Knowing in the Public Organization

People understand public organizations based on assumptions they make about what public organizations are and what it means to know them. Most literature sees them as purposive rational structures. This chapter proposes the usefulness of seeing public bureaucracies as made up of intersecting “life-worlds” shaped by practical understandings and everyday actions. The division of labor ensures that people develop role-specific understandings and ways of coping, which become distanced from one another. Worker knowledge is situational and relies on judgment gained in experience. Management knowledge is conceptual: abstraction in the minds of managers about the work. Executive knowledge struggles to blend abstracted understandings of the work with political exigencies in the bureaucratic environment. Since modern societies privilege conceptual knowledge over hands-on work experience, worker knowledge is subordinated to managerial discipline, and managers are cut off from fuller understanding of the work and how worker knowledge might improve results.