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HESWBL
1,2
Deconstructing workplace “know
how” and “tacit knowledge”
Exploring the temporal play of being within
128 professional practice
Kevin J. Flint
Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK
Abstract
Purpose – Over the past two decades across a number of sectors of the economy there has been an
ever increased interest in attempting to understand the mediation of “tacit knowledge” in developing
professional expertise. Much thought has been invested in studies which attempt to resolve the
difficulty of revealing tacit knowledge and finding ways of transferring it within institutions
and across organisations. But, in general these recent studies, and the approaches they have adopted,
do not take sufficient account of the phenomenology of human being, Dasein, which is essentially
temporal: the purpose of this paper is to address this issue.
Design/methodology/approach – The approach here is based on a phenomenological and
deconstructive study of two small–scale comparative cases of the mediation of tacit knowledge in the
development of professional expertise in Higher Education, within the context of social practice and
educational practice. The cases will each serve to provide a focus upon professional expertise in
teaching in each of these domains of professional practice.
Findings – Deconstruction will serve to illuminate the essential differences between what is observed
and re-presented as episodes of teaching and the complex interplay of temporality that in each case is
unique to the individual human being.
Originality/value – In the field of work-based learning this paper adopts a novel approach. The
deconstruction of tacit knowledge against indications drawn from Heidegger’s ontology serves to
bring into sharp relief the unfolding of essential forms of technology. By focusing the analysis upon
the language in which the knowledge is generated and the phenomenology of human being, Dasein,
the study will seek to explore some of the implications of attempting to convert “tacit knowledge” into
a technology that can be transferred across organisations and institutions. It will illuminate the
situation-specific nature of tacit knowledge as grounds for professional expertise.
Keywords Tacit knowledge, Higher education, Knowledge transfer, Educational philosophy
Paper type Conceptual paper

Earlier in March of this year at one university in the East Midlands of the UK, I was
fortunate enough to watch a colleague leading a one-day workshop concerning
research methodology, working with a group of professional doctorate students.
James Deacon[1], who leads a professional doctorate programme at Lake University[2],
had invited me to do a peer observation of his work with a group of students in
the second year of their programme. The students were seeking to learn how to
produce new and useful knowledge through their own research as a contribution
to developments in their own professional practices. A week after the event, I presented
James with my observations in person and he had expressed obvious surprise at the
detailed report that I had written, “Did all of that really happen?”
Higher Education, Skills and Work- His genuine surprise and delight in response to my observations suggested the
Based Learning
Vol. 1 No. 2, 2011
basis for this paper. There were several possible explanations for the difference
pp. 128-146 between my report of what had happened and James’s own perceptions of the events
r Emerald Group Publishing Limited
2042-3896
of that day. Most obviously, it points to the ever present “catastrophe of memory”
DOI 10.1108/20423891111128908 (Derrida, 2001, p. 353; Dooley and Kavanagh, 2007, p. 67). Reflections on this
phenomenon later in the paper will open consideration of the way as human beings “Know how”
we tend to push against the impossibility of re-enacting past events in their purity and “tacit
and totality. Ironically in orientating people in this way of being towards modalities
of improvement, it will be argued that such ways of thinking tend to block knowledge”
educators further from engagement in any formal education concerning what it means
to be human.
As a “research educator” (Scott et al., 2010), James’s surprise also pointed to the 129
possible mediation of “tacit knowledge” (Polyani, 1967, 1974) that someone skilled
in lecturing calls upon, almost without thinking, in shaping their pedagogic practice
with students. As Michael Polyani (1967, p. 4, emphasis as in the original) puts it, “we
can know more than we can tell ”. Of course, in this case such skilled performances
requiring what Ryle (1946) calls “know how” are often constituted on the basis of
learning from the practice of those who know how to lecture and are notoriously
difficult to constitute in formal propositional language. Here were other possible
explanations of the gap between James’ own perceptions and the observations made
of his lecturing in the classroom. On further prompting from the feedback, James
had agreed that there were “multi-dimensional” (Antonacopoulou et al., 2005) elements
derived from his learning that had been made apparent in his practice from the various
artefacts drawn from the world of art and science that he used to illustrate his
points and to challenge further questioning. Although a little surprised by the
observations, James agreed that his own learning in the workplace[3] had drawn
variously upon his learnéd “interconnectivity” (Antonacopoulou et al., 2005), which
is “transdisciplinary” in scope (Gibbons et al., 1994), reflecting, too, uncertainties
and complexities of society in which PD research is now situated (Nowotny et al., 2001,
pp. 30-47), and implicitly “generic” in the benchmarks of “doctoralness” (Lester, 2010)
that had structured practice with the students. It was such forms of learning that
variously grounded and provided the basis for the continued development of James’s
skilled performance in the classroom; the developing “know how” that it represented
had not only been distilled from, but found expression in, developing such practice.
The opening section of this paper will seek to illuminate the significance of
“know how” and of “tacit knowledge” within the economic framing of the knowledge
economy (Usher, 2002). The challenge for work-based learning, it will be argued, is
to take seriously its claims to be transdisciplinary in scope, and to take such
learning further in exploring both its ways of being a learner and what it means to
be learning in the workplace from the perspective of the people themselves. In
philosophical terms, we are considering the underlying phenomenology, and ontology
of being in the workplace which has tended to remain elided in the formal reporting of
contemporary discourses of work-based learning[3].
Such a locus for learning suggested a third possible explanation. What had also
been striking, which opened the possibility of writing this paper was that from a
reading of Heidegger’s (1962) magnum opus, Being and Time, much of the “equipment”
that educators draw upon in attempting to make their practices meaningful for
themselves and for their students, generally remains inconspicuous and as such, has
tended to be overlooked by researchers.
