نوع مقاله : مقاله پژوهشی
موضوعات
عنوان مقاله English
نویسندگان English
Introduction
In recent years, a significant gap between academia and the profession in urban planning in Iran has been raised, and doubts have emerged about the effectiveness of explicit knowledge (theories, concepts, etc.) in professional practice. In this research, the term “knowledge” is classified into two types: explicit and tacit knowledge (experience, worldview, etc.). Tacit knowledge, in contrast to explicit knowledge, cannot be articulated. Explicit knowledge sources include universities, conferences, academic and professional articles and books, government white papers, and practice guidelines. Sources of tacit knowledge are considered to be the context and the planner-as-person. The term “practice” has referred to what occurs in professional practice and leads to the production of products, namely, the prepared plans. This research has addressed the relationship between urban planning knowledge and practice within consulting firms to identify the gap between urban planning knowledge and practice.
Materials and Methods
In this research, the unit of analysis consists of consulting firms that are members of the Society of Consulting Engineers. In this section, the conceptual-operational model of the research has been presented. Since the majority of consulting firms (86 percent) are located in Tehran, this city has been selected as the case study. The approach of this research has been qualitative, and its nature has been exploratory. The research strategy was thematic analysis, and the data collection method used was semi-structured interviews. The target population of this research has been consulting firms with a Grade 1 ranking in urban planning, located in Tehran, as the main body for preparing urban plans in Iran. Based on random sampling, due to the inability to establish contact and the rejection of the interview request, seven firms have constituted the sample under study. The interviews were conducted between June and September 2024, and the interviewees were the CEOs or heads of the firms’ urban planning departments. After the interviews have been conducted, the coding process has been carried out based on this research’s criteria for thematic analysis, which, in order of importance, have been: alignment with the research question and objective, conceptual significance, and theoretical support, with the software tools ATLAS.ti and Word; and ultimately, 72 codes have been obtained. These codes—emphasizing recurring and in-depth concepts—have been the basis for deriving sub-themes and themes through a combined (deductive and inductive) approach, grounded in both the theoretical foundations and the research’s conceptual-operational model (deductive), as well as the data (inductive).
Findings
This section presents the themes and sub-themes of the detailed relationship between urban planning knowledge and practice within consulting firms in Tehran. The identified themes are: the linkage of explicit knowledge and practice, the linkage of tacit knowledge and practice, and the linkage of both explicit and tacit (hybrid) knowledge and practice. Accordingly, the relationship between explicit knowledge and practice in the firms above is often manifested through preparing specialized plans based on academic knowledge and applying theory in those plans. It also appears in conjunction with tacit knowledge, in the preparation of diverse plans, their procurement through tenders, staff training, the application of both theory and experience in practice, preparing plans and resolving complexities using the expertise of company personnel and regarding specialized components, through outsourcing, recruitment with emphasis on the planner’s experience and personality in addition to academic knowledge, as well as through public advertisements and referrals, and the procurement of both routine and innovative plans. The relationship between tacit knowledge and practice is often manifested through learning from mistakes and from others, storytelling, resolving complexities through consultation with the firm’s experienced personnel, the preparation of routine plans, limited management of tacit knowledge via the use of processes applied in previous routine plans, and aforementioned actions in conjunction with explicit knowledge.
Conclusion
In response to the research question, the relationship between urban planning knowledge and practice within consulting firms is based on both types of knowledge. The relationship between explicit knowledge and practice is based on academic explicit knowledge, and the relationship between tacit knowledge and practice is grounded in individual experience, with emphasis on context—particularly the complex context of decision-making. In the relationship between urban planning knowledge and practice in Tehran, tacit knowledge is predominant. This predominance has intensified in recent years due to the weakening of the financial capacity of consulting firms and skill-orientation within them. In order to achieve the research objective, it must be stated that the relationship between urban planning knowledge and practice in the aforementioned firms indicates the gap between explicit knowledge and practice, as well as between tacit knowledge and practice. The comparison between the context of this research and the global literature reveals that the relationship between urban planning knowledge and practice in the countries that are the context of those studies is more strongly based on explicit knowledge. Regarding the differences in the gap between explicit knowledge and practice in the contexts, while this gap in consulting firms in Tehran mainly stems from structural weaknesses imposed by higher-level institutions, in the context of global studies, it primarily originates from the non-organic (yet systematic) relationship between academia and the profession. Another difference is that the systematic relationship between academia and the profession in the context of global studies is broader than in Iran and the city of Tehran. Another difference can also be considered to be the lack of proficiency of professional inputs in the plan-making process and its hardware and software tools in Tehran, which have not been mentioned in the global literature. Similarities in the gap between explicit knowledge and practice in the mentioned contexts can be stated as a mismatch between this knowledge and the decision-making context in terms of legal and procedural aspects, as well as the observation of an expectation among professionals for theories to be predictive and prescriptive in planning practice. Regarding the gap between tacit knowledge and practice in those contexts, a difference can be identified in the lower formal recognition of experience in professional practice in the city of Tehran. Among the observed similarities is the limited tacit knowledge management system in the profession and its limited connection to the body of knowledge. Among the theoretical implications of the gap between urban planning knowledge and practice in Tehran is the weakening of the credibility of academia and research, and among its professional implications is the loss of the planner’s intermediary role between urban planning knowledge and action in the city. The knowledge contribution of this research to the field of urban planning can be regarded as the substantiation of the gap between explicit knowledge and the practice of urban planning in Tehran, as well as the gap between tacit knowledge and the practice in the city. Moreover, this research has integrated and operationalized the relationship between planning theory and practice in international studies, as well as the relationship between academia and planning practice—considering experiences—in other studies by incorporating additional concepts such as the planner-as-person and the management of tacit knowledge in the context of Tehran; and in fact, it has presented a broader concept of explicit and tacit knowledge in the relationship between planning knowledge and practice in the case study.
کلیدواژهها English
