Composition Forum 49, Summer 2022
http://compositionforum.com/issue/49/

Troubling the Tacit: A Review Essay of Harry Collins’s (2010) Tacit and Explicit Knowledge

Timothy R. Amidon

Abstract: In this review essay, I briefly examine Odell, Goswami, and Herrington’s discussion of tacit knowledge in The Discourse-Based Interview: A Procedure for Exploring the Tacit Knowledge of Writers in Nonacademic Settings, before discussing Collins’s expansive treatment of the concept in Tacit and Explicit Knowledge. In this monograph, Collins delineates three distinct forms of tacit knowledge: relational tacit knowledge (RTK); somatic tacit knowledge (STK); and collective tacit knowledge (CTK). I close by contextualizing Collins’s work alongside of recent research on tacit knowledge in writing studies, considering implications for future research regarding the role these forms of tacit knowledge play within epistemic and communicative activity.

Collins, Harry M. Tacit and Explicit Knowledge. University of Chicago Press, 2010. 186 pp.

Introduction

Just as the 40th anniversary of Lee Odell, Dixie Goswami, and Anne Herrington’s The Discourse-Based Interview occasions an opportunity to reflect on the discourse-based interview’s (DBI) influence on research in writing studies, so too does it provoke a moment to consider how tacit knowledge has evolved as a concept during this period of time. Indeed, tacit knowledge figures prominently within scholarship across writing studies, including rhetoric and composition (e.g., Adler-Kassner et al.; Danielewicz et al.; Robertson et al.), computers and writing (e.g., Cardinal; Alexander; Losh), and technical and professional communication (Moore and Elliot; Spinuzzi; Sauer). Yet, “existing treatments of tacit knowledge,” Harry Collins argues, “are unclear about what is meant by the terms ‘tacit’ and ‘explicit’” (x). In this review essay, then, I briefly look back on Odell, Goswami, and Herrington’s discussion of tacit knowledge in The Discourse-Based Interview, before discussing Collins’s expansive treatment of the concept in Tacit and Explicit Knowledge, including the three distinct forms of tacit knowledge he delineates within the book: relational tacit knowledge (RTK); somatic tacit knowledge (STK); and collective tacit knowledge (CTK). I close by contextualizing Collins’s work alongside of recent research into tacit knowledge in writing studies, considering implications for future research regarding the role these forms of tacit knowledge play within epistemic and communicative activity.

Tacit Knowledge and the Social Turn in Writing Studies

From a historical perspective, The Discourse-Based Interview was published following, as John Trimbur famously put it, “the social turn” in writing studies. That is, as researchers in the field of writing studies sought to investigate writing beyond the academic classroom, they discovered the importance of developing research tools and theories sensitive to the social and political dynamics within epistemic and rhetorical practice in such contexts. The discourse-based interview is significant to this moment for two reasons. First, Odell, Goswami, and Herrington recognized that Michael Polanyi had not only conceptualized tacit knowledge as a form of knowledge that individuals develop through participating within activities of a social collective, but also that Polanyi understood “[tacit] knowledge is characteristic of all activities, whether physical... or mental” and “exists on a number of levels” (221). Second, recognizing the limitations of Flower and Hayes’ “composing-aloud protocols,” which Odell, Goswami, and Herrington describe as “more suitable for eliciting information about global processes, not about specific knowledge and plans applied to familiar tasks” (234), the authors emphasize the potentials that the DBI has for “get[ting] at the tacit knowledge of people who write in nonacademic settings” and “enabl[ing] writers to make explicit the knowledge or strategies that may have been only implicit” (223). Put simply, the authors see the DBI as an approach that helps illuminate how knowledge of a rhetorical situation influences the decisions writers make as they design communication for specific, locally-situated social contexts.