In this paper, it is argued that all human beings have some understanding of
their own being and that formal interpretations of the meaning of being have tended
to be confined to the subject of a number of texts only within specialist discourses
of philosophy and theology. Within the pedagogic practices of HE, and of formal
education more generally, in opening further dialogue with readers, the argument will
HESWBL attempt to unlock reflections on the extent to which the development of such
1,2 understandings of being remain at best accidental and contingent upon the ways
individuals are disposed to each other in any given social interaction; including,
for example, episodes of teaching. In focusing upon two lectures given within HE,
the empirical dimension of this particular study will seek to illuminate the multiplicity
of ways in which students’ contingent understandings of the meaning of being may
130 be developed. Despite the fact that we are purporting to educate human beings
within the pedagogic practices of Higher Education, but outside the formal disciplines
of philosophy and theology, this paper will argue that practice remains mainly
constituted within descriptive and largely theoretical structures which, for the
purposes of this paper, we will describe as “ontic”.
In the various modalities of work-based learning such “ontic” structures focus
concerns upon new forms of knowledge generated from studies that in each case
attempt to “characterise” what is constituted as practice. In other words such
structures centre interest on “enumerating”, the distinguishing features of particular
beings, entities, phenomena that variously unfold over time in practice (Cerbone, 2008,
p. 6). Epistemologically, or, in terms of the structure of knowledge, such centring
is further reinforced by the somewhat uneasy interplay of discipline-based Mode 1
knowledge and transdisciplinary “Mode 2 knowledge” (Gibbons et al., 1994). The
shifting ground for such structuring is illustrated by David Scott et al. (2004, pp. 41-55),
who have argued for, and elicited, five structural modalities of knowledge generated
from practice.
For Martin Heidegger (1962, pp. 210-24, 167-80) such structuring only further turns
human beings away from addressing the ontological question of the meaning
of being, of what it means to be a human being in the workplace, or of the intelligibility
of beings as beings located in such a setting[4]. Hence, an “ontological characterisation
spells out what it means to be” a particular entity (Cerbone, 2008, p. 6). Despite
our natural proclivity to do otherwise, one of Heidegger’s (1962) claims in Being and
Time is that an understanding of particular beings, entities, phenomena y itself
presupposes an understanding of being. As Joseph Rouse (2005, p. 175) has suggested:
“this seemingly obscure claim is clarified by Haugland’s (1998 cited by Rouse, 2005,
p. 175) parallel to chess”. A meaningful encounter with a knight, for example, is
dependent upon some “grasp of the game of chess”. “In Heidegger’s terms the
‘discovery’ of particular beings associated with the game – pieces, positions, moves,
or situations – presupposes a prior disclosure of chess as the context for them to
make sense”. The “being” of knights or pawns “is their place within the game,
conferring their intelligibility” as the particular beings they are. There are, however,
significant complications to this parallel to which we will return.
In decentring the debate and focusing upon the discourses of HE in which we are
variously in the “throw”[5] of existence, in the final step in this paper it will be argued
that there is always a significant danger in grounding “research education” in the
ontic and epistemological structures for developing knowledge from the interplay of
work-based learning[3] and Higher Education. It will be disputed that the danger lies
in passing over an understanding of the meaning of being. The meaning of being upon
which beings come to be meaningful, it will be argued, in the extreme is now made
tangible in the “framing”[6] of dominant technological means-ends logic which is
tending to emerge as the only way of “revealing”[7] tacit and other ontic forms of
knowledge within discourses of work-based learning and of HE. The final remarks
in this paper open further questions concerning “research education” which takes
cognizance of the meaning of being. These remarks point to the irony and the possible “Know how”
risk for institutions, in possession of the ideals of Higher Education and work-based and “tacit
learning[3], as leading and emerging centres within the globalised knowledge economy.
In decentring debate, it will also be argued there remains a significant risk of knowledge”
the developing relationship between HE and work-based learning becoming a service
for the constitution of what could be seen as puppets of such technological framing –
variously identified as researchers, educators, managers, workers – in the on-going 131
drive towards innovation.

Knowledge generation, work-based learning, Higher Education

At issue here are the possible innovations that unfold from the emergent interplay of
institutions of work-based learning[3] and of Higher Education in the knowledge
economy, which has been given particular prominence over the past two decades by
the development of research education in and through the professional doctorate
qualification. A “third generation”[8] of such qualifications has now been established,
which takes seriously what works in practice as a locus for research and innovation.
But, in being in practice in the workplace what is the meaning of being in such
innovation? In attempting to address this question, this paper places what happened
in the microcosm of the HE workplace in the much wider horizon of unfolding changes
in the knowledge economy.
In The Will to Learn, Ronald Barnett (2007) suggests that knowledge and skilled
forms of action, of the form exhibited by two colleagues who allowed the author to see
particular episodes of their teaching, are “just two pillars of an educational project”.
In fact, in “being-in-the-world”[9] their worlds are always in danger of becoming
meaningless and of falling to the ground without the incorporation within the very
structure of their worlds of a formal education in what it means to be; an education in
the meaning of being. As this metaphor might suggest, however, ontological questions
are always in danger of being completely hidden within the very fabric of innovation,
with work-based learning in concert with HE continually working to develop their
roles as central hubs in the hegemonic generation of “useful knowledge” within our
contemporary knowledge economy [vide Doz et al., 2001; Department for Trade and
Industry (DTI), 1998; Drucker, 1969; Rooney et al., 2005; Stiglitz, 1999].
