Integrating Knowledge through Communication - the Case of Experts and Decision Makers

This paper sheds light on the communication processes through which experts and decision makers integrate their domain specific knowledge in decision making. Understanding knowledge integration as a communicative process, the study analyzes the communicative challenges that are present when communicating expert knowledge across its disciplinary boundaries and discusses practices to overcome them. We present a communication framework that outlines the dimensions of the evolving communicative context on which experts and decision makers refer when attempting to integrate knowledge. The framework is used as a conceptual lens for the analysis of the knowledge communication process in three case studies: the knowledge communication between IT-analysts and managers, between facility management consultants and their clients, and between policy analysts and public policy makers. The major communicative challenges that we found recurrently in these cases were: implicit misunderstandings because of differences in language use, lacking common ground, lacking big picture, and relational tensions in view of the knowledge gap. To deal with these challenges, experts and decision makers recurrently engage in the combined practices of boundary spanning (primarily: face-to-face conversations) and in the use of boundary objects.