3.4 Culture as a repertoire of knowledge

In a given culture or collective, people share a repertoire of knowledge. This is knowledge that we acquire and use in order to make sense of the world around us, to interpret experiences and to generate social behaviour. As Hoffman and Verdooren (2019) argue, this can refer to practical ‘everyday knowledge’ in the sense of ‘this is how things are done around here’. This could, for example, relate to opening hours of shops and government institutions, traffic rules, and the legal and political systems. Imagine, you want to travel on the bus and are new in town. You might come across a system whereby you have to buy a ticket before entering the bus and maybe you would be able to do this via an app or by going to the nearest kiosk. In another context you may be required to buy the ticket on entering the bus or there might also be a ticket inspector. People familiar with the environment share this knowledge about ‘taking the bus’. As newcomers we may feel confused if ‘taking a bus’ functions differently to what we expect and are accustomed to. Being knowledgeable about ‘how things are being done around here’ is important as it helps us to manage day to day affairs.

But cultural knowledge also relates to more abstract knowledge such as knowledge of philosophy, arts, history or science inasmuch as it is prevalent within a collective. Such knowledge can be the source of ideas, inspirations and discussion and within a collective can constitute what Hoffman and Verdooren (2019:28) call a group’s ‘frame of reference’ or a cognitive map. Such maps guide people to assess what is being considered as right or wrong and they contain some principles and an orientation regarding how to respond to and interpret such situations. This does not mean that they necessarily compel us to follow a particular course. It also does not mean that such maps cater for all circumstances, but they do contain some principles and an orientation regarding how to respond to and interpret certain situations. Whereas knowledge is something that people carry in their minds, behaviour is directly observable. And it is knowledge and information that underlie behaviour. By referring to the fact that culture consists of the shared information in people’s minds and their behaviour, we acknowledge that it includes mental as well as behavioural phenomena. Furthermore, we acknowledge that the knowledge of one cultural group can be distinct from the knowledge of other groups and this enables group members to behave in a way that is meaningful to them and acceptable to other group members.

Knowledge which is reasonably easy to articulate, capture, store and retrieve is called explicit knowledge. For example, if you start working for a company, you are likely to be given a booklet containing information about the history, organisational structure and a guideline of what is expected from you when working for the company. We can find explicit knowledge, for example, within a company's help centre, knowledge bases, process documentation, user guides, white papers, research reports, data sheets, specifications, organisational charts, formal documentation, as well as video and audio recordings.

Spain represents another example. The fact that Madrid is the country’s capital is well known and also that Spanish is the officially recognised language of the country. It is knowledge which can easily be gained, recorded and passed on.

A concept that is much more difficult to grasp is tacit knowledge, which is unconscious and unacknowledged information that is silently acquired through experience, socialisation, and habitual practices. It is unconscious knowledge that, if asked for, would be the most difficult to write down, articulate, or present in a tangible form, or at least it would take a lot of time and effort to articulate it.

Think, for example, about your grandmother’s most delicious cake. Even though she has given you the recipe or has told you all the ingredients you need, when you try it out, you feel as if something is different or missing. The reason is that after years of experience, she has learned the exact feel of the dough, or exactly how long the cake should be in the oven. It’s not something she can write down; she simply feels it.

Understanding culture as common practice, it should be clear that a large part of culture-specific everyday knowledge is tacit knowledge and this is difficult to transform into easily attainable explicit knowledge.

We can observe a further example by thinking of how we learn a language. Learning the alphabet, the sentence structure and vocabulary is the explicit knowledge that we acquire. But pronouncing words like the locals or acquiring an accent specific to a region usually requires the acquisition of tacit knowledge, which may well only occur after we have lived in the region for a while and become immersed in the culture. But having obtained the local accent, are we able to recall how we actually did it? Generating innovative ideas could be another example of tacit knowledge. How do we generate new ideas, new ways of doing things and developing a product? Is it based on intuition?

Photograph on the left by Adelheid Iken.  Photograph on the right by Yeliz Yildirim-Krannig