The science that is unfolding from research education, conceived as “useful
knowledge” of “what works in practice”; as Helga Nowotny et al. (2001, p. 47) have
argued, is no longer constrained by clear demarcations between “state, society,
economy, culture”. And, from the standpoint in this paper it is clear that in the
unfolding identity of work-based learning[3], both reflecting extant contemporary
change in the modes of knowledge production, and in providing a new emphasis on
the capitalisation of the self in forms of human, social, symbolic capital that mediate
knowledge production at the workplace, there is the very possibility of challenging
further debate concerning our very being that unfolds in the workplace.
As Manuel Castells’s (2000) seminal contribution on the “Rise of the Network Society”
has indicated, such permeability of disciplinary boundaries is already reflected in a shift
to globalised networks of knowledge and information from regionalised national
systems of science. What is missed by Castells, however, is the “framing”[6] of existence
that is reflected in the increasing speed, compression and digitalisation of knowledge and
information transactions in the global economy (Held et al., 1999).
As a transdisciplinary identity, work-based learning opens the possibility of
moving beyond docile agencies that have tended to become domesticated by the
HESWBL habitual reproduction of familiar ontic and epistemological structures. The case in
1,2 point in this paper illuminates the sometimes uneasy unfolding integration of
academic labour into a post-industrial economy (vide Bell, 1976; Lyotard, 1984;
Touraine, 1988; Scott et al., 2004, 2008). Along with concomitant shifts from the
apparent certainties and “linearity” of organisational and institutional change to
the multilayered ambiguities, “complexity” and “volatility” of practice, “work-based
132 learning”[3] opens further questions concerning the meaning of being in the workplace.
This is especially so when confronted with the “dark side” of developing knowledge
in the Risk Society (Beck, 1992; Nowotny et al., 2001, p. 47).
Of course, the question of the meaning of “being-in-the-world” of the workplace,
which is intimately connected with the issue of “framing”[6], might seem to many
readers as a purely academic issue, of no real value in terms of what is done in practice.
Although only rarely acknowledged as such, it is the framing that lies behind the
objectification and commodification of knowledge, along with the unfolding of
consumer democracies, the autonomisation and digitalisation of tertiary services
and a set of policies regarding innovation in science and technology that have tended,
unconsciously, to endorse such framing in their focus upon “Lifelong learning”
(Flint, 2011; Flint and Needham, 2007) and “Professional learning” (Elbousty and
Bratt, 2010; Hargreaves, 2000; Webster-Wright, 2010).
Not surprisingly information and knowledge are now seen “as the primary wealth-
creating assets” (Castells, 2000) in our late modern economy. In fact, one of the
“strategic goals” of the European Union is “to become the most competitive knowledge-
based economy in the world” (Brinkley and Lee, 2006). For some, such increased
competition has heralded new practices of knowledge production characterised
by “transdisciplinarity, heterogeneity, organisational diversity and enhanced social
accountability” (Gibbons et al., 1994; Nowotny et al., 2001). In such a competitive
globalised milieu it is hardly surprising that we have witnessed a shift in emphasis
away from the production of theoretical knowledge per se within HE, to the generation,
application and dissemination of “practical knowledge” (Peters et al., 2003).
In parallel with this shift, there is a new emphasis upon performativity and the
improvement of practices and associated competencies in the workplace. Such a
shift has a direct bearing on ways in which teaching, lecturing and learning are now
being re-configured within formal education, including HE (Flint, 2010). Within
the classroom in HE it has prompted a focus upon performance and performativity
that lies behind the policy of peer observation that prompted this current study.
So, the new emphasis on the management of knowledge in work-based practices
is hardly surprising; it too, continues to unfold over time in the “framing”[6]. The
Knowledge Creating Company: How Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of
Innovation, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi’s (1995) account of knowledge
management, has proved an important contribution in this field (Easterby-Smith et al.,
2003). Nonaka and Takeuchi’s work spearheaded a flurry of publications concerning
the management of knowledge within organisations (Drucker, 1999) and at the
frontiers of knowledge production, dissemination and application (vide Derrida, 1981;
Despres and Chavel, 2000; Edvinsson and Malone, 1997; Flint, 2010).
However, as Stefan Gueldenberg and Holger Helting (2007, p. 104) suggest, in
their critique of Nonaka’s synthesis of “Western” and “Eastern” “knowledge” in
“Bridging the Divide”, in practice knowledge management is far more complex.
“Following the initial enthusiasm in the 1990s, a more differentiated view of knowledge
management has now set in, accompanied by the first reports of practical experiences
with this approach”. The high expectations of the past decade had either not or only “Know how”
in part been met (vide Lucier and Torsilieri, 1997; Ruggles, 1998; Soo et al., 2002). and “tacit
Literature in the field ascribes such failures in many cases to an insufficient concept of
knowledge (vide Cook and Brown, 1999; Orlikowski, 2002). It was apparent that many knowledge”
did not appreciate the difference between tacit and explicit knowledge or too often
confused knowledge and information.
On reflection concerning the enabling conditions for knowledge creation, not 133
surprisingly, perhaps, creating conditions that enable innovation within each work-
place setting – from large companies and SMEs to non-governmental organisations
and universities; including, not least the classroom – is not a straightforward matter.