Harry Collins and Contemporary Studies on Tacit Knowledge

Over the past 40 years, the concept of tacit knowledge has continued to receive considerable critical attention, evolving through work in organizational science (e.g., Lam, Embedded Firms and Tacit Knowledge; Nonaka; Baumard), psychology (Wagner; Wagner and Sternberg; Reber, Implicit Learning and Implicit Learning), practice theory (Giddens; Schatzki et al; Turner) and sociology of science (Lynch; Collins; Gerholm). In particular, Harry Collins’s sustained care for the concept across Gravity’s Shadow: The Search for Gravitational Waves, Artificial Experts: Social Knowledge and Intelligent Machines, Rethinking Expertise (co-authored with Robert Evans), as well as highly cited articles The TEA Set: Tacit Knowledge and Scientific Networks, Bicycling on the Moon: Collective Tacit Knowledge and Somatic-Limit Tacit Knowledge, and Tacit Knowledge, Trust, and the Q of Sapphire, has done much to advance the study of tacit knowledge. Today, Collins is widely recognized as a preeminent expert on tacit knowledge, as his monograph Tacit and Explicit Knowledge is perhaps the most expansive deliberation on the ontological and epistemic boundaries of tacit knowledge. According to Collins, the purpose of Tacit and Explicit Knowledge is to not only synthesize his own thoughts surrounding tacit knowledge, but to also “resolve these confusions” with respect to how his framing of the concept resonated with work in other fields. From the beginning, Collins is fiercely unapologetic regarding two central claims about the state of scholarship on tacit knowledge. First, while explicit knowledge and tacit knowledge are conceptually related, scholarship surrounding the concepts had not yet proffered a meaningful distinction between the two. Second, despite widespread recognition that “tacit knowledge” referred to what were clearly a variety of kinds of tacit knowledge, there was little consensus about where the boundaries of one form of tacit knowledge ended and the next began.

To address these issues, then, Collins divides Tacit and Explicit Knowledge into three sections: Part I. Explicit Knowledge; Part II. Tacit Knowledge; and Part III. Looking Backward and Looking Forward. The next section of this essay focuses on Parts II and III, which have the most relevance for researchers investigating tacit knowledge in writing studies. While Part I forwards insights that some scholars in writing studies may find valuable, I found that this section problematically flattened variables surrounding epistemic and communicative activity. Specifically, I found the effort Collins devoted to developing strings—a concept that describes how knowledge can be rendered explicit and transferred under certain conditions—confusing as it was unclear how strings relate to or differ from distinct concepts such as language, symbols, thought, referents, message, and media as articulated in semiotics, rhetorical theory, and media studies (e.g., Ogden and Richards; Berlin; McLuhan).

Collins’s Three Forms of Tacit Knowledge

Arguably, the greatest utility of Tacit and Explicit Knowledge is that Collins revisits an earlier taxonomy for differentiating forms of tacit knowledge he had articulated in “Trust and the Q of Sapphire,” clarifying and reorganizing the previous categories into a three-part taxonomy that consists of relational tacit knowledge (RTK), somatic tacit knowledge (STK), and collective tacit knowledge (CTK). Collins primarily distinguishes between the three forms of tacit knowledge in terms of the difficulty associated with transforming that category of tacit knowledge into knowledge that can be explicitly communicated and transferred human-to-human-to-human. That is, a key factor between tacit and explicit knowledge is that “the explicit... can be conveyed by middle persons or middle things,” whereas “the tacit must involv[e] direct contact” and “is acquired by socialization among parents, teachers, and peers” (87). Table 1 offers an overview of the types of tacit knowledge.

Table 1: Overview of Collins’s taxonomy of tacit knowledge.

Type	Abbreviation	Level	Scope
Relational Tacit Knowledge<	RTK	Weak	Knowledge that could be explicitly articulated but hasn’t been for a variety of reasons.
Somatic Tacit Knowledge	STK	Medium	Knowledge that pertains to the body and embodiment and resists explication.
Collective Tacit Knowledge	CTK	Strong	Knowledge that deals with difference in practice, norms, and values across various situated social and cultural locations.

