Knowledge in organizations: What is a community of practice?

Résumé du document

This report presents you the concept of a community of practice. Normally the term community of practice in reduced to CoP and this term was created by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger in 1991. Now to understand this notion, we should understand the fathers of this notion. Jean Lave is a social anthropologist. She studied at Harvard University. Now she is teaching at the University of California, Berkeley. She published three books. Etienne Wenger is an educational theorists and practitioner. He is known for his theory about the situated cognition. He is also famous for his work on the community of practice subject. Etienne Wenger worked with Jean Lave on these two projects. Moreover he thinks that that learning is a social process which cannot be separated from its environment. Now this theorist lives in California but he is not American, he is from Switzerland.

Extraits

[...] Cop within organizations? CoP is also present in firms. In each firm you have a new kind of CoP. Work groups are a kind of CoP because they need to share, to create, to solve problem, to discuss. But in fact you have another kind of CoP inside firms: the informal one. The informal network permits to solve other problem and it is not an obligatory CoP. Managers cannot use this kind of CoP to manage their employees. So we can find two kind of CoP in companies: - the formal - the informal Moreover, I think that each worker needs to have both. [...]

[...] Enabling cop to be successful This table is called “Principles for cultivating successful communities of practice”. It presents the main rules to follow to success in the CoP. As you can see you have 7 principles. The first principle explain to us that all CoP need to be open to new members. Like that news problems are discovered and people stay inside this community. In the second principle, you have an example on each online blog. You find links with other blogs and every day you have a new subject or news about the subject. [...]

[...] Questions: - Why form communities of practice? - CoP within organizations? - Enabling CoP to be successful - Measuring the value added by communities Why form communities of practice? In this question, we can have 2 point of view: the first one is that communities are built to answer a social need. People need to meet others people and talk about their hobbies, find solutions about their problems. The second is more professional than the first one. I think you have CoP at work. [...]

[...] For example in a project team, the CoP stays alive until the end of the project. In my opinion I think that the group stays alive after even if the task is done. I mean that this group of people worked together and a social link was built, so this CoP is transformed in an Informal network or a temporary inactive CoP. As I told you before, an inactive CoP has to be closed. So I think that after a project team, we can find news in the informal network of each people from the project team. [...]

[...] Knowledge in organizations: What is a community of practice? This report presents you the concept of a community of practice. Normally the term community of practice in reduce to CoP this term was created by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger in 1991. Now to understand easily this notion, it should be good to discover fathers of this notion. Jean Lave is a social anthropologist. She studied at Harvard University. Now she is teaching at the University of California, Berkeley. She published three books. [...]