O tácito como conhecimento e seu modo de uso no labirinto organizacional contemporâneo

Abstract

Ethnographic study including immersion into an average size organization, with headquarters in Minas Gerais, in the Information Technology field, in order to identify related distinctions in the tacit knowledge and its use in the work context. The research carried out sought to collect data, to formulate provisional theories, creating new meanings, exploring the tensions between the individual and group knowledge, between intuition, common sense and the organizational learning, issues inscribed in the Information Sciences field, regarding the arena for creating internal meanings in the organizations, from the varied information, from the inside and outside environment. The Research involved documents analysis, interviews and field observation, in a perspective of methodological triangulation. First, in the search for understanding the environment where the tacit knowledge was presented in the way it is named in documents, then the way the participants themselves see their day-to-day activities in that environment, describe it, and are guided in it so as to carry out their daily activities characterized as practices. The use of the ethnographic approach has required that the field observer sought to be guided through what is going to be learned in the contacts, talks and intimacy and, from there on to create categories that would be recognized and acceptable by the native locals, instead of using pre-set concepts and categories, created in other artificial environments. From the documents analysis, categories have arisen related to the company practices, rules, meanings. These categories were considered settings or loci, where the tacit knowledge is: 1) Uniqueness / singularity; 2) Business Model; 3) Cycles / company history; 4) Enjoyment, joy, fun; 5) Hierarchy and profit; 6) Learning and share. The categories were deemed to belong in distinct knowledge poles, the first three ones being from the business internal nature, conclusion that leads to the core of recent researches carried out in strategic administration, in the so called Company Vision Based in the Knowledge, that takes knowledge as the primary strategic asset within an organization. The three ultimate ones linked to the externality, which favors rather than found the business existence and are inscribed in the discussion about HR policies, linked to the capacitance context. Thesecategories, when compared, are seen within the company as antagonists, propositions that achieve opposing conclusions, among which the company should make choices. From a comprehensive perspective, we see these apparent dilemmas resolution tendency as though they were a problem and, therefore, liable to reach a final solution. The mechanicist paradigm often avoids the tension and conciliation between control and freedom, stability and change, cohesion and diversity, so common in the contemporary organizations and found in thecompany under study. The option frequently exaggerated by the register, by the rules, leads to the existing tacit knowledge asphyxia and impoverishment. However, there are possible conciliations in the stimulus and cultivation of the practice communities and also in the widened use of hyper textual languages, as found in the wikipedia, solutions that refer to the complexity concept and escape from the simplifying contemporary visions.