The literature (Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995; Krogh et al., 2000; Ichijo and Nonaka, 2006)
suggests as a minimum such enabling conditions require:
. active and continual on-going dialogue regarding information and knowledge
disseminated within an organisation amongst all of the potential interest groups
(Krogh et al., 2000), associated “networks” (Castells, 2000) and “communities of
practice” (Wenger, 1998);
. perhaps more significantly, such dialogue can only be of real value in a
competitive environment if the knowledge and information that forms the basis
for dialogue is in fact representative of the absolute leading edge in any field of
inquiry and of practice (Krogh et al., 2000);
. as Kazuo Ichijo and Ikujiro Nonaka (2007, p. 84) indicate, above all the workplace
should be a locus for knowledge generation; “seeking to create knowledge” that
is in advance of “competitors”. This requires space for key agents to generate
knowledge;
. situated “tacit knowledge” and “know how”, which arises within a particular
organisational setting from individuals’ experiences in the workplace, is a major
potential source of competitive advantage because western organisations
generally pay so little attention to it (Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995); and
. there are considerable further competitive advantages to be gained from the
systematisation of knowledge and innovation flows at the workplace (Ichijo and
Nonaka, 2007; Krogh et al., 2000).
So, most obviously the way the literature has been presented invites reflection on a
model for knowledge generation that incorporates tacit, theoretical and practical
knowledges within any professional setting for work-based learning. Certainly, the
possible application of such a model, which places an emphasis on the significance of
practical “know-how” and “tacit knowledge”, might be regarded as a way forward in
addressing the gap identified earlier between what this author had known about
James’s teaching and James’s own perceptions and recollections of what had unfolded
during the course of his work with professional doctorate students.
However, there are at least two caveats, which hopefully will open further reflection
on the issue of the generation of knowledge from the workplace.
First, there is a need to take account of the revealing of the technological means-
ends discursive logic, which has infused the foregoing discourse concerning the
generation, application and dissemination of knowledge in practice. There is always
the danger that the materiality of everyday practices in the HE classroom and in
the workplace more generally, in being mediated by such discourses, may possibly,
HESWBL in the extreme, become dominated by the “revealing” of such technological “framing”
1,2 (Peim and Flint, 2009), a subject to which we will return in concluding this paper.
For Jacques Derrida (1973), in the discursive practices mediating science derived
from work-based learning[3], “the presence of the present is derived from the repetition
of signs and not the reverse” (Derrida, 1973, p. 52). Something is – for example, “the
revealing of science through research” at the workplace in this study – takes on the
134 unity of subjects or objects to the extent that each is brought forth by repetition; being
or identity in this reading of pedagogic practice is “proportionate to reiteration”.
On the other hand, as Caputo (1987) reminds his readers, “in metaphysics the
reverse mirror image has always prevailed; something is repeatable to the extent
that it is” (Caputo, 1987, p. 123; emphasis added). Essentially it is this standpoint
that constitutes the primary drive in science developed from work-based learning to
generate valid, reliable and trustworthy knowledge of what is. Here is an explanation
for the current ontic and epistemological centring of discourses of work-based
learning.
In fact, from Derrida’s (1978) deconstruction of Edmund Husserl’s Origin of
Geometry there are, in the extreme, two kinds of iteration of signs mediating practice.
At best we only ever reiterate ideas and observations about aspects of practice, by
repeating phrases and observations in different ways and in traces of contexts,
which are always necessarily partial and incomplete. “This is a metaphysical idea
of repetition which moves backwards” (Caputo, 1987, p. 121). At the other extreme
of a continuum of possible forms of iteration is what might be called a Joycean form
of iteration after the writer James Joyce who was famous for teasing out the nuances
and inter-connecting words and phrases. “This is prior to presence and productive
of it, and as a kind of reading, is therefore free to produce as it reads” – let us say a
critical idea of reiteration.
Second, in returning the issue of “the catastrophe of memory”, which was never
acknowledged as such by Heidegger or many others in philosophy, there is yet another
factor which has the potential to encourage people to remain for the most part with
only a tacit awareness of being caught up in “the framing”. What are reproduced in
discursive practices are only ever at best “traces” or “cinders” of any original
event unfolding in the workplace. That is, it is impossible ever to fully recreate a
historical presence. In Signature, Event, Context (Derrida, 1998, pp. 1-23) uses the term
“iterability” to describe this impossible relation.
The modern focus upon “improvement” in education more generally, and research
education in particular, is one measure of such impossibility; in this modern age
human beings are forever caught up, it would seem, in pushing against the impossible
(Flint, 2010). The human desire to overcome the impossible tends to encourage the
foregrounding of ontic and epistemological structures as grounds for the generation of
“useful knowledge”, and the further elision of understandings concerning the meaning
of being, which does not appear to have any direct bearing on improving aspects of our
practice within HE.

Improving practice at the workplace

On the surface, the invitation received from James to make my “observations” of one
episode of his teaching in my capacity as his peer (Boud and Lee, 2005) simply required
me to give some very brief feedback and an evaluation of my experience of being in
his workshop on research methodology that had been organised for a group of
professional doctorate students for the day. At its most banal, and returning to the
earlier remark about a “consumer democracy”, the process might be conceived as a way “Know how”
of checking that our “customers” (Vandermerwe, 1999)[10] for Higher Education are and “tacit
getting good value for their money – whatever that might mean. But, what seemed
particularly interesting was the “gap” between the brief observations that I had knowledge”
presented to James in person a week after the initial event, and his own perceptions of
that same episode. In opening further reflections on that gap I gratefully accepted an
invitation from another colleague, Alicia, to make observations of her work with a 135
group of PGCHE students – colleagues from another university in the East Midlands –
who were attempting to make sense of their course handbook.
On the surface at the beginning of the day in my feedback to James I had observed:
James was very well prepared for the teaching. He provided a very clear outline of the
programme for the following two days, which made explicit the objectives for the module in
terms of learning outcomes expected for the students.
And, in reflecting on his practice I had noted:
It was a mark of James’s skills as a teacher that he was able to get the students into a position
where they were confident to prepare and take the lead on talking about their own research
the following morning.

