Tacit Knowledge

Tacit Knowledge and Qualitative Research

In the final quarter of the 20th century, certain advocates for using qualitative methods in social science research employed Polanyi's tacit knowledge construct to help make their case. In particular, they used the construct to argue that a perceived problem with qualitative research was, in fact, an asset. Transforming perceived liabilities into assets is a classic marketing strategy, of course. The slogan, “With a name like Smuckers, it has to be good,” is an example of the marketing field's use of the strategy. Here, the markets have taken a name that could be seen as a liability and have turned it into an asset by creating a slogan that makes the name synonymous with “goodness.”

For academics, the problem of “marketing” qualitative methods to skeptical social science communities in the final quarter of the 20th century was not in a name. Rather, the problem was that qualitative researchers' emergent designs and their normally informal research strategies (e.g., participant observation, the researcher as instrument, conversational interviewing) were highly subjective, and traditional social scientists—who had been socialized to use supposedly objective procedures in the interest of minimizing error—viewed open-ended designs and subjective methods as problematic.

Qualitative researchers at times referenced Polanyi's notion of tacit knowledge to transform this perceived problem into a solution for a different problem that even many traditional social scientists had begun to recognize.

That problem was the complexity of social phenomena. Traditional researchers had become aware of the complexity problem when their traditional approaches to research failed to provide the sort of generalizable knowledge that traditional researchers had expected—and had promised—to produce. In the early 1970s, for example, evaluators who employed experimental and control groups to assess the effectiveness of programs began to understand that their a priori lists of independent and intervening variables did not capture a host of interaction effects and that their predefined dependent variables sometimes were less important than the unintended outcomes a program produced (and that their a priori designs, of course, did not address).

Qualitative research advocates argued that the complexity of social phenomena requires that researchers employ open-ended research designs and use research methods that allowed researchers to tap their tacit knowledge. Tacit knowledge, in other words, is needed to make sense of a level of complexity that prespecified designs and standardized—that is, quantitative researchers' so-called objective—methods will never be able to accommodate.

Minimizing and Managing Subjectivity

Of course, there is still a potential downside to relying on knowledge that is tacit and, hence, unavailable for public scrutiny and critique. Thus, qualitative researchers developed a number of procedures—for example, member checking, various forms of triangulation, peer debriefing, and audits—to move qualitative researchers' findings and interpretations beyond the tacit and subjective levels. In addition, a seminal article by Alan Peshkin, “In Search of Subjectivity—One's Own,” suggested ways to manage one's subjectivity so it contributed to rather than interfered with a study's validity.

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