ABSTRACT
In the literature addressing how various skills, know-how and competencies are mobilized and put into use in organizations, there is surprisingly little emphasis on the use of the five senses, that is, perception in knowledgeintensive work. Knowledge is often assumed to be cognitive and located in the cerebral structure of the brain, and based on a series of propositions, statements of factual conditions of the world that may be applied to cases (Boisot, 1998; Teece, 2000; Bontis, Crossan and Hulland, 2002). In an alternative perspective, knowledge is distributed, fluid and socially embedded (Gherardi, 2001; Tsoukas and Vladimirou, 2001; Tsoukas, 2005; Chia and Holt, 2008) and is the outcome from the combination of a number of human faculties, including the ability to see (Belova, 2006; Edenius and Yakhlef, 2007), listen (Porcello, 2004), touch (Prentice, 2005), taste (Fine, 1996) and smell (Fitzgerald and Ellen, 1999) entities in the social reality and cognitive capacities. In this view, knowledge is not what exclusively resides in cognitive processes but is instead what emerges when a variety of human skills are integrated and combined. For instance, Mody (2005) suggests that scientific procedures in laboratory work are based on the researchers’ and laboratory technicians’ ability to listen to and interpret the sounds of the laboratory equipment to determine whether the technology is operating as intended: [S]ound is an integral (if often overlooked) ingredient in tacit knowledge. Surface scientists carefully manage auditory (as well as visual and haptic) cues to liberate different kinds of information from the experiments’, Mody (2005: 177) suggests. In addition, more specialized professional groups, such as recording-studio technicians and sound engineers use their capacity for hearing and evaluating sounds produced within a an assemblage of technologies as an integral component of their everyday work (Porcello, 2004).
