‘Communities of Practice’

In this chapter, I advance a praxiology of community for the International Relations discipline. The approach is based on a creative rereading of Etienne Wenger’s (1998) concept of ‘communities of practice’. I highlight three interrelated themes that demonstrate its added value: first, the approach suggests transcending the traditional dichotomy between macro-structures and micro-processes of interaction and follows the ethnomethodological argument that macro-structures always depend on their instantiation in micro-social contexts. Second, ‘communities of practice’ become the prime context within which groups produce constitutive rules of engagement that serve as the background from which large-scale phenomena are made sense of. Third, I suggest turning to the boundaries of community as the site in which the background of community is negotiated. Based on the modified version of ‘communities of practice’, I elucidate that boundary practices are what create senses of like-mindedness among members of a “community of practice”. Subsumed under the term “boundary work”, boundary practices serve as the meaningful background scheme that sustains community. ‘Boundary work’ turns out as the background and anchoring practice for community at the same time.