Davenport, E.; Hall, H.: Organizational Knowledge and Communities of Practice (2002)
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- Abstract
- A community of practice has recently been defined as "a flexible group of professionals, informally bound by common interests, who interact through interdependent tasks guided by a common purpose thereby embodying a store of common knowledge" (Jubert, 1999, p. 166). The association of communities of practice with the production of collective knowledge has long been recognized, and they have been objects of study for a number of decades in the context of professional communication, particularly communication in science (Abbott, 1988; Bazerman & Paradis, 1991). Recently, however, they have been invoked in the domain of organization studies as sites where people learn and share insights. If, as Stinchcombe suggests, an organization is "a set of stable social relations, dehberately created, with the explicit intention of continuously accomplishing some specific goals or purposes" (Stinchcombe, 1965, p. 142), where does this "flexible" and "embodied" source of knowledge fit? Can communities of practice be harnessed, engineered, and managed like other organizational groups, or does their strength lie in the fact that they operate outside the stable and persistent social relations that characterize the organization?
