Codifying Social Practices

History and Challenges of Codifying of Social Practices

The codification of social practices begins with writing. According to Jack Goody, this operation expresses broadly a society's will to make up for the weaknesses and uncertainties of human memory with the aim of storing knowledge, perceived as a learning program. But writing also has cognitive effects on society, by developing abstraction capacities and the critical function, which play a specific role in encouraging new knowledge production. This operation takes on a particular value today, according to Dominique Foray, in relation to the emergence of a knowledge-based economy. In effect, the key factors for the success of companies and national economies are more than ever dependent on their capacities to produce and use knowledge. Since the main source of this knowledge is tacit, the problem of codification becomes vital in economic terms. In effect, codification makes it possible to detach knowledge from the person who possesses it. It involves a fixed cost—that of expressing the knowledge in a language and recording it on some form of support (e.g., paper, databases)—but then increases the efficiency of a whole series of knowledge management operations: memorization, distribution, learning. Once a formula has been written, which may represent a significant fixed cost, it may then be communicated broadly at a negligible marginal cost. In the management field, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi have identified a key stage in the spiral of organizational knowledge creation, the spearhead of Japanese company performance: the stage known as externalization. It consists of the passage from tacit knowing to explicit knowledge. The codification of tacit knowing has become a challenge for both economists and managers—even as it is for researchers. It is a complex operation, due to the very nature of tacit knowing, which still seems impossible to reduce to a codification operation. In addition, the codification process can never supply all the knowledge necessary to undertake an action.

In pragmatic terms, companies that have undertaken knowledge management have found this problem a stumbling block at some point in the process. It arises in different ways, depending on the strategy implemented. Morten T. Hansen, Nitin Nohria, and Thomas Tierney have identified two key ways of envisaging knowledge management by organizations: Organizations operate with two different knowledge management strategies, namely a codification strategy where knowledge is [Page 152]codified and stored in databases, and a personalization strategy where personal interaction is essential. These two forms of knowledge management reflect different visions of the organization—on one side, the paradigm of Herbert Simon's information processing system; and on the other, the community of practice of Jean Lave and Etienne C. Wenger. On one side there is a cognitivist vision, in information system terms, of knowledge management: It is the image of a physical platform for storage of information; on the other is a communitarist vision, in terms of management of human resources, of knowledge management: It is the image of the social network. The codification operation is as essential to the first strategy as it is negligible or even nonexistent in the second. Rather than completely contrasting these two forms of management, many authors try to combine them. We may well ask whether we are not actually in the presence of two sociotechnical configurations, as defined by Bruno Latour, that we must describe effectively: What is a data warehouse without the people who use it? What is a social network that operates without any physical support? The operation of codification takes different forms, depending on the sociotechnical pairing modes applied. Subsequently, we can envisage within a community of practice where there is mentoring between an expert and a novice, which is based, at a given moment in time, on the expert's expression of his practice, taking the form of a written discourse that the novice will use as a support within the framework of his learning. To tackle the question of codification from a methodological point of view, we must examine the nature of tacit knowing.

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