ABSTRACT

The recent history of community of practice (CoP) research begins with Lave and Wenger (1991) exploring CoPs as an exemplar of the social aspects of learning. CoPs were intended to be a social psychology alternative to cognitive theories of learning. A CoP is a set of people who “share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic, who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis” (Wenger, McDermott, & Snyder, 2002, p. 4). A CoP can be seen as a group that shares similar skills, such as a profession (communication professors, medical technicians, truckers, etc.), connected through similar skills and a common profession or vocation (groups of people who tie flies, cross-stitch, etc.). Also, CoP can refer to groups of people with divergent skills and possibly different departments within an organization that are formed to deal with a complex problem or to generate new knowledge. In both cases, a sense of community is focused on a practice. CoPs are unique, interesting, and popular in organizations attempting to capitalize on organizational knowledge, because CoPs can be viewed as a social mechanism for understanding or even creating knowledge without the limitations of pure technological and cognitive solutions. After all, CoPs directly demonstrate the social way people learn (Lave & Wenger, 1991). However, attempts to institute CoPs are difficult because they are complex social phenomena that develop in situ as interactive, communicative groups. As Zorn and Taylor (2004, p. 110) contend,

the notion of communities of practice captures the complexities of how knowledge is created and shared by those who work and talk together regarding shared objects and in shared situations, and simultaneously it captures the difficulties of attempting to transfer that knowledge to others.