| PRACTICE-BASED STUDIES OF KNOWLEDGE AND
INNOVATION IN WORKPLACES
In the last two decades we have witnessed an increasing
interest in the detailed understanding of how activities are carried out in the
workplace and the relation between learning, working, knowing, innovating, and
organizing. The growing interest in the close scrutiny of human activity and
interaction is not limited to work environments but is part of a broader
cultural trend that is focused through one or another of a bundle of
interrelated terms: knowledge, learning, practice, praxis, action, interaction,
activity, experience, performance.
Practice-based studies constitute an effort to employ the
practical wisdom and methodological toolkit of contemporary social science to
address some critical issues of the conception, design and implementation of
innovative ways to support workplace learning, activity and interaction. By
directing our attention to the study and representation of the details of work,
the intricacies of interactional order, the role of language and discursive
practices, and the social nature of competencies, practice-based studies allow
both social scientists and practitioners to deepen their understanding of how
participants use tools and technologies in the emergent production and
co-ordination of social action and activities, and how organizational contexts
and practices give artifacts their situated and determinate sense and usability.
And although a decade of inter-disciplinary collaboration has shown the
difficulty inherent in turning social science into design prescriptions, there
are encouraging signs of the benefits of this line of inquiry.
An advancement of practice-based studies may deepen the
understanding of the meaning and implications of new organizational phenomena
and imperatives - generically referred to as the "knowledge society" - which
seek to highlight the centrality of knowledge in the post-industrial society.
The growing importance of knowledge, the transformation and dematerialization of
"work", the growing relevance of knowing as social capital and the shift of
modes, locus of production and forms of utilization/consumption of knowledge
should be discussed further within organization studies. This requires the
development of new methodological approaches and the identification of new
epistemic objects.
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