A Companion to the Philosophy of Technology

Explicit Knowledge and Tacit Knowledge

Knowledge is increasingly being recognized as a vital organizational resource that gives market leverage and competitive advantage (Nonaka and Takeuchi 1995; Leonard-Barton 1995). In particular, knowledge has become a substance to be “managed” in its most literal sense. Polanyi (1967) considered human knowledge by starting from the fact that we know more than we can tell. In general, knowledge consists of two components, namely explicit and tacit. Technical knowledge consists of these two components, “explicit” and “tacit”; however, the greater the extent to which a technology exists in the form of the softer, less physical resources, the greater the proportion of tacit knowledge it contains. Tacit knowledge, owing to its non-codifiable nature, has to be transferred through “intimate human interactions” (Tsang 1997). In the meantime, it has to be recognized that tacit knowledge is the key to delivering the most competitive advantage, and it is this part that competitors have difficulties in replicating. Tacit knowledge transfer is often intentionally blocked because people understand the significance of tacit knowledge.

Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995) describe some distinctions between tacit and explicit knowledge, which are shown in Table 2.1. Features generally associated with the more tacit aspects of knowledge are shown on the left, while the corresponding qualities related to explicit knowledge are shown on the right. Knowledge of experience ...