Organizational Knowledge: The Texture of Workplace Learning

The book’s intended contribution is encapsulated by the expression which represents its central conceptual pillar: ‘knowing in practice’. This signifies that knowledge is studied as a social process, human and material, aesthetic as well as emotive and ethical, and that knowledge is embedded in practice, as the domain where doing and knowing are one and the same. The concept has a historical precedent of great importance which marks out an emergent strand of analysis centred on what are now known as ‘practice-based studies’. This book aims to show how safety can be interpreted as an organizational practice and how, within it, a researcher can empirically describe how ‘learning’, ‘knowing’ and ‘organizing’ are practised. Practising safety in construction industry is analised as situated action and studied not only in its ‘becoming’ but also in its ‘co-becoming’, together with the context in which it occurs and constitutes an ecology of socio-material relations. The book concern in studying a field of practices is to determine how connection-in-action comes about, how associations are established, maintained and changed among the elements of a partially given form. I have called this connection-in-action ‘texture of practice’, my purpose being to emphasise the qualitative aspect assumed by the connection once the relations have been activated and the weaving together of the relations-in-action has begun.