Weak, or Relational, Tacit Knowledge

For the author, RTK is “weak tacit knowledge” precisely because it “could be made explicit... but is not made explicit” because it “is just a matter of how particular people relate” (86). To clarify what he means by could, Collins outlines eight distinct factors that impact why knowledge cannot be explicated. Thereafter, he outlines subforms of RTK: (1) concealed knowledge, which includes secrets and rituals, (2) ostensible knowledge, which requires the use of an object that a learner can interact with in a guided way in order to transform the tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge that they then possess, (3) mismatched saliences, where one communicator works from an assumption regarding another’s possession “of some essential piece of explicable knowledge” (95), and (4) unrecognized knowledge, which is the kind of knowledge an individual possesses but doesn’t recognize themself as important to the work at hand. Repeatedly within in this section, Collins underscores how these subforms of RTK illustrate that these forms of tacit knowledge are often acquired by learning and working in close proximity to those who possess expertise via apprenticeship models. Ultimately, Collins argues that “[RTK] is tacit because of the contingencies of human relationships, history, tradition and logistics” (98).

Medium, or Somatic, Tacit Knowledge

Whereas RTK deals with human relationships and interactivity, STK fundamentally relates to tacit knowledge that reside within the body. One prescient example of STK that researchers in writing studies and technical and professional communication might be aware of is pit sense, an embodied form of knowledge which miners possess that Beverly Sauer described in The Rhetoric of Risk. Elaborating upon Polyani’s famous example of the kind of tacit knowledge required to ride a bicycle, Collins explains:

When we ride our bikes we do not self-consciously use any physical of mechanical models; somehow, with practice and training, the ability to balance on the bike becomes established in our neural pathways and muscles in ways that we cannot speak about. We do not learn bicycle riding from just being told about it... or reading about it, but from demonstration, guided instruction, and personal contact with others who can ride—the modes of teaching associated with tacit knowledge. That is why we say our knowledge is tacit—we cannot “tell it” but we can have it passed on in ways which involve close contact with those who already have it. (99)

A significant point of differentiation that Collins draws between RTK and STK, then, is that STK is not knowledge that can be rendered explicit. Again, for Collins all forms of tacit knowledge require some level of socialization with those who possess that form of tacit knowledge, but STK is not easily articulable in the same way that RTK is and requires a more significant commitment to the “model of teaching associated with tacit knowledge” (99). Moreover, Collins illustrates how humans might gradually cultivate higher levels of proficiency with respect to a STK by pointing toward Hubert L. Dreyfus and Stuart E. Dreyfus’ description of the stages drivers pass through while developing expertise. Notably, Collins points out that their model illustrates the interplay of “conscious and unconscious processing” in human cognition (103). Of course, scholars familiar with Clay Spinuzzi’s Tracing Genres Through Organizations may see parallels between STK and the notion of operations or operationalized actions, which “begin as conscious, goal-direction actions” and can become “habitual, unconscious [operations]” through the mastery of an action within an activity (pp. 29-36).

Strong, or Collective, Tacit Knowledge

The final category of tacit knowledge that Collins articulates in the monograph is CTK. This strong form of tacit knowledge is the most difficult to acquire, as well as categorically define, because it is an understanding of how to “manage trade-offs and repairs or apply the rules of gamesmanship in a human, social context-sensitive way” (120). Again, Collins returns to the examples of bicycle riding and driving cars, yet focuses not on the interiorized interplay of conscious and unconscious cognition associated with the human-machine interaction, but rather the kinds of unwritten social heuristics that we use when “negotiating traffic” amidst human and non-human actors (121):

Revisiting the Dreyfus brothers’ five-stage model of skill acquisition, it is immediately striking that the step-change between bodily skills and social skills is not discussed. At some stage, “traffic scenarios” enter into the picture in the same way as engine sounds and gear-shifting once entered—just as more of the same. No cognizance is given to the fact that gear-shifting is going to be pretty similar in all countries... while traffic scenarios are something different entirely. (124)

