"Significance and effects of Michael Polanyi’s work on Economics, as well as other knowledge fields"

2 Abstract In one of my bachelor courses I had Polanyi's paper for discussion and that was the moment of my introduction to the idea of Tacit Knowledge. Generally, most people understand what is Tacit Knowledge or at least can guess what it means, however only a small portion of them really understand the implications and applications that this idea has in real life. I was motivated to find out how significant is this concept of tacit knowledge to economics and many other different knowledge fields. As such, my main research question is: how exactly did Michael Polanyi’s concept of “Tacit Knowledge” managed to effect different knowledge fields over a long period of time? In order to do this, I studied Michael Polanyi's Tacit Knowledge and how it was used in later works from different knowledge fields, as well as the implications of those uses. I achieve this by finding papers that are deeply connected to Polanyi's Tacit Knowledge, then read and analyse them. To give a better view of the situation, I also do an analysis on respective knowledge fields, as in how they where effected by Tacit Knowledge. The key aspects that I use, is how often Polanyi's Tacit Knowledge is being cited through time, as well as the papers that use that concept. One of interesting findings of my paper is that tacit knowledge has been cited a lot more often in the recent years, which indicates that its relative significance in general has significantly increased in the last 10 to 15 years. Another interesting finding is that Tacit Knowledge has been incorporated in many ways and some of them are significant in their own respective fields. When presenting those analysis, I find out that not surprisingly Polanyi's breath managed to reach many different knowledge fields, be that in a small and insignificant ways, or having a important impacts on entire respective fields like Business Economics or Computer Since. By combining all those findings I draw a conclusion that Polanyi's work managed to leave an imprint in history of science.