Communities of Practice

by Steve Borgatti

This a notion developed by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, and further elaborated by Wenger in an influential book called Communities of Practice. In the book, he reports on an ethnographic study he did of a claims processing unit of an insurance company. 

[Please read the vignette drawn from that book in the course packet.]

Wenger views the claims processing unit as a community of practice. A community of practice is a set of interacting people engaged in a common practice. Practice refers to the work people do, but also to the ideas behind it -- the shared understandings and the activities.  Practice does not exist in the abstract -- it exists because people are engaged in actions whose meanings they create and negotiate with each other.  Practice is not in the books or tools or forms, though it may involve all these artifacts.

Communities of practice are a basic way that humans accomplish work. There are three key dimensions here:

1. mutual engagement
2. joint enterprise
3. shared repertoire

Mutual engagement refers to the amount and pattern of interaction among the members of the community.  Through their interactions, they shape the group's culture and it's practices. No matter how well-specified their work might appear, in fact when you examine what happens is a result of their interactions. It just emerges.

Membership is more than just being declared a member or being born with a characteristic -- interaction is also necessary. Typically this means that geographic proximity is also necessary, or at least helpful.

Three important aspects of mutual engagement are

• enabling elements: e.g., Roberta's cookies
• diversity: complementarity and distributed cognition
• multiplexity: joined by a variety of ties, including conflict

Joint enterprise refers to the common purpose that binds the people together and provides a unifying goal and coherence for their actions. Three important aspects to attend to:

• negotiated goals. Sometimes this joint enterprise entails elements that are not exactly what management intends. The group develops a conception of their joint goals through mutual engagement.
• indigenous purpose. In part the goals of the group are determined by the larger structure in which they are embedded. But the group itself creates its own identity, goals, enterprise.
• mutual accountability. The joint enterprise is not like McDonald's mission statement which is tacked on the wall and completely ignored. Because it is indigenous, and it is constructed by mutual negotiation, it creates a regime of mutual accountability. People are responsible to each other for sharing information & making each other's lives easier, and they enforce this themselves when it really is a community of practice

Shared repertoire refers to the continual development and maintenance of a shared repertoire of procedures, techniques, shortcuts, jargon, tools, forms, symbols, mental categories, actions, concepts, etc. This is the most obvious outcome of a community of practice.

Three aspects of shared repertoire are worth noting.

• shared history. Because the repertoire is built up and shaped over time by the participants themselves, they are part of their shared history and give a sense of identity and belongingness
• richness. The shared repertoire provides a language for communicating meaning. The larger the repertoire, the easier to express meanings because there is more to work with
• ambiguity. How elements of the repertoire are viewed and used is always up for interpretation. For example, chairs can be viewed as just what you sit on, or as symbols of how management views the claims processing unit.