Making: Knowing: Being

Anna Brown

University of St Andrews

School of Management

Knowing and Practice

• Away from systemic and functional views of organisations (Nicolini et al, 2003)

• Knowing = social activity, connected to doing and emergent from practice (Schatzki, 2003)

• Becoming a knowledgeable practitioner (Lave 2011)

• Ways of practicing as ways of being (Sandberg & Pinnington, 2009; Sandberg & Tsoukas, 2011)

How knowing emerges through a bodily engagement in a relational whole.

Knowing and Being

• Aesthetic nature of knowing: bodily engagement with tools, materials, environs

• Balance & coherence: the influence of institutional arrangements on making

• Finding your voice: reflection of rhythmic nature of making in the process of becoming

References

Carlile, P, Nicolini, D, Langley, A & Tsoukas, H,. (eds.) (2013). How Matter Matters: Objects, Artifacts and Materiality in Organization Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lave, J., (2011). Apprenticeship in Critical Ethnographic Practice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press

Nicolini, D, Gherardi, S, and Yanow, D., (eds.)(2003). Knowing in Organizations, New York: M.E Press.

Sandberg, J. & Pinnington, P., (2009). Professional Competence as Ways of Being: An Existential Ontological Perspective. Journal of Management Studies, 46: 1138–1170.

 

Sandberg,. & Tsoukas, H., (2011). Grasping the Logic of Practical Rationality. Academy of Management Review 36(2): 338-360.

Schatzki, T.R., (2003). A New Societist Social Ontology. Philosophy of the Social Sciences 33(2): 174-202

“… I’ve been making 20 mugs or something and you go into almost a sort of a trance and just…. and you do the same motion and you just go into kind of just autopilot you know like if you go on a really long walk your legs just get wound up and you feel you might never ever stop walking…you can get in into that lovely sort of state of suspended animation just sort of throwing away as hard as you can.”

- Life History Interview

“I think the main thing... is to be able to let yourself grow and learn from what you are doing and I still think that's fascinating. What was I making the other day, something, and I thought, ah! I right I can do x, y and z the next time and the real err, joy of making something that's specifically you've got to do. You do it and think hmm, not quite sure about that. And then just learning by what you're doing and just refining it each time until you get to what you want and there's lots of failures along the way. But you know to keep on learning by what, by through what you are doing. And that what I think really matters.”

– Life History Interview