As with all highly skilled performances in teaching, James worked seamlessly throughout the
day in promoting an engaging, intellectual and scholarly dynamic with the students. And, in
fact, in evaluating his own work at the close of the day James had reflected critically on his
own short-comings in his preparation for the day. Such was his skill in teaching that if there
had been any minor limitations in his preparation they had not been evident to the students.

These observations could also simply be viewed as confirmation of “what works” in

terms of “customer satisfaction”, which is clearly of significant importance to the
students involved; independently they had disclosed to me during the day the
multiplicity of questions James’s workshop had opened for each of them in developing
aspects their own research. In fact, their conversations only added further confirmation
that their engagement in the workshop had opened the possibility of their own
development of contributions in both “work-based learning” and “professional
learning” through research.
Equally, and significantly for James, these observations added further confirmation
from one of his peers of the values ascribed by his students to the human, social and
symbolic capital that they are able to draw upon in the development of their research.
But, in delving beneath the surface what exactly is at work in such observations?
I hope at this point readers will stay with what will prove to be a short exegesis into
some more technically focused philosophical discourse that follows in reflecting
again on the observations I had made of my two colleagues. It will not only provide a
more fruitful possible explanation for the “gap” between my own observations and
James’s perceptions of his teaching, but this exegesis will also open further reflection
upon discursive practices of education that tend to be structured by technological
framing. In short, it opens further reflection regarding the current elision within
HE and the workplace more generally of a general education in being and its
relationship to the framing.
Heidegger’s (1977a) essay, “Science and reflection”, opens questions regarding
the semantic connection between our engagement in “work” (wirke) and what is “real”
(Wirkliche). For Heidegger, the work of observation in the temporal movement of
“bringing to presence” what is real is expressed by a series of compounds derived from
HESWBL the verb, arbeiten – to work: not least, zuarbeiten – to work towards, herausarbeiten –
1,2 to work out. The mood[11] of such a way of thinking about observation (Betrachung)
was suggested to Heidegger from the Latin root of the German term, tractare, meaning
to manipulate, to work over, to refine, which finds expression in the German language
in the compound verb, bearbeiten.
On further reflection such “working over” and manipulation in standard discourses
136 of workplace observation has, perhaps, already been signified in the foregoing use
of what might appear to be a rather outmoded expression – “bringing to presence” in
the work of a temporal movement that makes real what had happened in James’s
workshop. Any consideration of such movements was for the most part elided in my
observations, which had drawn on the language of “objectives”, “learning outcomes”
and “skilled performance”. Heidegger (1977a) also opened reflection on the possibility
of “unarbeiten”, meaning to work around something through observation, which I have
used to structure the way of thinking that unfolds in the final part of this paper.
In my formal feedback to James perhaps, the only reference that imputed any
possible temporal movement came in my observation that he had been “promoting
an engaging intellectual and scholarly dynamic with the students”. Such dynamism
that James’s discourse had opened up amongst his students, whilst not making any
specific reference to “temporality”, most clearly connotes a movement in time of our
existence, Dasein. As William Blattner (2005) has pointed out, “time is not here some
abstract ‘container’ that we imagine ‘clock-time’ to be, but a basic structure of Dasein’s
being” (Blattner, 2005, p. 311; emphasis as in the original).
“Dasein” is Heidegger’s expression for “the being of that being which I myself am”
(Gorner, 2007, p. 3). As Michael Inwood (1999, p. 42) makes clear, however, “as a
nominalised infinitive Dasein has no plural. It refers to any and every human
being [y]”. Heidegger (1962) argues that Dasein’s understanding of its being is always
already an understanding of being with (Mitdasein). Dasein is both individual and
communal. Basically, Heidegger’s discourse makes clear that the horizon of being is
temporality; that is, the ever unfolding relationship between the future and what has
been happening at the workplace from which we make sense of the present. “Dasein is
its time” (Hoffman, 2005, p. 328; emphasis added). For example, in everyday terms we
might express the view that we need time for a particular piece of work. Such time can
be clock time. But, it can also be the recollection of experience and the projection into
the future of particular ideas or visions that helps to address a particular activity
at work. On this broader horizon of time, we are also each aware in different ways of
the finitude of our own being, the ways our lives stretch out from birth to death.
Formally, our existence is definable in terms of the way Dasein stretches itself along, or
its “historicising between birth and death” (Heidegger, 1962, pp. 425-7, 373-5)
Again what had been lost in my observations was such historicising (Geschehen)
of Dasein. In the culture of observation in which I had been thrown, in writing my
observations I had simply interpreted historicising as the unfolding of an episode in
the lives of the individuals involved by confining such historicism in terms of what had
happened in the classroom. Geschehen connotes to happen. In both of my observations,
the happenings in question concerned the unfolding events involving students
working with lecturers in two contrasting settings in HE. It opens further reflections on
whether there is ever a need to address the “big” questions that we sometimes have to
confront in our lives. Nevertheless, the discourse does at least begin to open a more
formal consideration of the question of the meaning of being. For Dasein the meaning
of being is temporality; that is, it is temporality – the relationship between past and
future from which we continually make sense of the present – that provides the axis of “Know how”
understanding around which we make sense of things in our world. and “tacit
Ordinarily, in the workplace it is so easy for observations to gloss over our
temporally structured interactions. My second observations were taken from a class knowledge”
organised by my colleague, Alicia, who we met earlier. They had been engaged in
examining their course handbook and were beginning to make sense of some research
they were required to do. The observations that follow provided a focus on temporal 137
structure of interactions in one particular workplace.
Before the workshop, Alicia had positioned herself at a desk facing the entrance, so
that she could immediately engage in dialogue with her students as they each arrived.
