Community of Practice

Community of practice is a concept emphasizing that learning, knowledge, and identity are ultimately social processes arising from the collective engagement among members of a community. The theory is grounded in the doings, actions, or practices of individuals that take on meaning as the individuals engage with others in shared activities and interests. For communication study, the theory weaves together concerns of joint activity, meaning making, and identity within situated localities.

A community of practice is marked by three characteristics. First, individuals engage in joint enterprises reflecting a shared domain of interest. Individuals undertake tasks and activities that are linked to a commonly understood interest or aspect of the community. For example, insurance claim processors in an office individually undertake the collective work of responding to claims submitted by clients for compensation of medical expenses. Second, by undertaking joint activities and discussions, participants build relationships of mutual engagement; they assist one another, help each other learn how and what to do, and clarify what is meaningful and what is not, without necessarily being explicit about such concerns. Chatting with colleagues about the day's work provides such opportunities. Third, members of communities develop a shared repertoire of resources over time. A shared practice of experiences, tools, stories, strategies for problems, objects, and materials results from members' involvement as practitioners of the community's domain. As claim processors undertake the routine tasks of their day, they acquire and create a host of things to do and say to enable their successful engagements in their work.

While the term was briefly noted in Etienne Wenger's dissertation of 1990, the concept was first introduced to a wider audience the following year by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger in their book Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Over succeeding years the concept has been articulated further, receiving book-length description by Wenger in his 1998 Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. Since then the concept has been explored by its application to numerous fields and settings in organizations, education, and governmental agencies, among others.

Communities of practice developed from the goal of creating a social learning theory to explain the development of knowledge and membership via social practice. Emphasizing the social nature of the process and seeking an alternative to activity theories, the theory is based on four premises: (1) Humans are social beings, (2) knowledge is situated competence in valued undertakings, (3) knowing involves active engagement in such undertakings, and (4) learning ultimately produces meaning. Building from the emphasis of legitimate peripheral participation, in which learning is characterized as a feature of community practice as learners move from peripheral to full member status, development of the community of practice theory involves integrating concerns of meaning, practice, community, and identity. Broadly, the concept is situated among theories of social practice, which collectively engage the production and reproduction of social resources, coordinated activity, and interpretations, and among theories of identity, which collectively address the social formation of the person and membership among collectives.

Four fundamental dualities make up the concept, each providing a theoretical element extendable in practical application of the theory. The first duality is participation-reification, the process of our negotiating meaning by our experience and engagement with the world. As we live, we develop memberships in social communities, participating and taking part in their recognized doings. In addition, we give form to our experiences, which is what reify[Page 148]means, by creating tools, symbols, stories, concepts, and material objects that reflect the practices in which we engage as participants. Meaning is manifested by the interplay of our participation and the things we create to reify or represent the practices of our communities. In our claims office, we create forms to aid our classifying of claims and talk to one another about the cases we encounter.

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