Harmonizing: an interpretative category to understand the processes of creation and sharing of knowledge in an organizational context

Every organized working context is based on a system of practices-in-action. Practicing the actors produce everyday knowledge. These processes of creation and sharing of knowledge live and grow in a composite repertory of “habitual way” to do things. The crucial point of all the debate about practice is located in the search of a possible interpretation of the elements that push the actors to practice in a potentially stable way in time. To give a possible interpretation of the process of “knowing-in-action”, the concept of harmonizing could represent a perspective of meditation and debate. Every job is made by passages and subdivisions of charges of duties. To work means also to subdivide in the personal agenda the charges of work. This subdivision is not taken for granted but it is the result of a complex mechanism composed by practice valuations. Similarly to the music, in working life people follow a rhythm, a way. The job flows on the score, the agenda of the worker completes itself through the division of tasks. The harmonization makes the work not too unpleasant, it subdivides and scans in the time the incumbencies. The grave sonorities harmonize themselves with the high ones, hard works harmonize themselves with less difficult tasks. A job takes life in the harmonization of different practices of a practitioner. Harmonizing the working day develops itself in the synthesis of different situated practices and in the continuous production of knowledge. The term “harmony” derives directly from the Greek and indicates a concordant link among elements. To harmonize means to synthesize the different parts in proportion and to make them pleasant in their apposition. The harmony is an accordance among different “voices”. This harmonization is not something individual, but it is built in the sociality. In the organizational working contexts to harmonize means to accord your own job with the others ones. Like an orchestra that plays a waltz, every practitioner harmonizes her/his music with the others. Music and work are not individual fields of activities but they are built in the relationship with other practitioners. Playing together, the workers build themselves the daily activities; in the relationship, in the collaboration, every practitioner orients the activities of the others ones. The concept of harmonization could be considered as a useful interpretative category to understand the processes of creation and sharing of knowledge in an organizational context. This paper has the intent to reflect about the theoretical valence of the harmonizing concept, developing a critic parallel with other interpretative typologies already developed in the academic literature. This concept presupposes a dynamicity of doing-in-action, it is opposed to the “staticity” of the relationships among actors. In conclusion, in the light of this abstract, this theoretical paper wants to reflect about the harmonizing concept as an interpretative category of creation and sharing of knowledge. Developing a parallel with the music, this paper wants to demonstrate the heuristic potential of this concept to understand and to study an organizational context.