For me what had been most interesting was what Heidegger (1962, pp. 157, 121) calls
the Fürsorge, which is translated as “solicitude” – in more literal terms it means to care
for other indviduals – which had been shown to others in the group. What
had been particularly interesting was not so much the psychology of care, which had
been evident in both classrooms, but the temporal aspects of “care” concerning
our very being. Along with their various “concerns” (Besorgen) (Heidegger, 1962,
pp. 296-7, 253) regarding the development of individual research, what had been
striking, on reflection following the observations, had been the structural totality of
Dasein’s being as temporal “care” (Sorge) (Heidegger, 1962, p. 406). Again, in the
German language, the semantic connections between these terms are here made much
more obvious. In the practice witnessed in the two classrooms, the lived reality for all
members of both groups was always “referred back to the ‘phenomenon of care’ ”
(Heidegger, 1962, pp. 254, 211). Here life that had unfolded in the classroom had been
lived in its existential possibility. In other words in the temporality of care all entities
within each of the workshops had been transcendentally determined as temporal.
Intuitively and tacitly at this point it is perhaps plain that the objects of my
earlier formal observations serve almost completely to elide the vibrant and quite
literally vital quality of such movements. The only passing reference to such fullness
of life witnessed in both classrooms had been glossed in my observations as skilled
performances that had engaged an intellectual and scholarly dynamic with the
students.
In being students and lecturers working together, in the temporality or in the
temporal “play” (Flint, 2009, 2010) of their various conversations there came to be
“research”, “knowledge”, “skills” y Such movement of “temporality” is perhaps
Heidegger’s (1962, pp. 231-437) big idea in his seminal account of Being and Time. It
arose from his deconstructive reading of Aristotle’s “Metaphysics”. “Temporality is
not, strictly speaking, a process”. It cannot be measured empirically. “It is a structure
of occurrence” (Stambaugh, 1986, p. 88). In the workplace and in our lives more
generally, temporality structures a continually unfolding relationship between the
future and the past from where we continually make sense of the present. For
Heidegger: “temporality temporalises as a future, which makes present in the process
of having been” (Heidegger, 1962, pp. 401, 350). But, what do these words mean in
practice?
Temporalising does not mean a succession of the ecstases (i.e. what has been, present and
future). The future is not later than beenness, and this is not earlier than present (Heidegger,
1962, pp. 401, 350).
Such temporality has already been connected with Dasein’s existential possibility, for
example, here in the classroom. “Possibility, which Dasein in each case is existentially,
HESWBL is distinguished just as much from empty, logical possibility as from the contingency of
1,2 something occurent (vorhanden) in so far as with the latter this and that can ‘happen’
( passieren)” (Heidegger, 1962, pp. 182, 143). In other words, what had been witnessed in
the classroom is that the possibility of being a student or a lecturer is “futural”[12], not
because it is merely a statistical measure of possibility rather than the actuality of what
happened in the workplace. Instead such existential possibility witnessed in the
138 workplace expresses a prospect that can never be actualised in the present; it expresses
a future that can never be present.
“Future” does not mean a Now, which not yet having become “actual” sometime will be, but
rather the coming in which Dasein comes towards itself in its ownmost ability to be
(Heidegger, 1962, pp. 401, 350); emphasis as in the original).
Dasein’s possibilities that had been witnessed in both pedagogic settings in the
workplace had not been the sorts of objects that can be actualised in practice. In
being a student or a lecturer (or more generally some other identity found in the
workplace), my existential possibility is always futural; these are not endpoints at
which I aim. As William Blattner’s (2005, p. 314) “Unattainability Thesis” suggests
even though I continually press ahead to become a student or a lecturer (or any other
given identity), in practice I can never become those objects, because in each case the
temporal structure of my being as care is always “futural”.
Implicitly, as epistemologists have always claimed (Caputo, 1987; Rouse, 2005), my
foregoing observations could have been construed in terms of a relationship between
distinct entities:
. myself as the author; the “knower” in this case;
. the objects “known” – skills, performance, motivation, research, knowledges y
– that I had observed in the two classrooms; and
. the “knower’s representation of the known” in this case inscribed in my formal
observations taken from the two classrooms.
But, the foregoing exegesis on the temporality of being that continued to unfold in
those two classrooms has already begun to point to the “unexamined and erroneous
propositions” that underlies “any conception of knowers as a special kind of entity – a
mind, a consciousness, language speaker or rational agent – and of knowledge as a
relationship between entities” (Rouse, 2005, p. 174), or indeed, of knowledge as an
object of the economy. As a leading translator of Heidegger’s work, Joan Stambaugh
(1986, p. 93) noted: “Temporality is” also “centrally instrumental” y “in pulling the
rug out from under the concept of man as sub-ject because there is no standing-under
(substance) involved”.
But, having arrived at this point we have yet to provide a satisfactory explanation
for the gap between my earlier observations of practice in the classrooms and what had
unfolded in practice. Hopefully, it is no surprise now to find that the present is not an
object, but an unfolding movement of “what Heidegger calls the ecstasis of the
originary present” which he identifies as “enpresenting[13], making present”. As
Blattner (2005, p. 319) indicates, “the horizon of the enpresenting is the in-order-to”;
that is, the horizon of those involvement relations that structure Dasein’s relationship with
“equipment”, in this case found in the lecture theatre or more generally, the workplace.
