Narrative and Social Tacit Knowledge
*
Charlotte Linde
Abstract: This paper discusses the role of narrative in the expression and
transmission of social knowledge as a specific type of tacit knowledge.
Narrative is a central mechanism by which social knowledge is conveyed.
Narrative provides a bridge between the tacit and the explicit, allowing tacit
social knowledge to be demonstrated and learned, without the need to
propositionalize it. Institutions can best maintain their stock of stories by
providing occasions on which they can be told. Archival systems such as data
bases, lessons learned systems, and video records are less effective, particularly
when they attempt to store records or transcripts of oral stories. However, they
can be improved by attention to key design dimensions, including appropriate
allocation of the effort required from system administrators and users, and
attention to translation between genres.
Keywords: Narrative, institutional memory, tacit knowledge, social knowledge,
lessons learned systems, genre, knowledge management
This study analyses the central role of narrative in the expression and
transmission of a specific form of tacit knowledge which I term social
knowledge. Examples for the discussion of narrative in institutions is drawn
from a study of a seventy year old American insurance company, which I shall
call MidWest Insurance. My colleagues and I carried out a three year
ethnographic study, which included observations of the training and work of
insurance sales agents and their offices, as well as observations of ongoing
training programs, sales conventions, regional meetings, special task forces and
corporate meetings. MidWest Insurance initially commissioned the Institute for
Research on Learning to address questions about agents’ learning and their sales
practices, and to assess the success of its new training program for agents.
TACIT SOCIAL KNOWLEDGE
The term tacit knowledge is conventionally opposed to explicit knowledge, and
is used to describe knowledge which cannot be explicitly represented. Clearly
this covers a very broad range of meanings. Common examples of tacit
knowledge include the knowledge of how to ride a bicycle, how to knead bread,
how to use a word processor ((Polanyi, 1958), (Nonaka, 1995) (Goguen, 1997)).
However, when the notion of tacit knowledge is used within the field of
knowledge management, it is frequently used to describe any form of non-
*
In Journal of Knowledge Management, Special Issue on Tacit Knowledge Exchange
and Active Learning, 5 (2), 2001.
2
quantifiable knowledge, particularly the knowledge about social interactions,
social practices, and most generally, how a group or an institution gets things
done. This type of knowledge is considered particularly problematic for
knowledge management, because it is difficult to represent as propositions or
rules. At the same time, such knowledge is not unspeakable: it is commonly and
easily conveyed by narrative, although narrative exemplifies rather than
exhaustively describes such knowledge.
I suggest the following taxonomy of types of tacit knowledge, focussing on tacit
social knowledge. Distinguishing social knowledge as a distinct subtype of tacit
knowledge increases the precision of the discussion, since social knowledge is
maintained and transmitted in very different ways than physical knowledge. In
particular, aim of this paper is to examine the relation of narrative and tacit
knowledge, and it is most particularly social knowledge which narrative is suited
to convey. In addition, I include only types of social knowledge which are
directly related to the problems normally addressed by knowledge management.
However, I do not intend to claim that these are the only types of tacit
knowledge. There are obviously many forms of tacit knowledge not included
here, such as knowledge about emotions, aesthetic knowledge, ethical and
spiritual knowledge, etc..
Types of Knowledge
Explicit
Knowledge
Language
Individual
Identity
Membership
Practice
Work
Practice
Individual
Knowledge
Work
Practice
Identity
Practice
Membership
Practice
Group
Knowledge
Social
Knowledge
Physical
Knowledge
Other
Knowledge
Tacit
Knowledge
Types of Knowledge
This taxonomy focuses on two kinds of social knowledge: knowledge about
social groups held by an individual, and knowledge held by the group itself.
Individual social knowledge includes knowledge about what the identity of the
group is, what it means to be a member, and how to be a member. This is the
kind of knowledge which is most frequently and best conveyed through
3
narrative, and narrative induction: the process by which newcomers to the
group learns to take on the story as their own. That is, part of becoming a
member of an institution involves learning the stories about that institution
which everyone must know, the appropriate times and reasons to tell them, and
the ways in which ones own stories are shaped to fit a new institutional context.
Of individual tacit knowledge, language is perhaps the most tacit form of tacit
knowledge: one knows how to speak, but can not articulate how one does it, or
the rules which govern language use. (Except of course for linguists, whose
professional activity lies exactly in attempting to make explicit these tacit
regularities.) Part of the knowledge of language includes knowledge of
discourse forms: how and when to tell a story. Knowledge about identity, who
one is and what one’s history has been, is a very important part of an
individual’s tacit knowledge. (Linde, 1993) describes the ways in which people
use narrative to construct these identities. Knowledge about one’s identity as a
group member, and the practice of acting as a member of the groups one belongs
to is also easily expressed in narrative. Knowledge about work practice, how one
does one’s job is also tacit, and can, under certain circumstances described below,
be conveyed by narrative.
The second kind of social knowledge is knowledge which is held by the group
or institution itself. Some social knowledge is explicit knowledge, for example,
the knowledge expressed in forms, formal procedures, file cabinets, and data
bases. However, in addition to procedures, there is also tacit knowledge which
manifests as work practices, as well as the knowledge about how and when to
use these knowledge resources. (See (Brown, 2000), particularly Chapter 4, for a
discussion of the difference between process and practice.) This kind of
knowledge is held by institution as a whole rather than of the individuals who
comprise it. For example, in a large, bureaucratically organised institution, there
may be a set of procedures for arranging business travel and obtaining
reimbursements, and this set of procedures may be represented somewhere in
the organisation. However, it is entirely possible that no one person understands
the entire practice: the traveller may know how to get reimbursed,
administrative staff may know how to process requests, people in the accounting
department may know how to pay or deny reimbursements. Yet none of the
people who deal with part of the process have a clear picture of the entire
process. Such processes are knowledge held by the entire institution, not by any
given member. Other types of group tacit social knowledge include the ways
that teams and groups work together, how decisions are made, how
communications flow. For example two organisations may have nearly identical
organisation charts. Yet in one, it is appropriate and may even be encouraged for
a worker to raise an issue to someone many levels above her in the organisation,
while in another organisation, such a communication would be viewed as
insubordination if not treachery.
