Community of practice

"CoP" redirects here. This article is about "Communities of Practice". For other uses of CoP, see CoP (disambiguation).

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).

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 of 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.

From a functional and experiential perspective, perhaps William Snyder and Xavier de Souza Briggs (2003) have provided the most practical definition (to date) for the 'community-of-practice' term in their research paper entitled "Communities of Practice: A New Tool For Government Managers" ( [1] ) (page 7): "Communities of practice steward the knowledge assets of organizations and society."

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

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:

• Communities of Action
• Communities of Circumstance
• Communities of Interest
• Communities of Position
• Communities of Purpose

Communities of Practice (The Scientific Perspective)

As revealed in the latest Snyder & Souza-Briggs “Communities of Practice” research publication ( [2] ), all communities of practice (CoPs) steward the knowledge-assets of organizations and societies: Scientific CoPs are no exception in this regard.

The detailed scientific analysis of the unique applications of knowledge-assets that take place within scientific communities of practice has become an area of intense research in recent years; particularly as many western nations begin to transition into Science & Technology Information Age economies. As Coakes & Clark make clear in their latest 2006 communities of practice research ( “Communities of Practice In Information & Knowledge Management” [ [3] ] ), the proper application of knowledge-assets by pertinent communities of practice has suddenly become a central business concern of many modern societies.

Said another way, the specific approaches utilized by scientific CoPs in the development and the application of their scientific knowledge-assets is rapidly becoming the new economic engine of many former Industry-based nations, as they transition into Science-Based Societies.

Obviously, ‘what really works’ in the operation of scientific CoPs, and ‘what doesn’t work’ -- as scientific organizations and societies attempt to create and manage new scientific knowledge -- is a topic that demands rigorous scientific investigation.

The most immediately-distinguishing factor about scientific communities of practice, is that all scientific CoPs are unified, and readily distinguishable from all other CoPs, by their strict adherence to the use of the scientific method in the day-to-day operations that create and manage scientific knowledge:

1. By definition, all scientific CoPs develop and steward scientific knowledge-assets; after all, the Latin root for ‘science’ means ‘having knowledge’. All scientific organizations are knowledge management organizations.

2. Almost without exception, scientific CoPs also steward the learning-assets of their organizations: Again, by definition, all succesful scientific research organizations must possess a vibrant CoP learning-asset dimension. All scientific research organizations engage in organizational learning, as they create new scientific knowledge.

3. In addition, scientific CoPs almost universally steward suffering-abatement-assets that are used daily by the organization. As an example, consider the stated mission of the U.S. Food & Drug Administration to ensure the safety & efficacy of all American drug products & medical devices: All legally-authorized medical organizations in the U.S. (and in most Western nations) have a counter-part scientific CoP dimension to respond to this federal mandate. Other examples of this same principle include all nuclear energy research facilities, aircraft manufacturers, and nanomolecule design organizations, that have similar responsiblities to promote the safety and quality-of-life of citizens worldwide.

Scientific CoPs in most Western nations, such as the United States, demonstrate 3 additional characteristics in their operation that are remarkable:

1. Ever since the release of the Snyder & Souza-Briggs “Community-of-Practice” research (and their articulation of the landmark CoP definition, as cited above) scientists now understand that their scientific CoPs are always operating (24/7). All grant-funded science in the U.S., especially government-supported clinical medicine organizations, always operates in a scientific CoP setting.

2. Scientific CoPs operate principally at the informal organizational level, not at the formal, legal, and administrative levels of organizational structure. The human interactions that steward the knowledge-assets, the learning-assets and the suffering-abatement assets of scientific CoPs can usually not be located in the organizational “org-chart” of formal roles and responsibilities, but rather at the informal level of professional interactions for ‘how things really get done’ in the organization.

