Call for Papers

Indeed, as the title of the forthcoming 41^st EGOS Colloquium in Athens has it, creativity goes a long way, provided, however, that we see creativity not as a technique but as epistemology. As pragmatist and process philosophers have long argued, novelty is embedded even in the most mundane activities. The knowledge people act upon when undertaking skilled action at the workplace, even when basic or non-complex skills are used, is always in the making, situated in particular contexts, involving mind and body, and the use of tools. To use knowledge is to exercise judgment.
 
The distinction between data, information, and knowledge has often been made. For Bell (1999: lxi–lxiv), data is an ordered sequence of given items or events; information is a context-based arrangement of items whereby relations between them are shown; and knowledge is the judgement of the significance of events and items which come from a particular context and/or theory. Drawing on Dewey’s (1934) conception of aesthetic experience, Bell (1999: lxiv) further argues that ‘judgement arises from the self-conscious use of the prefix re: the desire to re-order, to re-arrange, to re-design what one knows and thus create new angles of vision or new knowledge for scientific or aesthetic purposes’. As Tsoukas and Vladimirou (2001: 121) have noted, “the self-conscious desire to rearrange what one knows implies that the individual wishes to see things differently, to disclose aspects of a phenomenon that were hitherto invisible, or simply to see more clearly than before”.
 
The exercise of judgment involves two things. First, the individual’s ability to draw distinctions and, second, the embeddedness of an individual within a collective domain of action - a “form of life” (Wittgenstein, 1958) a “practice” (MacIntyre, 2007; Nicolini, 2011), or a “horizon of meaning” (Gadamer, 1989). On this view, organizational knowledge (O-K) is more than a corpus: it is the ability organizational members have developed to draw distinctions in the process of carrying out their work, in particular contexts, by enacting rules that are grounded on collective understandings (Hadjimichael et al., 2023; Tsoukas & Vladimirou, 2001: 128). The overlap between judgment and knowledge has been underexplored. O-K entails that individuals draw on “already constituted distinctions” (i.e., bodies of knowledge) and the creation of new knowledge stems from the “ability to draw new distinctions concerning a task at hand” (Hadjmichael & Tsoukas, 2019; Tsoukas, 2009: 941). If to know is to judge, to judge is to draw new distinctions from old ones.
 
This sub-theme aims to explore the epistemic aspects of judgment as organizational members knowledgeably carry out their activities. O-K, by and large, is embedded in skills, routines (Feldman et al., 2016) and practices (Nicollini, 2011), and is manifested in action. Being situated, agency-dependent, and in the making, O-K is associated with the emergence of novelty and creativity (Hjorth et al., 2018; Leclair, 2023; Thompson, 2018). Studying how O-K is used enables scholars to study the “the self-conscious use of the prefix re”.
 
Mainstream views of O-K have traditionally been entitative (Easterby-Smith & Lyles, 2005). In this sub-theme, we invite scholars to go beyond the entitative perspective and conceive of O-K in enactivist terms – namely, that knowledge is creatively disclosed, made, and re-arranged by situated, embodied and embedded agents (Hadjmichael et al., 2024; Gallagher, 2017). An enactivist perspective draws on phenomenology and pragmatism, as well as practice and process-based onto-epistemologies, stressing subjective experience and highlighting the inherently creative making of the world by skilled agents (Joas, 1996). It is grounded on an open-world ontology, performative epistemology, and poetic praxeology (Gallagher, 2017; Stewart et al., 2010; Tsoukas, 2005). O-K is distributed (Tsoukas, 1996), grown in self-governed practices (Nicolini et al., 2022), and continuously enacted (Orlikowski, 2002). It is related to practical wisdom (phronesis), since agents must intuitively grasp the salient features of complex situations ‘as a whole’ in order to make the ‘right’ distinctions and engage in the ‘right’ course of action (Contu, 2023; Schwartz & Sharpe, 2011; Shotter & Tsoukas, 2014a, 2014b).
 
We would like to consider the following questions:

• How can we advance the existing debates on the nature and characteristics of O-K and judgment, in light of the increased complexity of problems organizations grapple with in a globalized world?

• How do new technologies, including but not limited to AI, LLM, and VR, enable and constrain judgment in organizations?

• What types of O-K are used, by what agents, in what contexts, and with what effects?

• How are personal knowledge and O-K integrated in situ?

• How is judgment exercised differently at different levels of professional competence and expertise?

• How is individual practical wisdom related to organizational knowledge and collective reasoning?

• How are tacit, propositional and contextual knowledge drawn upon in the exercise of judgment in organizations?

• How do time and space, especially when mediated by technology, enable or inhibt the development of O-K and the exercise of judgment?

• How are values and morality intertwined with the processes of drawing on organizational knowledge and utilizing judgment?

References

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• Contu, A. (2023): “Antigone: On Phronesis And How To Make Good and Timely Leadership Decisions.” Academy of Management Review, 48 (1), 149–164.
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