Knowledge about the identity of an institution and the proper ways to be a
member are very easily conveyed to new members by narrative, although it is
almost impossible to represent such knowledge explicitly. A familiar example of
failed attempts to make this kind of social knowledge explicit can be found in the
4
phenomenon of corporate mission statements and value statements. These are an
attempt to convey the essence of an organisation to the outside world, and to
socialise new members into the practices of the organisation, an issue which
becomes of ever-increasing concern in a time of extremely high labour turn-over.
Such mission and value statements are almost invariably vacuous failures.
Partially this is because they are written by a committee process which usually
makes any mission or values statement sound like any other: Microsoft’s values
become indistinguishable from Xerox’s or Coca-Cola’s. But more essentially,
mission and values statements are doomed to failure because they attempt to
state explicitly kinds of knowledge which are best conveyed indirectly, through
example, and particularly through stories: the knowledge about what it is like to
work at a particular organisation, and what kinds of behaviour are expected,
required, or condemned there. MidWest Insurance conveys its values through
repeated stories of its history, and the life and character of its founder. The story
of the founder is known to everyone at MidWest, and is used by many managers
and agents to explain their own history and values. The story includes the
following points:
• The founder was charismatic, a hard worker, a brilliant salesman, and an
honest man, who had a new vision for insurance sales: the idea that farmers
of good moral character should be charged lower rates for auto insurance,
since they ran lower risks than city drivers, and an exclusive relation between
the company and its sales agents.
• The American rural and small town origins of the founder and of the
company, which still shape its values. This point is still passionately held,
even by company members who have spent their entire lives in large cities.
• The development of the company from selling auto insurance to a full service
company offering fire, life and health insurance as well, presented as an ever-
growing commercial and ethical success.
• The idea that the company is a family, and represents family values.
The story of MidWest’s origin and growth gives a coherent account of the
company’s identity and values. For a member to know this story means to know
what the institution is, and how that member must act in order to be a part of it.
(See (Linde, 1998) for a detailed linguistic analysis of a story the founder.)
WHAT IS NARRATIVE?
A narrative is a representation of past events in any medium: narratives can be
oral, written, filmed or drawn. In this discussion, I will mainly focus on oral
stories, since these are extremely important and nearly unrecognised in every
form of social institution from the informal group to the most formal
organisation.
5
Stories provide a bridge between the tacit and the explicit, allowing tacit social
knowledge to be demonstrated and learned, without the need to propositionalize
ethics, specify in detail appropriate behaviour, or demonstrate why particular
heroes of the past are relevant today. The reason for this is that stories do not
only recount past events. They also convey the speaker’s moral attitude towards
these events: the protagonist of the story acted well, acted badly, is to be praised
or blamed, can be taken as a model for the hearer’s own behaviour. These
evaluations are sometimes explicitly stated within the story, but more often are
suggested through the use of a single word or phrase. Indeed, it has been argued
in the study of oral stories, that the most effect stories are those in which the
evaluation is the least explicit. ((Labov, 1972) ) This argument is the equivalent
of the familiar advice to novelists: Show, don’t tell.
Further, telling oral stories is a group process. The hearers are usually not
passive consumers. Rather, they may agree, or disagree, or modify not only the
speaker’s account of what happened, but also what it meant. ((Linde, 1993),
(Polanyi, 1989), (Goodwin, 1986)) Even within a formal organisational context,
for example an annual meeting of a corporation, although listeners may have no
opportunity to dispute publicly the CEO’s account of what happened to the
company and the meaning of these events, they certainly have the choice of
whether to agree with the account and retell it, to mock it among their peers, or
to ignore it as just one more piece of corporate rah-rah. It is this participatory
process which makes stories particularly effective as a way of transmitting social
knowledge, because the hearer comes to participate in the construction of the
story, and thus comes to have a stake in it.
Part of becoming a member of any institution, formal or informal, is learning to
tell the stories of that institution, and learning to tell one’s own stories in a way
coherent with those of that group. Part of what one needs to know to be a
member is what the stories of the group are, what events in the past are judged
to have relevance to the present, what values the stories exemplify, and when it
is appropriate to tell them. This is one very important way that people actually
take on the values of the institution as their own (Linde, 2000). As part of the
work of inducting new agents, inspiring existing agents, and representing itself
to the public, MidWest Insurance works its past intensely, and much of that
work is done by oral narrative. Agents tell stories about their early days, and the
course of building their business. Managers tell stories about their own career,
about the careers of exemplary agents, and about changes in the company. And
everyone tells stories about the founder of the company. These narratives form a
tightly linked system of first person and third person narratives, which convey
both the history and the values of the company, at a national, regional and local
level.
Thus, agents and managers at MidWest tell their own stories in a way that
mirrors the values exemplified in the story of the founder. For example,
entrepreneurship is always cited as a major virtue of the founder, and agents
(who are contractors rather than employees) describe the building of their own
agencies as the activity of independent business owners, who are willing to take
the risk of basing their own income only on the business they can bring in, rather
