Symposium – Authoring Epistemic Practices: How Inter/Professional Knowledge is Manufactured

If you want to submit an abstract/paper for this Symposium, click here.

Symposium organizers/facilitators:

Silvia Gherardi, Università di Trento, Italy
Monika Nerland, University of Oslo, Norway
Karen Jensen, University of Oslo, Norway
Terrie Lynn Thompson, University of Stirling, UK

The idea of the Symposium, positioned within the conference programme in two half-day slots, is to accept maximum seven papers/presentations, offering 45’ for each presenter (instead of the 30’ available in the other conference sessions), in order to allow a stronger work/paper development, and to access a deeper level of understanding of the topic “Authoring Epistemic Practices: How Inter/Professional Knowledge is Manufactured”.
In line with the main conference theme, the topic focuses on how practitioners in today’s working life may become actively involved in knowing in practice and in the related forms of knowledgeable doing in ways that both requires and encourages agency. Within this broader theme, the symposium will particularly explore practices related to knowledge generation and knowledge sharing in occupational and professional contexts and across professional boundaries. Authoring a practice is understood as a process of signing the knowledge field discovered and enacted through epistemic practices within a community and at the borders of different communities.
Practitioners’ knowledge is conceived as manufactured and developed through a set of epistemic practices that constitute “how we know what we know” in a given field of expertise (Knorr Cetina 1999; 2007). This concerns ways of identifying or agreeing upon what counts as knowledge or ‘evidence’, the criteria that guide theoretical or methodological choices, how certain ways of knowing are justified, and more generally the ways in which collective knowledge is developed and shared. It also concerns the relationships with objects that emerge in different practices, i.e. the ways practitioners orient to their professional objects and how these may take epistemic functions. Such relationships with objects and artifacts may stimulate the manufacturing of knowledge as well as practitioners’ desire to engage in further investigation (Knorr Cetina 2001; Nerland & Jensen 2014). At the same time the very form of objects and the ways materiality ‘come to matter’ emerge in practice through a set of creative-constructive acts (Gherardi and Perrotta 2013).

The symposium aims at exploring this topic both as an intra- and interprofessional phenomenon. In recent years, a strand of research have emerged within the literature on organisational learning that takes interest in on how the manufacturing of inter/professional knowledge is organised. Researchers have explored the role of epistemic objects in knowledge-generating processes (e.g. Ewenstein and Whyte 2009); the ways different epistemic discourses and practices may create obstacles for inter-professional knowledge production (e.g. Mørk et al. 2008); and the ways in which the construction of shared epistemic objects may facilitate collaboration among practitioners from different fields of expertise (e.g. Edwards 2010; Nicolini et al. 2012). What is needed, however, is in-depth explorations of how practitioners come to participate in the epistemic practices related to their work, how they through this also become active contributors in the manufacturing of inter/professional knowledge, how conflict and power dynamic hamper cross professional coordination.
We welcome substantial papers that provide a deeper understanding of these phenomena in occupational and professional contexts and contribute to the further exploration of what Knorr Cetina (1999) has described as efforts to “make visible the complex texture of knowledge as practiced in the deep social spaces of modern institutions”.

Characteristics of the symposium:
- High selectivity of papers: acceptance of promising themes/papers with a clear focus;
- Paper discussed at length: 45’ minutes for exploring the topic, with time divided between work presentation (20’) plus 5’ with discussant and 20’ of plenary work discussion;
- Everybody is invited to read all the papers in depth before the symposium
- The symposium facilitators will send questions in advance to increase the level of discussion of the presentations.

References:

Edwards, A. (2010). Being an expert professional practitioner: The relational turn in expertise. Dordrecht: Springer.
Ewenstein, B. and J. Whyte. (2009). Knowledge practices in design: The role of visual representations as ‘epistemic objects’. Organization Studies, 30(1), 7-30.
Knorr Cetina, K. (1999). Epistemic cultures. How the sciences produce knowledge. Harvard University Press
Knorr Cetina, K. (2001). Objectual Practice. In T. Schatzki, K. Knorr Cetina, E. von Savigny (Eds), The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory (pp. 175-188). London: Routledge.
Knorr Cetina, K. (2007). Culture in global knowledge societies: Knowledge cultures and epistemic cultures. Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 32(4), 361-375.
Mørk, B.E., Aanestad, M., Hanseth, O. & Grisot, M. (2008). Conflicting epistemic cultures and obstacles for learning across communities of practice. Knowledge and Process Management, 15(1), 12–23.
Nerland, M. & Jensen, K. (2014) Changing Cultures of Knowledge and Professional Learning. International Handbook of Research in Professional and Practice-based Learning, edited by S. Billett, C. Harteis and H. Gruber. Dordrecht: Springer.
Nicolini, D. Mengis, J. and Swan, J., Understanding the role of objects in multidisciplinary collaboration. Organization Science, 23: 612-629.
Gherardi, S., Perrotta, M. (2013) Doing by inventing the way of doing: Formativeness as the linkage of meaning and matter, in P. Carlile, D. Nicolini, A. Langley, H. and Tsouchas (eds), How Matter Matters: Objects, Artifacts and Materiality in Organization Studies, OXFORD: Oxford University Press.