Jörgen sandberg. Stockholm School of Economics. A classic managerial problem, страница 4

Interpretative Approaches to Competence

The interpretative research tradition may provide an alternative to the rationalistic approaches to competence. Weber (1964/1947) was the primary initiator of this tradition, but phenomenological sociologists such as Schutz (1945, 1953), Berger and Luckmann (1966), and Giddens (1984, 1993) developed it further. The main feature of the interpretative research tradition is its phenomenological base, the stipulation that person and world are inextricably related through persons' lived experience of the world (Berger & Luckmann, 1966; Husseri, 1970/1900-01; Schutz, 1945, 1953). Accordingly, competence is not seen as consisting of two separate entities; instead, worker and work form one entity through the lived experience of work. Competence is thus seen as constituted by the meaning the work takes on for the worker in his or her experience of it (Dall'Alba & Sandberg, 1996; Sandberg, 1994). The shift in the point of departure—from worker and work as two separate entities to the workers' lived experience of work— gives rise to an alternative way of understanding human competence at work.

A major finding that has emerged from interpretative studies of competence carried out in a range of different areas such as artificial intelligence (Dreyfus & Dreyfus, 1986), education (Schön, 1983), nursing (Benner, 1984), and ethnographic and ethnomethodological studies of competence within sociology (Atkinson, 1988; Barley, 1996; Brown & Duguid, 1991; Fielding, 1988a, 1988b; Garfinkel, 1986; Kusterer, 1978; Livingston, 1987; Tyre & Von Hippel, 1997) is that attributes used in accomplishing work are not primarily context-free but are situational, or context-dependent. More specifically, the attributes used in particular work acquire their context-dependence through the workers' ways of experiencing that work. A central feature of the context-dependence of competence is its tacit dimension (Polany, 1967). Giddens noted the following: "[Work activities are] largely carried out in practical consciousness. Practical consciousness consists of all the things which actors know tacitly about how to 'go on' in the contexts of social life without being able to give them direct discursive expression" (1984: xxiii). When attributes are viewed as context-free, the tacit dimension of competence is overlooked (Brown & Duguid, 1991; Fielding, 1988a; Schön, 1983). Reviewing recent ethnographic studies of workplace practices, Brown and Duguid concluded "that the ways people actually work usually differ fundamenìally from the ways organizations describe that work in manuals, training programs, organizational charts, and job descriptions" (1991: 40). Within education, Schön (1983) made a similar point in his criticism of universities and other institutions that educate professional workers. He argued that such institutions are principally based upon a rationalistic epistemology that "fosters selective inattention to practical competence and professional artistry" (1983: vii). He closely examined what professional workers such as architects, psychotherapists, engineers, planners, and managers actually do when they work. Schön discovered that when workers encounter their work, they frame and set the problem situations of the work through their experience of it. In other words, as workers frame their work, the attributes used in performing that work are not separate from their experience of it, but internally related to work through their way of framing the specific work situation.

Hence, if attributes acquire their context-dependent nature through workers' experience of their work, as suggested by the findings of interpretative studies, then people's ways of experiencing work are more fundamental to their competence than the attributes themselves. Although the reported interpretative studies further clarify what constitutes competence by highlighting the context-dependence of attributes, the studies do not demonstrate how these attributes are integrated into competent work performance. Nor do they explicitly capture the variations in competence that may occur within a group of workers. The interpretative studies of Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1986) and of Benner (1984) capture variations in competence in terms of different levels of competence acquisition. However, these authors did not describe variations in competence that may occur at any one level, among novices, advanced beginners, or experts, for example. In other words, they do not sufficiently explain why some people perform work more competently than others.