In Dasein’s “comportment”[14] to entities, in the lecture theatre, for example,
the meaning of such “equipment” does not fall from the sky. Being-in-the-world of
the lecturer and the student attending workshops of the kind that have already been “Know how”
the subject of observation in this study, Dasein encounters ready-to-hand entities. It is and “tacit
through such encounters that the lecturer or the student constitutes particular
equipment as meaningful. “Equipment” for (Heidegger, 1962; Gorner, 2007) is knowledge”
differentiated by its defining “in-order-to” relationship. As a lecturer when I walk into a
workshop with my students I am tacitly aware of the space in which I am working,
not as a collection of separate individual objects, each with their own special 139
properties, but as an holistic environment. In being constituted meaningfully for
me as ready-to-hand, the entities that I encounter do not occur in isolation but belong
to a system of references or “referential totalities” as Heidegger calls them. And, the
equipmental character of equipment that I encounter in the lecture theatre is
constituted as meaningful by its “in-order-to” structure.
In practice, Dasein hardly notices much of the familiar equipment involved in
working practices. For example, having learned how to type without looking at the
keyboard, the individual keys on my keyboard are utilised in an almost infinite variety
of different ways in writing papers like this one without me hardly noticing them.
As Blattner (2005, p. 319) suggests, “the in-order-to is Heidegger’s general term for the
involvement relation that binds the available to the human practices in terms of which
they make sense and are defined” y. And, “this in-order-to is made accessible to
Dasein in enpresenting”.
So, it was such equipment, that the two lecturers who had been the subject of
my earlier observations had utilised, that has been uncovered in mediating the
unfolding dynamic of their practices. A multiplicity of “equipment” that James
and Alicia had utilised in their practices “in-order-to” help their students make sense
for themselves of their particular interests in research. Whilst listing such equipment
as singular items would itself always run the risk of simply reducing such equipment
to categoric objects, which have only incidental bearing on what is done in practice,
it might be of interest to reflect on the unique “equipment” we each use in our work
with students in helping them to make sense of our own workplaces.
We have also now reached a point of reflection regarding the opening discourse
presented in this paper concerning the reproduction of knowledges, including tacit
forms of knowledge. “For Heidegger an entity or a being (ein Seindes) is anything
that in any sense is” (Gorner, 2007, p. 15), including the knowledges identified in the
opening section of this paper. Rather than as objects of a knowledge economy, the
foregoing exegesis on the temporality of being has uncovered such beings in their
“enpresenting” as primary projections of the “possibility” of understanding. What is
always in danger of being lost, however, is what it means for something to be. For
example, what it means for something to be knowledge as constituted in the
knowledge economy?
The question of the meaning of being is one that is often passed over in readings of
Heidegger’s (1962) Being and Time (Caputo, 1987; Dreyfus and Wrathall, 2005b). In
fact, in his seminal work, Heidegger (1962) draws out not just an ontological difference
between beings and being, but a tripartite distinction involving the meaning of being.
For Heidegger, preliminary projections of understanding the workplace are projected
upon their horizon of being, for example, in being in the workplace. In this tripartite
distinction, meaning is that which constitutes what is understood (Heidegger, 1962,
pp. 193, 152) in the workplace, “giving it an axis around which it can organise itself”.
So, “meaning signifies the ‘upon which’[15], of a primary projection in terms
of which an issue”, in this case unfolding within discourses of work-based learning,
HESWBL “can be conceived in its possibility as that which it is” (Heidegger, 1962, p. 371, 324).
1,2 As Heidegger (1962, pp. 371, 324) makes plain what is required now is no less than that
we study the hidden projection which underlies the interpretation of knowledge as
objects in the opening section.
In a series of lectures presented as The Principle of Reason, Heidegger (1991, p. 28)
answers his own earlier question; namely, for him it is that eponymous principle
140 “that bepowers everything insofar as reason [y] ” and in “complete fulfilment of the
demand for reason”. For Heidegger, what continually unfolds from the mighty
principle of reason: “nothing is without reason”, “is that modern technology pushes
towards the greatest possible perfection” (Heidegger, 1991, p. 121). It does so on the
basis of the “calculability of objects” (Heidegger, 1991, p. 121) and the very fact that as
we have witnessed already in the opening section of this paper:
The “subject” demands that a “reason” be brought forth for the “object” only because the
subject has long ceased to let the being be in its ownground[16] (Caputo, 1987, p. 223;
Heidegger, 1991, pp. 26-7).
In contrast, and in reflecting on the observations from the two workshops in the
preceding section the paper has sought to uncover the significance of an education in
our relationship with being. There is always the possibility that our short exegesis on
the temporality of being is considered to be solely of interest to those involved in
specialist discourses of philosophy. In fact, as Heidegger (1977b , pp. 115-54) points out
in his own reflections on “The age of the world picture”:
Every science is, as research grounded upon the projection of a circumscribed object sphere
and is therefore a science of individualized character [y]. Specialisation is not the
consequence but the foundation of the progress of all research” (Heidegger, 1977b, p. 123).
Ironically, such specialisation, which may block some readings of the foregoing
exegesis, is itself a product of technological framing. For Heidegger (1977c, pp. 155-62),
this constitutes the “upon which” of the revealing of meaning in all of the sciences.
In Heidegger’s attempt to rethink the history of western thinking (Mulhall, 2003),
which this paper has sought to capture in microcosm by opening reflection on the
temporal structures of being in the workplace constituted by Higher Education, his
writings serve to put in question our very sense of what is and our temporal
relationship with being. In so doing, it is hoped the paper serves in “making strange”
(Brecht used the term Verfremdungseffect[16] ) our everyday sense that we make of the
world of Higher Education and of the workplace more generally. For Brecht, such
strangeness engenders an attitude of thoughtfulness and questioning, which it is
hoped here will be directed towards the possible dangers of the current hegemony of
the means-ends structured technological “framing” of education (Peim and Flint, 2009).
