How knowledge is acquired?
The approach to knowledge management
in health services has generally been to try and deliver better-researched facts
to clinicians and to try and help them to make good use of such facts. But this
strategy assumes a rational and individualistic approach to knowledge acquisition
that flies in the face of all the evidence about what some have called ‘the social life’
of knowledge – the intricate, convoluted and confusing pathways by which people
in an organization negotiate, adapt and transform new knowledge that is often
far from factual. Maybe, we surmised, clinical knowledge also had a ‘social life’
that could be the key to overcoming the persistent frustrations of evidence-based
practice. The task we set ourselves, therefore, was to look afresh at how clinicians
actually acquire and use their knowledge in practice.
The approach to knowledge management
in health services has generally been to try and deliver better-researched facts
to clinicians and to try and help them to make good use of such facts. But this
strategy assumes a rational and individualistic approach to knowledge acquisition
that flies in the face of all the evidence about what some have called ‘the social life’
of knowledge – the intricate, convoluted and confusing pathways by which people
in an organization negotiate, adapt and transform new knowledge that is often
far from factual. Maybe, we surmised, clinical knowledge also had a ‘social life’
that could be the key to overcoming the persistent frustrations of evidence-based
practice. The task we set ourselves, therefore, was to look afresh at how clinicians
actually acquire and use their knowledge in practice.
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