3. The quality of the knowledge-assets, learning-assets, and suffering-abatement assets of any given scientific CoP can be measured scientifically. The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has acknowledged the importance of precisely measuring the quality of the CoP assets stewarded by U.S. scientific organizations in such initiatives as its NIST Baldrige National Quality Program Health Care Criteria ( [[4]] ).

The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) has also recently acknowledged the validity and the power of the scientific communities of practice approach to measuring the 'value' of NIH-sponsored scientific research with the launching of the new NIH Office of Behavioral & Social Science Research intiative (see page 5 of the NIH "Healthier Lives Through Behavioral & Social Sciences Research" Report { [5] } ).

Many credible elements of the American academic community are now insisting upon an early educational exposure of students to basic scientific communities of practice principles. Examples of ongoing research in this promising area of early childhood education in scientific CoP principles include Northwestern University’s “Bootstrapping a Community of Practice: Learning Science by Doing Projects in a High School Classroom Program” [6].

The U.S. National Academy of Sciences has recently become even more strident in this regard, insisting that the scientific community must actively pursue the creation of more-useful communities of practice in science & technology on a global scale [7]: This new scientific CoP focus by the National Academy of Science falls under its high-priority Science & Technology for Sustainability (STS) Program [8].

Communities of Practice and Organizational Learning

For Etienne Wenger, learning is central to human identity. A primary focus of Wenger’s work is on learning as social participation – the individual as an active participant in the practices of social communities, and constructing his/her identity through these communities. From this understanding develops the concept of the community of practice: a group of individuals participating in communal activity, and experiencing/continuously creating their shared identity through engaging in and contributing to the practices of their communities.

For Wenger, organizational learning of the deep conceptual type is best facilitated if the realities of communities of practice are recognised when the change process is designed.

“For organizations, … learning is an issue of sustaining the interconnected communities of practice through which an organization knows what it knows and thus becomes effective and valuable as an organisation” (Wenger, 1998, p. 8)

Wenger describes the “negotiation of meaning” as how we experience the world and our engagement in it as meaningful. If all change involves a process of learning, then effective change processes consciously facilitate negotiation of meaning. In his model that negotiation consists of two interrelated components:

• Reification: He describes this process as central to every practice. It involves taking that which is abstract and turning it into a “congealed” form, represented for example in documents and symbols. Reification is essential for preventing fluid and informal group activity from getting in the way of co-ordination and mutual understanding. Reification on its own, and insufficiently supported, is not able to support the learning process, however.

“But the power of reification – its succinctness, its portability, its potential physical presence, its focusing effect – is also its danger … Procedures can hide broader meanings in blind sequences of operations. And the knowledge of a formula can lead to the illusion that one fully understands the processes it describes.” (Wenger, 1998, p. 61)

• Participation: Participation, the second element in the negotiation of meaning, requires active involvement in social processes. It involves participants not just in translating the reified description/prescription into embodied experience, but in recontextualising its meaning. Wenger describes participation as essential for getting around the potential stiffness (or, alternatively, the ambiguity) of reification.

“… If we believe that people in organisations contribute to organisational goals by participating inventively in practices that can never be fully captured by institutionalised processes …. we will have to value the work of community building and make sure that participants have access to the resources necessary to learn what they need to learn in order to take actions and make decisions that fully engage their own knowledgeability.” (Wenger, 1998, p. 10)

Crucially, Wenger describes the relationship between reification and participation as a dialectical one: neither element can be considered in isolation if the learning/change process is to be helpfully understood.

“Explicit knowledge is … not freed from the tacit. Formal processes are not freed from the informal. In fact, in terms of meaningfulness, the opposite is more likely … In general, viewed as reification, a more abstract formulation will require more intense and specific participation to remain meaningful, not less.” (Wenger, 1998, p. 67)

Wenger calls the successful interaction of reification and participation the “alignment” of individuals with the communal learning task. Alignment requires the ability to co-ordinate perspectives and actions in order to direct energies to a common purpose. The challenge of alignment, Wenger suggests, is to connect local efforts to broader styles and discourses in ways that allow learners to invest their energy in them.

