CREATING KNOWLEDGE WITH AND FROM THE DIFFERENCES: THE REQUIRED DIALOGICALITY AND DIALOGICAL COMPETENCES

Abstract

The main purpose of the current conceptual article is to contribute to theorizing tacit knowledge creation (tacit knowing or knowing), by investigating its primary, foundational, and underlying condition: dialogicality. Drawing from dialogism – an epistemological and ontological framework – and the epistemology of practice, key concepts and approaches were intersected to explain dialogicality in knowing and the competences for crafting and refining it. As the emphasis on knowledge creation in organizational settings has often been on the need of interacting with other individuals to create knowledge – the more the better – the current study centres on a qualitative aspect of such knowing. There has been a de-skilling in creating knowledge with different experts and from their different experiences, and dialogicality is critical to help harnessing the generative and transformative power of such differences in knowing. Moreover, theorizing ‘dialogic’ or ‘dialogical’ knowing has been mostly based on cognitive and structural approaches and transmission models of knowledge communication, and such phenomenon has been limitedly understood in concrete and empirical sense, as knowing by means of face-to-face interactions through talk, verbal interactions with turn-takings, and ‘ideal dialogues’. It is argued the need to go beyond the idea of knowing-through-dialogue to knowing-through-dialogicality. It is claimed that it is not any dialogue that enables knowing with different experts and from their different experiences; such knowing-dialogue needs to be dialogically understood and conceived and for such, dialogicality is a central condition. Based on dialogism, the dialogicality in knowing is explained and four dialogical competences that help crafting and refining such dialogicality are suggested. The study extends and deepens the understanding and role of dialogicality in creating knowledge with and from the differences by analysing its epistemological, meta-theoretical, and ontological assumptions and by proposing its formative competences.