Community of practice

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The concept of a community of practice (often abbreviated as CoP) refers to the process of social learning that occurs when people who have a common interest in some subject or problem collaborate over an extended period to share ideas, find solutions, and build innovations.

The term was first used in 1991 by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger who used it in relation to situated learning as part of an attempt to "rethink learning" at the Institute for Research on Learning. In 1998, the theorist Etienne Wenger extended the concept and applied it to other contexts, including organizational settings. More recently Communities of Practice have become associated with knowledge management as people have begun to see them as ways of developing social capital, nurturing new knowledge, stimulating innovation or sharing existing tacit knowledge within an organization. It is now an accepted part of organizational development (OD).

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Key Concepts

The earlier work of Lave and Wenger (1991) had the notion of legitimate peripheral participation as the central process in Communities of Practice. In his later work Wenger abandoned the concept of legitimate peripheral participation and used the idea the inherent tension in a Duality instead.

Wenger (1998) described CoPs in terms of the interplay of four fundamental dualities - participation vs reification, designed vs emergent, identification vs negotiability and local vs global although, possibly because of the possible link to Knowledge management, the participation vs reification duality has been the focus of most interest.

A brief history of the concept of Communities of Practice can be found here.

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Communities of Practice

The term Communities of Practice - though because of the words chosen for it, the term seems as though it stands just for shared practice - was created to refer to a larger whole. It is a common misconception that other types of communities are needed to refer to a different philosophical foundation. The theoretical foundation for the below mentioned 'community types' all root in what has been described for Communities of Practice (see discussion of this article). However, it might serve a specific practical purpose to refer to a specific type of Community of Practice using more illustrative expressions such as:

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Communities of Practice and Knowledge Management

The benefits that Communities of Practice claimed as part of a Knowledge Management programme have led them to become the focus of much attention. Earlier approaches to KM treated knowledge as object (Explicit knowledge); however Communities of Practice offer a way to theorise tacit knowledge which can not easily be captured, codified and stored.

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See also

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External links

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References

  • {{cite book

|author=Paul Hildreth and Chris Kimble |year=2004 |title=Knowledge Networks: Innovation through Communities of Practice |publisher=Idea Group Inc |location = London / Hershey |id=ISBN 159140200X }}

  • Saint-Onge, H & Wallace, D, Leveraging Communities of Practice, Butterworth Heinemann, 2003.
  • Wenger, E, McDermott, R & Snyder, W.M., Cultivating Communities of Practice, HBS press 2002.
  • Wenger E, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity, Cambridge University Press, 1998.
  • Lave, J & Wenger E, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.af:Gemeenskap van praktyk

fr:Communauté de pratique de:Community of Practice es:Comunidades de práctica hu:Gyakorlati_közösségek ru:Сообщество практикующих

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