Community of practice or practices of a community?

Gherardi, S. (2009). Community of practice or practices of a community?. In S. J. Armstrong & C. V. Fukami The SAGE handbook of management learning, education and development (pp. 514-530). London: SAGE Publications Ltd doi: 10.4135/9780857021038.n27

May 9, 2020

By S. Gherardi

Introduction

• CoP originally set out for “community [to] replace the individual as the learning subject and the repository of knowledge as a collective heritage”
• Organizations were also considered as a community of communities
• CoPs helped understand community, as a collective subject, become a source of agency
• The concept of CoP originally developed by Lave and Wenger “has been appropriated by the community of management scholars”
• This paper looks at how CoP is used in the virtual community as empirical objects of research”

CoP in the Learning Literature

• Lave and Wenger wanted to know “the process of learning as a trajectory of participation”
• CoP = situated learning in social situations and situated-in-materiality “the instruments that mediate with the external world”
• Lave and Wenger claim that learning happens in the process of participating in a group and it does not exist alone in the minds of individuals
• Therefore, learning happens in the community, and the community as a collective learns together
• Knowledge is linked with “technology of practice and the culture of that practice”
• Lave and Wenger’s studies focused on the way situated learning “concerns the process by which newcomers become part of a community of practice” ((Lave and Wenger, 1991: 29)
• The process of participating conducts learning as well

CoP in the Knowledge Management Literature

• CoPs expanded to management literature as Wenger continued his practice as a consultant and collaborated with authors of diverse disciplinary backgrounds
• There are debates on “whether or not a certain set of workers can be defined a community of practice”
• Wenger has left “a margin of ambiguity in his work” on what he means by “community”
• “…management cannot establish a CoP but only facilitate its spontaneous emergence”
• CoP is “not a stable or static entity… it evolves over time…”
• These kinds of definitions makes it hard to pin down the boundaries and characteristics of the community
• CoPs bring value to organizations by:
  • Driving strategy
  • Starting new lines of business
  • Solving problems quickly
  • Transferring best practices
  • Develop professional skills
  • Recruit and retain talent
• So, as long as a communities do these things, are they a CoP?
• Community in this case is not a formal work group, not a project team, not an informal network; though they share the same qualities
• In Wenger’s version of CoP, the community is always a body of practitioners within the same organization
• “management cannot form a CoP, it can only cultivate one”
• CoPs are manageable—if they’re not, it is not a CoP

CoP in the On-Line Communities in Literature

• In this body of literature, the “’the Other’ is face-to-face interaction and the relative sociality”
• Debates: The research questions are whether or not these can be called communities of practice, and what facilitates or obstructs their becoming ‘communities’ in the absence of face-to-face interaction.”
• Themes in debates:
  • “work groups increasingly use ICT technologies to collaborate ‘normally’, so that the sharing of information and knowledge takes place on an everyday basis;
  • ICT technologies make it possible to work at a distance in a relatively stable and continuous way, or in more sporadic and limited form, and the groups thus brought into in contact may constitute a CoP;
  • ICT technologies are also used outside work, and around them communities which share interests and engage in intense social exchanges are spontaneously developed;
  • technology itself, with its variability that facilitates synchronous interaction (telephony, whiteboard, slides, and video links), asynchronous interaction (e-mails, discussion boards, e-mail lists, wikis and blogs), and access to stored information (file sharing, document archives, newsletters), and different forms of interaction (talking, writing, listening), can differently mediate the formation or otherwise of a CoP.”
• CoP in this literature highlight “the social competences necessary to make up for a missing interactive dimension with technology, but without forgoing the managerial dream of being able to create and manage a CoP by simple diktat or via technology.”

Criticisms to Communities of Practice and Beyond

(The following describe the different ways CoPs are conceptualized since inception from Lave and Wenger)

Community

• CoPs assume that communities are “harmonious… where conflict neither exists nor is allowed”
• Lindkvist (2005) claims that “community” within the concept of CoP should only be used in the context of occupational communities studied by Lave. Lave studied communities involving apprenticeship relationships between the master and pupil. In this context, knowledge is homogenous within the tightly knit community
  • (Lindkvist, L.‘Knowledge communities and knowledge collectivities: A typology of knowledge work in groups’Journal of Management Studies42(6)1189–210. (2005)http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6486.2005.00538.x)
• “Community” in the concept of CoP outside of this context may be project-based and therefore short lived. The knowledge in this context becomes diversified and distributed, which is a contrast to Lave’s version of homogenous knowledge within a community”
• Therefore, the way community is seen today has evolved from developing homogenous versus diversified knowledge
  • So, which one do I stick to?

Power

• In Lave and Wenger’s early work, influential power from experience was important to consider within a community. Power dynamics shaped the participation of newcomers. The significance of power in defining CoPs slowly faded since then.
• Does this mean that in order to form a community, there needs to be boundaries of power and hierarchy?

Trust

• “the relation between trust and knowledge sharing is taken for granted”
• “trust is not an attribute of a group, nor an automatic social effect”
• It is “the contingent product of a social construction of trust”; trust is contingent within a community, and is “relat[ed] to power dynamics within the group between newcomers and old-timers…”
  • Carlile, P. R.‘Transferring, translating, and transforming: An integrative framework for managing knowledge across boundaries’Organization Science15(5)555–68(2004)http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/orsc.1040.0094

Participation

• Participation vs socialization
• When following the concept of CoP as an apprenticeship model, the participation to learning process is linear “from being a novice to being an expert”. Thus, the knowledge outcomes are path-dependent
  • Handley, K.Sturdy, A.Fincham, R.Clark, T.‘Within and beyond communities of practice: Making sense of learning through participation, identity and practice’Journal of Management Studies43(3)641–53(2006)http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6486.2006.00605.x
  • Handley, K.Sturdy, A.Fincham, R.Clark, T.‘Researching situated learning: Participation, identity and practices in client-consultant relationship’Management Learning38(2)173–91(2007)http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1350507607075774
• The knowledge outcomes in CoPs are also seen to be dependent on the individual
• Participating can mean to follow a certain path
• Socializing is to adapt, and thus makes the structure of the community dynamic
• Will I consider the definition of participation as following a process, or organic within the community?

Size, spatial reach, duration

• “Amin (2002) s suggests that location, proximity, and distance should be considered relationally, rather than as geographically determined.”
  • Amin, A.‘Spatialities of globalisation’Environment and Planning A34385–99. (2002)http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/a3439
• Communities also move at a different pace
• CoPs are “empirical phenomena” depending on various dimensions of their environment
• Rather than analyzing every instance of a CoP based on its variability, the author suggests “the concept of CoP should be abandoned for different definitions (collectivities, networks, configurations) that focus on the nature of knowledge and the processes of its creation and treatment.”

From CoP to PoC

• The author reviews literature to propose a reversal of the concept of CoP
  • (Brown and Duguid, 2001; Gherardi et al., 1998; Roberts, 2006; Swan et al., 2002)
• Claims that greater emphasis needs to be placed on practices in a community since common activities create a sense of community and incorporates the necessary elements of power and conflict, which a community needs
• The definition of practice as a concept is also as debatable as community
• …

I stopped here because the author’s description of PoC was starting to get confusing; I don’t want to use the concept of PoC for my research, but this paper shows good breadth of criticisms on Lave and Wenger’s work in CoPs.