Rethinking Polanyi’s concept of tacit knowledge: From personal knowing to imagined institutions

Half a century after Michael Polanyi conceptualised ‘the tacit component’ in personal knowing, management studies has reinvented ‘tacit knowledge’—albeit in ways that squander the advantages of Polanyi’s insights and ignore his faith in ‘spiritual reality’. While tacit knowing challenged the absurdities of sheer objectivity, expressed in a ‘perfect language’, it fused rational knowing, based on personal experience, with mystical speculation about an un-experienced ‘external reality’. Faith alone saved Polanyi’s model from solipsism. But Ernst von Glasersfeld’s radical constructivism provides scope to rethink personal tacit knowing with regard to ‘other people’ and the intersubjectively viable construction of ‘experiential reality’. By separating tacit knowing from Polanyi’s metaphysical realism and drawing on Benedict Anderson’s concept of ‘imagined communities’, it is possible to conceptualise ‘imagined institutions’ as the tacit dimension of power that shapes human interaction. Whereas Douglass North claimed institutions could be reduced to rules, imagined institutions are known in ways we cannot tell

La connaissance créatrice : la dynamique de l'entreprise apprenante /

Bibliogr

The TerraSAR-X/TanDEM-X Mission Planning System: Realizing new Customer Visions by Applying new Upgrade Strategies

The history of the TerraSAR-X and TanDEM-X mission planning system is briefly presented. In addition to the not trivial demands of the first years, special attention is given to the challenges of recent years. Here the TanDEM-X science phase, conducted between 2014 and 2016, is the most prominent feature. It is shown how agile software engineering methods can help to keep the already achieved system robustness, and how further enhancements can easily be incorporated