Minority Social Workers Share Their Previously Tacit Knowledge: Patterns and Importance of Sharing and the Context

The gap between fieldwork demands and academic knowledge necessitates the sharing of tacit knowledge to ensure continuity of context-appropriate professional knowledge. The research describes and explains patterns of minority social workers' sharing of their previously tacit knowledge, the knowledge's significance and the context where it was acquired. In data drawn from in-depth semi-structured interviews with twenty children and youth workers in Arab welfare bureaus throughout Israel, Arab social workers exposed tacit knowledge they had revealed and shared concerning prolonged institutional deprivation in out-of-home settings that dramatically limited their ability to ensure the minors' rights. This knowledge was shared in four ways: retention, transmission between colleagues, documentation for the future and publication. Social workers invested insufficient efforts to share their tacit knowledge, due to inappropriate relevant professional training and lack of a suitable infrastructure and organisational culture. They were aware that sharing and dissemination of their previously tacit knowledge could serve three players in the Children and Youth Services: the target population (giving them a voice), professionals (uniting their ranks for collective action) and government institutions (reflecting the reality and equipping them with data concerning service gaps). Social work should reconsider the potential value of sharing such knowledge. This pioneer article provides a response to a lacuna in the relevant literature. It traces the sharing/disseminating of previously tacit knowledge by social workers from the Arab minority in Israel, who specialise in care for children and youth in the welfare bureaus. The premise of this study: Sharing previously implicit knowledge is an existential professional need for social workers serving disadvantaged and diverse minorities who do not have adequate context-appropriate knowledge. Each of the interviewees surmised that their previously tacit knowledge was exclusive but, without prior coordination, the findings disclosed a complete knowledge corpus concerning prolonged institutional deprivation in out-of-home settings. Actually, minority social workers rarely share the knowledge they reveal with the relevant professional milieu because of deficient professional training, lack of organisational culture and establishment support. Disseminating previously tacit knowledge could serve the target population of the children and youth, providing them with a voice and increasing the authorities' awareness of the problems in the out-of-home settings, and informing social work educators to prepare their students to cope with this reality. Greater awareness is needed regarding the importance of eliciting and sharing tacit knowledge with the relevant professional players.