Introduction

This chapter discusses the Community of Practice (CofP) concept – and discusses the need to be meticulous in empirically identifying communities of practice (and other social aggregates) and the need to stimulate the responsibly informed use of the CofP in a wider variety of fields of language-oriented research so as to enable the investigation of a much wider field of questions. The CofP found an early and sympathetic audience in language and gender, and in language in the workplace, because its advanced theorisation of the social was helpful in tackling the research questions being investigated by scholars in those fields at that time. Religious identity is an aspect of investigation for which the CofP can be highly useful when determining the status of practices being analysed. The investigation of language, identity and ageing also stands to benefit a great deal from a CofP approach, as evidenced by the usefulness of practice-based approaches to sociolinguistic ageing-focused research more generally.