Here there are important aspects in terms of how Collins differentiates between STK and CTK. Foremost, the type of STK we can observe within a human’s interaction with a machine is more generalizable and portable. Once a human has developed this type of tacit knowledge, it is readily retained and adaptable within similar interactions: driving a Jeep with a manual transmission will differ in some ways from driving a Maserati with a manual transmission, but not that markedly that it should impact their ability to carry out the activity. However, as Collins elucidates, CTK deals more with the variances within and between social contexts, because deploying this form of tacit knowledge requires deep enculturation within the practices, processes, and dependencies localized within situated social collectives. That is, Collins’s description of CTK appears to resemble the development of heuristic, rather than algorithmic, frames for navigating “the contingencies and dynamics” of socially situated interactions (Selber 172).

Implications of Collins’s Tacit and Explicit Knowledge

In Part III, Collins circles back to reexamine previous work surrounding tacit knowledge, before considering the implications for future explorations of the subject. In particular, Collins considers the implications of his re-conceptualized taxonomy of tacit knowledge in relationship to the work of Dutta and Weiss, Nonaka and Takeuchi, Baumard, Dreyfus, Polanyi, as well as his previous TEA Laser and Q of Sapphire studies. Across these reorientations, one considerable take away that appears prescient to Collins is the highly intricate ecological interrelationships that explicit and forms of tacit knowledge share when mobilized by humans within technologically and scientifically complex places. As Collins appears to suggest, humans experience, learn, and enact activities in ways that are less sensitive to the kinds of differentiations he’s articulated between explicit and tacit knowledge—as well as the three-forms of tacit knowledge he’s discussed (145-147). The example of bicycle riding, for instance, illustrates that humans are likely to encounter and then mobilize an interdependent web of knowledge types, including explicit knowledge, RTK, STK, and CTK while engaging in this human activity. Moreover, Collins offers a detailed map of the ways that RTK, STK, and CTK interrelate, arguing that ironically that “[the] hard to access regions (CTK and STK) are in fact the regions we live in everyday—the familiar world” (158). From the standpoint of current and future research surrounding tacit knowledge, then, the most enduring legacy of Tacit and Explicit Knowledge will likely be the stable vocabulary and useful taxonomy Collins has offered for differentiating between forms of tacit knowledge.

For myself, I’ve come to see RTK as tacit knowledge that could be articulated yet remains unstated, assumed, and/or unarticulated in activity, STK as the forms of tacit knowledge that surround the dynamics of embodiment and cognition in activity, and CTK as a higher-level, macro-scale form tacit knowledge—perhaps, a heuristic ability to mobilize habitus. Applying Collins’s insights to my previous research into firefighters’ workplace literacies (Amidon), I can see a deeper appreciation for the distinct forms of RTK, STK, and CTK that firefighters mobilize within literacy practices to realize epistemic and communicative aims. Moreover, it seems that there are considerable opportunities to extend the utility of discourse-based interview within workplace literacy research by integrating it into methodologies and digital tools from multimodal and sensory ethnography (e.g., Dicks; Jewitt and Mackley; Hurdley and Dicks; Pink). For instance, I’ve used digital recording tools such as thermal imagers, heat resistant cameras, GoPros, and audio-recorders to capture observational data with firefighters working in live-fire trainings, and to scaffold interviewing about the sense- and knowledge-making, reading, and communication practices that unfold within their work. During one particular observational session, we recorded the activity of a crew and the incident commander as they communicated during a primary search of a structure to locate victims. At the conclusion of the training session, the crew and I held a debrief and viewed the video as a group. At this point, the audio had not yet been lined up with the video, so we were afforded an exclusively visual, spatial, and gestural representation of their movements as they progressed through the rooms on the floor of a structure.

