They’ve Gotta Learn Something Unless They’re Just Out To Lunch: Learning and Identity in the Community of a Salmon Hatchery

Expert practical knowledge emerges through sustained participation in some community of practice. However, participation alone is not the sole factor that contributes to high levels of expertise in the workplace. Our multi-year ethnographic study of one fish hatchery and associated activity systems shows that deeper experiential (practical) and conceptual (scientific) knowledge emerged when fish culturists initiated and designed scientific experiments to improve hatchery practice. However, experimentation entered contradictions into the hatchery system. On the one hand, there was the fish culturists’ embodied, practical knowledge built up over many years of experience and, on the other hand, experimentation demanded from them an abstract, formal, decontextualized scientific knowledge. These two forms of knowing, which constitute the dialectic of practical understanding and explaining, contributed toward the fish culturists’ development as experts. Through participation and reflection, the fish culturists assumed and enacted their evolving identities as fish culturists among other hatchery colleagues and the support biologists who provide science-based advice to the hatchery. When aspects of mediation by other members of community were absent, contradictions arose within the activity system that in some situations led to breakdowns. These mediated relationships of individuals and communities that unfold over historic time are fruitfully modeled by activity theory. Our research thereby contributes to understanding the development of expertise and identity in the workplace, the role of practical understanding and interpretation, and the role of mediation by other community members in development and identity.