RICERCA ITALIANA     

The communication of knowledge.
Ethnography of knowledge in diverse institutional and organizational settings

Università degli Studi di Trento

Abstract

The objective of the research programme is to study forms of knowledge communication in certain institutional and organizational contexts. For a number of years, the members of the research group have worked on communication processes in various organizational and institutional settings: public prosecutors' offices; health facilities like large hospitals and emergency operations centres; schools; and businesses. The aim of the project is to study in action, in the everyday processes of work, certain aspects of the culture of professions which concern fundamental spheres of social life and disciplinary fields of knowledge, such as the law, health care, education, and business. Considered in particular, within a broadly comparative framework, will be three aspects of the communication of knowledge and expertise: 1. the socialization of knowledge, i.e. the ways in which specific knowledge and competences are transmitted and diffused; 2. the relationship among different knowledges, i.e. the ways in which different bodies of knowledge are combined in organizational and institutional settings comprising hybrid solutions to the problems that arise in those settings; 3. knowledge in practice, i.e. all the forms of knowledge that are not necessarily conceptual and propositional but tacit and hidden, and upon which rests the effective action of the members of professional communities analysed. In order to study these phenomena, the various research units will use broadly ethnographic >>>

Principal Investigator

Giolo FELE Università degli Studi di TRENTO

Research Objectives

The objective of the research project is to study forms of knowledge communication in certain institutional and organizational settings.

For a number of years, the members of the research group have worked on communication processes in various organizational and institutional settings: public prosecutors' offices; health facilities like large hospitals and emergency operations centres; large educational institutes like schools; companies and businesses. These various organizational and institutional settings embody forms of knowledge which concern fundamental spheres of social life and disciplinary fields of knowledge such as the law, medicine, education and business.

The aim of the present project is to link our long-standing interest in communication processes with the forms of knowledge typical of these organizational and institutional settings. The intention is to provide an empirical foundation for the classical tenet of the sociology of knowledge, which states that in all the contexts of social life, not only of everyday routine but also of organizational or institutional contexts, knowledge performs a crucial role in structuring social relationships.

Our approach enables empirical analysis of the contents and forms that knowledge assumes in specific organizational and institutional settings which we may call "epistemic communities and cultures" (Coulter, 1991; Knorr Cetina, 1999). Our concern is to study, not the sphere of >>>

First Results

All the units aim to achieve three main objectives by the end of the first phase of research. Firstly, the survey of the most recent literature in the various research areas will have been completed, with particular attention being paid to publications which deal directly with ethnographic approaches to the communication of knowledge. Secondly, the preliminary version of the research instruments will have been prepared, with particular attention to methodological aspects and the combination of ethnographic techniques with those of text, discourse and conversation analysis. Thirdly, the units will have completed the negotiations on access, which should permit first contacts with the research field for the purpose of an exploratory ethnography and a methodology test.At the end of the second phase the individual units in the research groups expect to have concluded negotiations with the organizations and institutions concerned. At the same time they expect to have used the results of the first wave of research to define the protocols, which may be supplemented according to requirements arising from the fieldwork.Collation of ethnographic notes, transcription of the unstructured interviews, video recordings, audio recordings, photographs, etc.: all the material constituted by the data collected by the researchers. Moreover, collation of all the administrative, bureaucratic, organizational materials produced in the settings analysed by the various research units.Final research >>>

Timescale

24 months

National and international background

For some time the sociology of knowledge has been revitalized by studies which have shed light on aspects and methodologies that profoundly innovate the classic issues addressed in the field. The ‘new sociology of knowledge' (Steher e Meja 1984; Coulter 1989; Swidler and Arditi 1994; Gibbons M. et al. 1994; Doyle McCarthy 1996; Knorr-Cetina 1999; Meja and Stehr 1999; Camic and Gross 2000) has shifted attention from the role of the social position of individuals and groups in explaining the distribution and structuring of knowledge to the culture and knowledge that permeate social organizations and everyday life. This is a new, amply interdisciplinary, terrain of analysis, and contributing to it are sociologists, anthropologists, and historians of culture, religion, science, and technology. There is, in fact, no real shared terrain of research, but rather common themes and sensibilities created on the basis of sometimes highly diverse empirical inquiries.

This new sociology of knowledge has also developed as a result of profound transformations in modern society brought about by the development of information systems and network resources. Numerous authors have stressed that an increase in individual choices, emancipation from ready-made solutions, constant choice opportunities, the need to be informed and participate directly in collective decision-making processes, are some of the features of modern (or post-modern) society. Whence derives the label >>>