One aspect of their behaviors was immediately prescient—the crew had stopped repeatedly for durations of 5-30 seconds for reasons that were initially unclear. During our debrief, in some senses a discourse-based interview, when the crew was asked to recount their choices and actions, the crew couldn’t explain these pauses in tactical activity. Moreover, their memory of the activity suggested that they had been continually moving and progressing through the search of the floor. It became evident that there were tactical implications associated with the crew pausing the search that needed to be better understood. Afterwards, I lined the audio up with the video to gain a better sense if those data might shed light into the choices the crew had been making as they navigated the structure. It became apparent that the crew had been pausing every time the incident commander keyed the microphone. When we met again to discuss the footage (discourse), the crew stated that they were stopping to listen to the radio traffic because it was too loud to hear if they continued progressing through their task. Yet, they provided additional insights that revealed they were not simply listening, but also mobilizing CTK to co-construct and interpret messages they received, and then co-constructed messages back to the incident commander as they progressed through the search. It appears, then, that the crew was working from CTK in at least two ways. First, they appeared to share a sense of their aim—to successfully complete a thorough search of the entire floor of the building. Second, they recognized, without stating directly in the audio, that the incident commander’s intent in hailing them during this task was to replace them with a fresh set of personnel. In the brief moment that the team convened during the first pause, they not only collectively read the situation but also co-constructed a message that the crew leader was able to relay via the radio to provide the incident commander with confidence that they would successfully complete the task.

Future Directions of Tacit Knowledge in Writing Studies

In closing, the framework that Collins delineates within Tacit and Explicit Knowledge has the potential to advance more nuanced empirical research and discussion about the specific roles distinct forms of tacit knowledge play within human activities, including within the field of writing studies. Despite the fact that Tacit and Explicit Knowledge has been in publication for over a decade, it has received considerably little attention in writing studies. This is surprising, given the prevalence of tacit knowledge as a focus of interest within scholarship across the field. Existing studies of tacit knowledge as it relates to transfer (e.g., Adler-Kassner et al.; Robertson et al.), genre theory (e.g., Spinuzzi; Russell; McNely), and embodiment (e.g., Sauer; Campbell; Fountain; Mckoy) could be advanced in promising ways by extending questions regarding RTK, STK, and CTK as it relates to these topics.

Examples of such questions might include:

• What types of RTK do writing instructors in FYC programs tend to omit or assume students possess in composition programs?

• How do writers and rhetorical communicators negotiate or make use of CTK while weighing the tradeoffs associated with the selection of particular genres or genre-enactments in distinct rhetorical situations?

• What might emerging methods and methodologies such as multimodal and sensory ethnography (Jewitt; Pink), rhetorical circulation (Gries; Edwards; Ridolfo), and/or distant, hyper, and machine reading (Tham and Grace; Hayles; Gallagher) illuminate regarding the roles RTK, STK, and CTK play within rhetorical activity?

Writing studies stands to gain considerable insight by engaging more deeply with the taxonomy of tacit knowledge that Collins has articulated in Tacit and Explicit Knowledge. Moreover, the editors of this special issue are astute in recognizing the potential of the DBI, as it continues to hold place and evolve within writing studies research as a tool for rendering the forms to tacit knowledge visible. For instance, Caroline Dadas’s recent work regarding the use of discourse-based interviewing in job searches also underscores the potential utility that DBI has as a tactic for holding academic and disciplinary institutions accountable to equity and justice in their practices. Her more recent work resonates with a warning Odell, Goswami, and Herrington advanced: “as soon as researchers direct their attention in one direction, they blind themselves, at least temporarily, to information that might be available if they were to look in other direction” (230). That is, researchers, scholars, and educators utilizing the DBI have an ethical imperative to critically consider advantageous moments and consequential implications of rendering visible the various forms of tacit knowledge possessed by individuals and communities that have been historically subject to oppression.

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