Docta Ignorantia: professional knowing at the core and at the margin of a practice

The expression ‘knowing-in-practice’ focuses on practical reasoning and organizing that takes place is working practices. An empirical analysis of the practice of cardiological teleconsultation allows to illustrate the characteristics of knowing-in-practice and how organizing is discursively accomplished. The article illustrate how professional knowing-in-practice has an opaque dimension which is explored in terms of docta ignorantia (Bourdieu, 1990), that is, a mode of practical knowledge unaware of its own principles that accommodates a full range of sociomaterial resources and interactional forms according to the logic of the practice at hand. The concepts of ‘generative model’ and ‘economy of logic’ are employed in order to analyze how professionals rely on ‘docta ignorantia’ to accomplish the practice in which they are involved. The generative model of the practice of teleconsultation distinguish between activities at the core of the practice (mobilizing professional authority and jurisdiction; performing accountability on professional, legal and bureaucratic bases; enacting a diagnostic community) and activities at the margins of the same practice (learning, theorizing in practice, performing of a professional self and of a community of professionals). While the former activities are oriented towards the formation of the object of practice, the latter are oriented to the reproduction of the practice itself.