For Heidegger (1977d, p. 12) “technology is [y] no mere means”, however. “ [y] It
is a way of revealing” the world. In the opening reflections on the production of
knowledges, tacitly our interest had been structured by ontic concerns regarding
the meaning and the truth of what is. On reflection such ontic structures concerning
what is point to the dangers of “the framing” of workplace activity in the competitive
arena of the generation and production of knowledge for the knowledge economy.
And, as we have suggested already, as a revealing of the world technology essentially
opens up the Real to us in a certain way. For example, one way that we have uncovered
is on the basis of the “principle of reason”, upon which the exigencies of science as
research concerning the workplace are grounded.
 As we saw earlier in the reflections upon making observations, and in the revealing “Know how”
of what Heidegger (1977d) calls “das Ge-stell” (the framing), there is always the and “tacit
possible danger of ordering and severely delimiting our world. “Technological
framing”, “das Ge-stell signifies the endeavour or the will to set in place as opposed knowledge”
to a seeking of possibilities among beings” (Peim and Flint, 2009, p. 352). This ordering
and setting in place has already been made apparent in the opening section of
this paper. 141
In fact, Heidegger’s account of technological framing opens reflection upon the
possibility of other forms of revealing through research education. In taking seriously
the claims to multidisciplinarity made in discourses of work-based learning, this paper
deliberately poses questions concerning our relationship with the temporality of being
and the possible hospitality given to a broader education in such a relationship: one
significantly no longer confined to specialist discourses of philosophy or theology
whose prime locus is the workplace.

Notes
1. Anonymous fictional identity to protect the anonymity of those involved in the research in
accord with standard protocols for ethical research [British Education Research Association
(BERA), 2004].
2. Again this is a fictional identity in order to protect the anonymity of participants.
3. “Work-based learning” is represented in this paper by readings of: Boud and Lee, 2005, 2008;
Boud et al., 2005; Scott et al., 2004, 2008; Costley et al., 2010; Garnett et al., 2009;
Gibbons et al., 1994; Lester, 2010; Nowotny et al., 2001; Scott and Morrison, 2010.
4. Technically, Heidegger (1962) uses the term verfallen, meaning falling from an
understanding of being and of the meaning of being. He identifies Dasein as having the
character of being mostly lost in the “they” through “idle chatter”, “curiosity” and
“ambiguity”.
5. Dasein is thrown into the world, not by itself, and can never get back behind its throw;
Dasein’s thrownness is not in its own control. Dasein does not come to rest in the throw, it
remains “in the throw and is sucked into the turbulence of the they” (Heidegger, 1962,
p. 223, 179; Inwood, 1999, pp. 218-20).
6. The “framing” (Stambaugh, 1992, pp. 31-4) is one translation of Heidegger’s (1977e) term for
the essence of technology, das Ge-stell, which as Heidegger notes, cryptically, “is no means
anything technological” (Heidegger, 1977e, p. 4). In the words of Joan Stambaugh (1992, p. 31)
framing “comprises the nongeneric unity of activities involving the verb stellen, to place, put,
set: stellen (challenge), vorstellen (represent), ent-stellen (disfigure); nach-stellen (to be after
someone)” to which we could add, zustellen (render something) and verstellen (disguise).
7. Essentially in the revealing of the framing the world, the earth, humankind are rendered as
Bestand (Heidegger, 1977e, p. 17) “standing reserve” or “available for use” (Heidegger, 1977,
p. 27ff) and open to exploitation.
8. Scott and Morrison (2010) note that professional doctorates, practitioner-based doctorates
and work-based doctorates, now described as “third generation” doctorates.
9. As Hubert Dreyfus and Mark Wrathall (2005a, p. 4) “Being-in-the-world” means that we
always find ourselves in the world in a particular way – we have a there which is a
meaningfully structured situation in which to act and exist – and we are always disposed to
things in a particular way, they always matter to us somehow. Our disposedness is revealed
to us in the way moods govern and structure our comportment by disposing us differentially
to ‘things’ ‘in the world’.
HESWBL 10. Sandra Vandermerwe (1999) examines the ways in which market dynamics of a capitalist
system, which is the obvious outward manifestation of Heidegger’s “framing”, can be
1,2 influenced by an identity such as “customer”; an identity now used increasingly in HE in
place of “student”.
11. In the German language “mood” is also a grammatical category, which makes possible for
speakers to signal their attitude to what they are saying, in particular to indicate whether
142 what they are saying is to be understood as a fact, a possibility or a command (Durrell, 2002,
pp. 323-47.
12. Heidegger recognises as “mauthentic” is that in already being caught up in the completely
anonymous “they” (das Man)-in somewhat outmoded English we would see “what ‘one’ does
in such situations – where Dasein is looking ‘away from itself’ ”. Heidegger’s contention is
that in this existential understanding of futural he has uncovered the underlying
presupposition behind our ordinary everyday understanding of the future – usually
conceived as the not yet now (Gorner, 2007, pp. 156-7; Heidegger, 1962, pp. 472-80 (420-8)).
Heidegger also recognises an authentic “possibility” for Dasein in being “futural” - “in the
moment of vision for its time” (Heidegger, 1962, pp. 435-9 (384-7)).
13. Gegenwärtigen.
14. This is a term much used by Heidegger (1962) in Being and Time.
15. Das Woraufhin.
16. This is John Caputo’s translation of the original German.

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Further reading
Castell, M. (2000), The Rise of the Network Society, 2nd edn., Blackwell Publishers, Oxford.

Corresponding author
Kevin J. Flint can be contacted at: kevin.flint@ntu.ac.uk

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