“Alignment requires specific forms of participation and reification to support the required co-ordination … With insufficient participation, our relations to broader enterprises tend to remain literal and procedural: our co-ordination tends to be based on compliance rather than participation in meaning … With insufficient reification, co-ordination across time and space may depend too much on the partiality of specific participants, or it may simply be too vague, illusory or contentious to create alignment.” (Wenger, 1998, p. 187)

To the extent that a deep conceptual change involves importing practices and perspectives from one community of practice into another, such change involves what Wenger calls “boundary encounters.” Such encounters change the way each community defines its own identity and practice. Crucial to the success of the boundary encounter is the role of highly skilled “brokers”, who straddle different communities of practice and facilitate the exchange process.

“The job of brokering is complex. It involves processes of translation, co-ordination and alignment between perspectives. It requires enough legitimacy to influence the development of a practice, mobilise attention and address conflicting interests. It also requires the ability to link practices by facilitating transactions between them, and to cause learning by introducing into a practice elements of another. Toward this end, brokering provides a participative connection – not because reification is not involved, but because what brokers press into service to connect practices is their experience of multi-membership and the possibilities for negotiation inherent in participation.” (Wenger, 1998, p. 109)

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.

• The relationship between CoPs and Knowledge Management is discussed in the article: The Duality of Knowledge.

• The relationship between CoPs and organizational knowledge strategy is discussed in the article: Knowledge management as a doughnut: Shaping your knowledge strategy through communities of practice.

Multidisciplinary Communities of Practice

CoPs are usually formed within a single discipline in order to focus efforts in sharing knowledge, solving problems, or innovative ventures. Given the complex nature of the technological and global age in which organizations function, multidisciplinary participation provides an advantage in these efforts because of the expanded focus and even holistic goal that can be achieved.

These communities are much less common than single disciplinary communities of practice, but are growing in importance in developing scientific fields in which knowledge from one branch is unable to advance without contributions from other branches.

See also

• Knowledge management
• Knowledge transfer
• Network of practice
• Organizational learning
• Social network
• Virtual Community of Practice

External links

• Thought Leaders: A list of experts, consultants, authors in the area of CoPs and KM
• Open directory references to Communities of Practice
• Jean Lave, Etienne Wenger and communities of practice
• links to CoPs with the general theme of Nurturing Knowledge from slashdemocracy.org
• Review of Cultivating Communities of Practice by Etienne Wenger
• Community of Practice Resources
• http://www.i-km.com/linkscops.htm
• http://www.intranetfocus.com/information/communities.pdf
• Special Interest Group on Communities Of Practice
• How to make a CoP fly
• http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/404/lesser.pdf
• http://www.elearningeuropa.info/doc.php?id=1483&lng=1&doclng=1
• Etienne Wenger's "Community start up guide"
• CPsquare is a community of practice on communities of practice
• Com-Prac is a global forum on communities of practice
• Communities of practice bibliography
• DARnet wiki - Action Reasearch with distributed communities of practice

Tags

• http://www.citeulike.org/tag/communities_of_practice
• http://del.icio.us/tag/communities_of_practice
• http://del.icio.us/tag/communitiesofpractice
• http://www.citeulike.org/tag/cop
• http://del.icio.us/tag/cop

References

• Lave, J & Wenger E, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
• Wenger E, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity, Cambridge University Press, 1998.
• Wenger, E, McDermott, R & Snyder, W.M., Cultivating Communities of Practice, HBS press 2002.
• Saint-Onge, H & Wallace, D, Leveraging Communities of Practice, Butterworth Heinemann, 2003.
• Paul Hildreth and Chris Kimble (2004). Knowledge Networks: Innovation through Communities of Practice. London / Hershey: Idea Group Inc. ISBN 1-59140-200-X.