How Can We Define Mastery? Reflections on Learning, Embodiment and Professional Identity

Marina Dantas Figueiredo,Ana Sílvia Rocha Ipiranga

doi:10.1590/1807-7692bar2015150019

Marina Dantas Figueiredo, Ana Sílvia Rocha Ipiranga

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1590/1807-7692bar2015150019

Copy DOI

Abstract

In this article we reflect upon the knowledge production process through the body in the social-material arrangement of craft. Resorting to the embodiment paradigm, we aim to theoretically understand how someone reaches the mastery that characterizes the domain of craft skill. In analogy with craft practices, we analyze how knowledge that relies under practical performances such as skill are built and kept through the bodily relation with the making of things in the immediate contact with the world. At the end, we conclude that such reflections about mastery may be useful to investigations on professional identity.

Highlights

This article aims to foster a reflection on the corporal knowledge-production process in the socialmaterial arrangement of craft
As mastery can be defined as practical proficiency, or as the embodied comprehension of a practical knowledge, we focus on the way how skill constitutes and maintains itself through the bodily relation that someone achieves while performing practices with high levels of proficiency
Within Organization Studies (OS), the mentioned works are relevant, especially when we discuss them side by side with theoretical articulations that we have developed in this article, because they enable the study of professional identity from an embodied dimension (Barzin, 2013)

Summary

Introduction

This article aims to foster a reflection on the corporal knowledge-production process in the socialmaterial arrangement of craft. Falling back upon phenomenology to explain the learning experience as a result of the perception of the living body, we seek to theoretically understand how one achieves the so-called mastery related to craftwork know-how. The intended contribution to the field of Organization Studies (OS) is to theoretically reinforce the concept of mastery as a way to understand skill as resulting from knowledge embodiment. In this respect, even though practice-based studies on OS have privileged the analysis of knowledge embodiment as lived experience, the lack of concrete references to the cultural context where it takes place ends up making most of those studies describe such processes in a superficial way (Sandberg & Dall’Alba, 2009). While traditional ontology takes the principle of detachment – meaning people are essentially detached from the world, but get connected to it as they perform and experience many practical activities during the process of living in the world – a phenomenological perspective such as the one we take in this article considers that the entwinement of the person with the world is the defining condition of being

Objectives

Discussion

Conclusion