ABSTRACT
Community as a facilitator and site of learning and knowledge generation has recently attracted much attention from researchers exploring intra-/inter-organizational knowledge creation and transfer (Cohendet and Llerena 2003; Amin and Cohendet 2004; Amin and Roberts 2008a; Roberts 2010a; inter alia). In particular, the ‘communities of practice’ notion, originally developed in studies of situated learning (Lave and Wenger 1991), has been identified as a mechanism through which knowledge is held, transferred and created (Brown and Duguid 1991; Wenger 1998, 2000). Initially influential within management studies, both as an analytic lens and a practical mechanism for knowledge management, the approach has extended its reach as an analytical framework and has been applied to investigations of urban, regional, national and transnational learning and innovation networks (Benner 2003; Cohendet and Simon 2008; Faulconbridge 2010; inter alia). The idea of communities of practice has evolved from being concerned with an entity firmly embedded in a specific situated physical territory to one potentially deterritorialized, and therefore released from the prerequisite of physical proximity, which is thus able to facilitate distanciated learning and knowledge generation.
