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Warwick Business School

Bring Knowledge to Life:A Case Study of

National Palace Museum, Taipei

Jimmy HuangWarwick Business School

Can knowledge trigger emotionexperience?

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Warwick Business School

Intellectual origins (I)

• Knowledge and knowing– Encultured knowledge (Blackler, 1995)– Felt quality of knowing (Piaget, 1958)– Generative dance between knowledge and

knowing (Cook & Brown, 1999)– “If you have to ask what jazz is, you are never

going to get to know” (Geerts, 1983, p. 94)

Warwick Business School

Intellectual origins (II)

• Emotion experience– The conscious appraisal of external stimuli,

experience of changes in core affect, overt readinessfor action(s) to direct away or towards the stimuli(Russell, 2003)

– First and second order emotion experience (Lambie &Marcel, 2002)

– The notion of hodological space (Lewis, 1952; Frijda,2005)

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Warwick Business School

Knowing as emotion experience

• Why individuals yield different emotionexperiences to the same knowledgepresented to them?

• How can the process of knowing bedesigned and enacted to make it becomea more meaningful experience?

Warwick Business School

Methods• Research design: a grounded theory approach

(Strauss & Corbin, 1998)• Data collection

– Between December 2006 and April 2009– Interviewing: 19 interviewees– Focus groups: 20 participants– Participative observations: 14 guided tours– Documentations

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National Palace Museum, Taipei

Warwick Business School

Emerging findings• Organising exhibitions as a means of

actualising institutional goals• Exhibitions as encapsulated spaces of

cultural knowing• Reconstructing, narrating and

experiencing culture• Emotionalising knowledge

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Coding schemes

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Warwick Business School

This ten-lobed lotus bowl has gently curved sides, asubtly flaring rim, smooth transition from one petal lobeto the next, and a relatively tall ring foot. The blue-greenglaze, from rim to the base, is uniformly thin and opaque,with fine crackling. During firing, this piece wassupported by five tiny points underneath the ring foot,and these are the only parts of the body not covered bythe glaze. At these points, it is possible to make out thegrayish-yellow unglazed ceramic body.

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New theory

Open coding

Axial coding

Selectivecoding

Open sampling

Relational &variationalsampling

Discriminatesampling

Theoreticalsaturation

Codingprocesses

Samplingprocesses

New theory

Open coding

Axial coding

Selectivecoding

Open sampling

Relational &variationalsampling

Discriminatesampling

Theoreticalsaturation

Codingprocesses

Samplingprocesses

Densifyingcategories

Developing &Relating

categories

Maximizingcategories

Samplingfoci

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New theory

Opencoding

Axialcoding

Selectivecoding

Opensampling

Relational &variationalsampling

Discriminatesampling

Theoreticalsaturation

Codingprocedures

Samplingguidelines

Generatingbuildingblocks

Relatingstructure with

process

Integration &refinement

Contextualframing

Structural &processual

shaping

Storylinerefining

Emergingtheory

Samplingdecisions

Selectivecodingphase

Axialcodingphase

Opencodingphase

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Conclusion and implications

• Theoretical implications– Adding emotion experience to the theorisation of

knowledge and knowing– The process of emotionalising knowledge

• Methodological implications– How theoretical opportunities emerged during a

grounded theory can be managed?– The potential of using grounded theory to materialise

interdisciplinary research