Epistemic Communities

Conceptual Overview

Basically, the epistemic community notion refers to the way in which expert groups deal with and operate on knowledge. As discussed by Burkart Holzner and John Marx in 1979, this notion signals a prime interest in the kinds of epistemic criteria that different communities apply and how these interpenetrate with the embedding social and cultural context. The discussion by Peter Haas in 1992 shows how the general EC idea may be further elaborated. For him, an EC is a network of professionals with recognized expertise and competence in a particular domain. Those who belong to such an EC may come from a variety of disciplines, but they should have (1) a shared set of normative and principled beliefs, (2) shared causal beliefs, (3) shared notions of validity, and (4) a common policy enterprise. Haas notices that such a characterization of ECs somewhat resembles Thomas Kuhn's sociological definition of a paradigm. Using the above criteria, it follows that interest groups that lack shared causal beliefs do not belong to the EC category, nor do disciplines or professions that lack those principled values, ethical standards, and common enterprise associated with ECs. To illustrate, he claims that while economists as a whole constitute a discipline or profession, Keynesians may constitute an EC, systematically contributing to a set of projects informed by their views, beliefs, and ideas.

A second highly influential source of inspiration for those who theorize about knowledge work within sciences, disciplines, professions, occupations, or the like, are the writings of Karin Knorr-Cetina. In her 1981 book, she portrays the manufacture of knowledge in scientific laboratories as a highly contextual and [Page 458]socially situated activity, where a multitude of diverse contingencies and interests interplay. Scientific laboratories should therefore be conceived as transscientific fields, mirroring how laboratories are constantly traversed and sustained by social relationships that transcend the site of research. Later, in her 1999 book, Knorr-Cetina introduces the notion of epistemic culture to signify, not the knowledge production per se, but the entire amalgams of arrangements and mechanisms deployed in its production. This brings the great diversity of specific epistemic cultures to the fore and suggests the power of this machinery to reconfigure both objects and scientists into fitting derivative devices.

Within organizational analysis, explicit references to the epistemic community notion appear predominantly in connection with attempts to extend or complement the discourse about the communities of practice. References to the works of Knorr-Cetina are a recurrent feature here. The 2001 article by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid is particularly informative in making a clear distinction between communities of practice, referring to tightly knit groups working in close proximity, and loosely connected epistemic networks of practice, which refers to large occupational or professional groups extending beyond the firm, where members may neither know nor have met each other. By participating in a similar practice, they acquire communal know-how and tacit knowledge, which paves the way for communication and knowledge transfer.

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