NW 32: Knowing and Acting: The changing conditions and potentials of organization education research

Network
NW 32 Organizational Education

Title
Knowing and Acting: The changing conditions and potentials of organization education research

Abstract
With our call organizational education (network 32) we invite scholars from organizational education and related disciplines to engage with the theme “Knowing and Acting in and Between Organizations.” Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

• Theories of knowing and acting in organizational education,
• Knowledge for action and theories-in-use,
• Tacit and explicit knowing in organizational learning,
• Co-creation, participation, and communities of practice as well as
• Knowing–doing gaps and organizational hypocrisy
• AI, algorithmic knowledge, and the transformation of organizational knowing
• Decolonial, feminist, and posthuman perspectives on organizational knowing and acting,
• Epistemic justice, legitimacy, and knowledge-power relations in organizing
• Spatial and relational approaches to knowing and acting.

The Call
Organizational Education is interested in the learning in, of and between organizations (Göhlich et al 2018). Therefore, knowing and acting are especially important.

In the field of organizational education, the issue of how to relate knowledge and action has a longstanding tradition. After decades of academic and action theoretical discussion on organizational learning, traditional approaches of knowledge transmission, transfer and trickle down increasingly are left behind and notions of cocreation, of shared practice arrangements have become more relevant. In these debates, we might identify different ways, how knowing and acting is related to each other:

Firstly, the relation between knowing and acting is thought of a productive knowledge creation for practice: Chris Argyris, a pioneering author in the field of organizational learning and organizational education with his book “knowledge for action” (1993) might introduce in such a way of relating, where knowledge is created for action. With his guide he proposes action research for organizational learning and intends to overcome barriers to organizational change.

Together with Donald Schön, Chris Argyris (1974) relates “Theory in Practice” to increase professional effectiveness. In organizing as well as organizational learning, theories are not to be situated in academia, but in everyday´s practice, as “theories in use”. Lave and Wenger (1991) have highlighted the notion of communities of practice (CoP) in which implicit knowing as a collective practice is enacted at a daily basis of situated learning. Here we may identify the second relational pattern of knowledge in action. The connex between knowledge and action is theorized as implicit or explicit: According to Nonaka & Takeuchi´s (1995) knowledge management model, tacit and implicit knowledge transforms into organizational knowledge – and by this sustains action-ability.

While practice theoretical approaches, too, conceptualize knowing and acting as interconnected and interrelated continuum, other perspectives regard this relationship as problematic or even antagonistic and offer a third relational pattern: The traditionally problematized so called “knowing-doing gap” addresses the relationship between knowing and doing as a hindered and a complicated one. Organizational learning might from this angle be interested in closing such knowing-doing gaps. Such conceptualizations of the relationship between knowing and doing might not just reflect on the existing gaps, but on intentional or non-intentional strategies in organizing: Brunsson´s (1989) concept of organizational hypocrisy would analyze the discrepancies between knowing and doing as a systematic rationality of and in organizing. Organizations decouple their formal structures and policies from their actual practices to manage conflicting demands. To maintain a positive image, they strive for legitimacy by organizational rhetorics rather than for actual performance. In this sense, knowing and acting in this relational pattern are apart.

Spatial conceptualizations of the relationship between knowing and doing might focus on the necessary boundary work in cocreational settings, on multiperspectivity in open innovation. Knowing and acting in this fourth pattern relates as knoweable acting in stories of experience to be told and exchanged. In cocreational settings like innovation labs knowing and acting merge (Weber 2018; Belfield & Petrescu 2025).

In addition to these patterns, we observe how machine knowledge and machine agency by large language models are increasingly involved in organizational processes, shifting from human-centric knowing to distributed cognition and action. As non-human actors become more relevant, organizations are moving from knowledge-based to data-driven (Zine 2025).

