a large transshipment port in the Mediterranean area is conducted. Ethnographic methods including participant observation and interviews are used, and emerging data are analyzed through an interpretive methodology. The paper explores 30 employees’ narrated accounts of how safety rules are enacted or infringed while living and working in the field in a transshipment port. Data obtained through organisational shadowing provided secondary data. Interview data were analyzed using content analysis, using a CHAT framework. Constant comparison and theoretical sensitivity were pursued through an iterative analysis process.

This study documented the critical role the workers’ knowledge played in practice in ensuring the efficient functioning of the port, and evidenced that the disconnect between safety procedures and technical productivity standards is the most important factor determining the erratic compliance with prescribed procedures. The selective application of safety norms was deliberate in nature, collectively shared and culturally regulated.

This contribution fails to address probably the most important aspect of the activity theoretical approach: its developmental orientation. The initial analysis intervention was meant to lead to a longitudinal process of expansive learning and development in the activity system. The authors had planned to initiate a cycle of expansive learning laboratories involving representatives of the dockworkers, the port management and the safety certification firm, but this had to be postponed to an undefined time due to the significant changes occurred in the international maritime cargo industry and the decision of the multinational company who owns the transshipment port to cut down its cargo traffic and privilege other ports in the Mediterranean area.

The practical implications of the case study concern the conception and design of safety training and management for the port organisation. By acknowledging the disconnect between espoused safety routines and the constraints and affordances of the workers’ everyday work practice, it is suggested that safety training could be more effective if it engaged the workers (or first-level supervisors) in the fine tuning of safety regulations. Workplace learning opportunities could enable the workers to learn and construct situated safety practices.

This paper seeks to highlight how the consideration of local knowledge and context-dependent practices can achieve better comprehension of situated application of safety norms.

The paper contributes to understanding the complexity of enacting and translating safety procedures into everyday work practices.

The paper sets out to suggest that knowledge in the SME enterprise is embodied as evident in such notions as tacit knowing and learning, and embedded grounded in the situated social historic contexts of individual lives and work. This supports the view that the nature of knowledge is inherently indeterminate and continually evolving.

A practice‐based approach focuses towards, the point of action, enabling the researcher to observe knowing as an intimate recursive feature of organisational life, the local in which traditional dualisms lose their meaning, in the specific context of real time practices, in that the knowing subject and the known objects cannot be treated in isolation and opposed to one another, the given and the emergent co‐exist and presuppose one another.

The paper offers the suggestion that a social process perspective offers a means of engaging the SME enterprise in more effective knowledge creating activities, and fostering innovation, which is both relevant and useful to them.

The paper offers the suggestion that a social process perspective offers a means of engaging the SME enterprise in more effective knowledge creating activities, and fostering innovation, which is both relevant and useful to them.

The paper seeks to extend the current conceptualisations of organisational learning developing the view that learning is no longer associated with the diffusions of pieces of knowledge, but rather it is viewed as the process of developing of situated identities based on participation in a process of social engagement and interaction.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the processes of identification, emergence and filling of organizational knowledge gaps over an extended period of time, using the strategy in action perspective. Specifically, it aims to explore the nature and types of knowledge gaps, to capture their changes and to shed some light on the processes of filling knowledge gaps.

The study is based on two case studies and adopts a processual approach. It analyses 40 years of data collected using secondary sources and semi-structured interviews over a period of two years and identifies critical organizational events both in retrospect and real time.

The findings show that the two case study companies have identified a number of knowledge gaps over the 40 years period. Changes in the nature and type of knowledge gaps are identified and discussed in detail leading to a new taxonomy of organisational knowledge gaps. The findings report that knowledge gaps emerge due to changes in both exogenous and endogenous conditions over time. The filling of those gaps depends on a number of factors. Among these, the ability to make a distinction between “strategic” and “imposed” knowledge gaps and the ability to build absorptive capacity within a stipulated time frame have a predominant role.

The respondents were asked to look back into the history of their company using their memory of events to provide explanations surrounding critical organizational events. Since some of the respondents had not witnessed all of the events in question, their responses were at times based on hearsay. However, every effort was made to check the authenticity of the respondents ' explanations, such as using a range of sources and discussing the events with respondents at different hierarchical levels of the company.

This study provides examples of knowledge in practice and puts forward a new taxonomy of knowledge gaps which can help managers to deal with imposed and strategic knowledge requirements. Specifically, this study equips managers with tools on how to devise their knowledge strategy, how to identify their knowledge requirements and what are different sources (internal and external) which they can explore to fill those knowledge gaps.

The paper builds on the strategy in practice perspective, which stresses the need for further studies to link theoretical frameworks with practical solutions. In this respect, this paper attempts to make sense of organizational knowledge theory by applying it in real life business situations and by unearthing the concept and usage of knowledge gaps. The use of a retrospective processual approach to study changes in organizational knowledge requirements over time is another interesting aspect of this research. Finally, the paper provides a new taxonomy of organizational knowledge gaps.

The purpose of the paper is to explore how service marketing knowledge is applied in practice. It introduces some ideas about how to bridge the gap between scholarly knowledge and business practices, and thereby opens up the conversation between service marketing scholars and management practitioners.

This qualitative study focusses on four concepts of service marketing (service quality, servicescape, internal marketing and augmented service offering). Knowledge use is studied according to the degree service marketing knowledge is applied at symbolic, conceptual and instrumental levels. Four firms are involved.

Service marketing knowledge was acknowledged within the firms. However, the application of the knowledge in practice was limited, resulting in shortcomings and negative consequences in terms of marketing outcomes. Hence, the knowledge was used mainly symbolically and conceptually, and the instrumental use of the knowledge was limited.

By comparing the current use of knowledge to the levels of knowledge, the findings contribute to the understanding of why shortcomings of knowledge use develop and the study introduces ideas about how to bridge the gap between service marketing knowledge and business practices. Using this approach, the study contributes to the debate on knowledge “translation,” transfer, exchange and sharing between scholars and practitioners.

The study shows how management practitioners could understand and analyze their own practices as they develop their services and customer-oriented practices. It offers insights for scholars who seek to share scholarly knowledge for practical use.

The study contributes to the discussion on the use of scholarly knowledge by focussing on knowledge related to service marketing. Moreover, it focusses on not only the use of service marketing knowledge but also how it is used. By applying the three usage levels, the study recommends systematic means to detect gaps and shortcomings in knowledge use.