What is knowledge?

I spoke to a uni­ver­sity stu­dent the other day who was hav­ing trou­ble under­stand­ing dif­fer­ent types of knowl­edge, for exam­ple tacit, explicit, organ­i­sa­tional or social. I tried to explain it this way:

I know there seems to be a dif­fer­ence between the text books, and other lit­er­a­ture, I’ll try and explain the dif­fer­ence. This also may be lengthy, but I think this is an impor­tant dis­tinc­tion to under­stand to grasp some of the lit­er­a­ture.
I under­stand tacit and explicit knowl­edge to be types of knowl­edge gen­er­ally. That is to say, if know­ing is a human trait, knowl­edge is the human act of using infor­ma­tion. There­fore, explicit knowl­edge is basi­cally infor­ma­tion stored or explic­itly avail­able. Con­trast that with tacit, or implicit knowl­edge, the things you “know” but are not writ­ten or recorded. Tacit knowedge can build on and com­ple­ment explicit knowl­edge. For exam­ple, if you write down a process, say how to cre­ate a prod­uct, that writ­ten process becomes explicit knowl­edge. How­ever, within your knowl­edge are aspects of that process that give it con­text, why you are mak­ing the prod­uct, what envi­ron­ment the prod­uct oper­ates in and other such things.

Con­trast the gen­er­al­i­ties of tacit and explicit knowl­edge with human social and struc­tural knowl­edge. Don’t think of those as dif­fer­ent dis­tinct types, rather dif­fer­ent ways of refer­ring to the same things. It’s rather like Robert Katz man­age­r­ial skills ver­sus Henry Mintzbergs man­age­r­ial roles, dif­fer­ent ways to describe the way things exist and operate.

Human knowl­edge refers to things you know, or things you can do, thus the human aspect. Social knowl­edge refers to knowl­edge that is present in social net­works (in the clas­si­cal, non-facebook sense), such as dis­cus­sions, infor­mal chats, net­work­ing and rela­tion­ships. Struc­tured knowl­edge is also called organ­i­sa­tional knowl­edge, which refers to the knowl­edge that is stored or retained in struc­tured way, like processes, man­u­als, wikis, doc­u­men­ta­tion and so forth.

I think the key to know­ing what types of knowl­edge exist is to under­stand that nobody can define knowl­edge pre­cisely. There is no way to “chop up” knowl­edge into par­tic­u­lar bits. There are only ways that we can cat­e­gorise knowl­edge, and these vary from per­son to per­son, and organ­i­sa­tion to organisation.

Part of the rea­son organ­i­sa­tions have trou­ble with knowl­edge man­age­ment is that they do not under­stand dis­tinc­tions between, and pos­si­ble types of knowl­edge. Lump­ing it all in one bas­ket doesn’t work.

If you are inter­ested in knowl­edge, an inter­est­ing arti­cle, if only for it’s descrip­tion of human, social and organ­i­sa­tional knowl­edge is:
Lopez-Cabrales, A., Pérez-Luño, A., & Cabr­era, R. V. (2009). Knowl­edge as a medi­a­tor between HRM prac­tices and inno­v­a­tive activ­ity. Human Resource Man­age­ment, 48(4), 485–503.