Given the changing conditions and potentials of organizational education research, AI distruptively questions the meaning and function of knowing and acting in organizing, while the polycrises of our times challenge the existing approaches, understandings and concepts of knowing and acting in organizing and in organizations. Against such large integrations, deeper notions of knowing might refer to deep aesthetic learning experience (Macdonald & Oliver 2025).

In a world of polycrises, the different patterns of knowledge for action, knowledge in action, acting against knowledge and knowledgeable action all will co-exist. While some organizations might avoid external recognition as an actor (Grothe-Hammer 2019), develop into hybrid constellations of humans, material, digital agencies others conceptualize knowing as sense-making between humans and AI outputs. Moreover, problematic shifts in knowing and acting can be observed, analyzed and intervened in organizational settings: While white supremacist subject positions are being re-empowered at a global scale, post- and decolonial perspectives of knowing and acting question established ways of organizing as Eurocentric power/knowledge regimes.

As epistemic violence, such ways of knowing and acting play out in conceptualizations of the “right” way of organizing (Alasuutari & Qadir 2014). Organizing in this sense becomes a battleground of epistemic and ontological positionings (Grosfoguel 2002; Mignolo 2017), of political and economic power as well as academic freedom: Seen from his angle, not only in academic organizing, both knowing and acting are at risk …

Contact Person(s)
Susanne Maria Weber, susanne.maria.weber(at)uni-marburg.de

References
Alasuutari, P., & Qadir, A. (2014). Epistemic governance: An approach to the politics of policy-making. European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, 1(1), 67-84.

Argyris, Chris (1993): Knowledge for Action. A guide for overcoming Barriers to Organizational Change. San Franscisco. Jossey-Bass.

Argyris, Chris & Schön, Donald (1974): Theory in Practice: Increasing Professional Effectiveness. San Franscisco. Jossey-Bass.

Belfield, A., & Petrescu, D. (2025). Co-design, neighbourhood sharing, and commoning through urban living labs. CoDesign, 21(2), 171-194.

Brunsson, Nils (1989): The organization of Hyprocrisy. Talk, Decisions and Actions in Organizations. Hoboken. Wiley.

Göhlich, M., Novotný, P., Revsbaek, L., Schröer, A., Weber, S. M., & Yi, B. J. (2018). Research memorandum organizational education. Studia paedagogica, 23(2), 205-215.

Grosfoguel, R. (2002): Colonial Difference, Geopolitics of Knowledge, and Global Coloniality: Decolonizing Political Economy and Postcolonial Studies. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/290695308_Colonial_difference_geopolitics_of_knowledge_and_global_coloniality_in_the_moderncolonial_capitalist_world-system

Grothe-Hammer, Michael (2019): Organization without actorhood: Exploring a neglected phenomenon, European Management Journal, Volume 37, Issue 3, 325-338

Lave, Jean; Wenger Etienne (1991): Situated Learning. Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge University Press.

Macdonald, A., & Oliver, C. (2025). “Feeling With”: Sensory–Material Interaction and Embodied Freedom in a Progressive Democratic School in England. Anthropology & Education Quarterly,https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/aeq.70041

Mignolo, Walter (2017): Coloniality is far from over, and so must be decoloniality. Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Inquiry. 43, 38-45. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316986305_Coloniality_Is_Far_from_Over_and_So_Must_Be_Decoloniality

Nonaka, Ikujiro; Takeuchi, Hirotaka (1994): The knowledge creating company – how japanese companies create the dynamics of innovation. New York. Oxford University Press.

Rammert, Werner (2025): Distributed Agency & Digital Technology. Springer

Weber, Susanne Maria (2018): Innovationsmanagement als Gegenstand der Organisationspädagogik. In: Michael Göhlich; Andreas Schröer & Susanne Maria Weber: Handbuch Organisationspädagogik. Wiesbaden. Springer VS. . 517-527.

Zine, Rachid. (2025). Data Driven Organization in the Age of AI. In: Hamdan, R.K. (eds) Tech Fusion in Business and Society . Studies in Systems, Decision and Control, vol 233, Springer, 625–632