Chris Kimble Leeds Reading Group 2006 Never Knowingly Undersold The changing meanings of the term Communities of Practice

Chris KimbleLeeds Reading Group 2006

Never Knowingly Undersold

The changing meanings of the term Communities of Practice


Overview

• Introduction– Why the phrase “Never Knowingly Undersold” and its

relationship to Communities of Practice

• Never Knowingly Undersold– An examination of the literature on Communities of

Practice looking mainly at the work of Etienne Wenger

• Conceptual Analysis– An examination of the assumptions that underlie the

differing meanings of ‘Community of Practice’


Never Knowingly Undersold

• The claim "Never Knowingly Undersold" has been used continuously since 1925 by a chain of upmarket department stores in the UK called “The John Lewis Partnership”

• The implication is that the store will never be beaten on price, and indeed, they guarantee that if a customer can buy the same item for less elsewhere, they will refund the difference

• While this is an eye-catching headline, the reality is not quite so straight forward


The Guarantee

• The Headline– If you have purchased an item from one of our

shops and find the same item selling for less elsewhere, we will refund the difference

• The Small Print– The comparison must be with exactly the same item (brand, model, colour,

size etc) – Both we and the competitor must have the item in stock– We match the shelf-edge price the competitor displays not a negotiated or

special price for particular individuals (e.g. store card holders). – We take into account ‘hidden extras’ charged by the competitor, such as

delivery charges for items that normally require delivery– We do not price match with outlets which are not conventional shops, e.g.

membership clubs, mail order catalogues or the Internet– We do not match closing down sales as these are not trading as normal

shops

• The even smaller print– We only sell top of the range and/or specialist goods so the number of price comparisons you can

make will inevitably be limited


… and Communities of Practice?

• Just like the phrase “Never Knowingly Undersold”, the notion of Communities of Practice is used to signify certain desirable qualities which, on closer inspection, may not prove to be all that they first seem

• Just as the precise meaning of the guarantee “Never Knowingly Undersold” has changed and evolved over time, so has the meaning of the term “Communities of Practice” has changed


The Evolution of a Concept

Changes in the concept and changes in meaning

– The Early Period (1991 – 1995)• Lave and Wenger (1991)

• Brown and Duguid (1991)

– The Middle Period (1996 – 1999)• Wenger (1998)

– The Late Period (2000 – 2003)• Wenger, McDermott and Snyder (2002)


The Evolution of a Concept

For each period:

• Some Background– What is the historical context for this view of CoPs?

• An Analysis– What is a CoP, what does it do and how does it work?

• A Summary– What are the key features of this particular view of

CoPs?


The Early Period

• Principal Works– Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated Learning:

Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

– Brown, J. S., & Duguid, P. (1991). Organizational Learning And Communities Of Practice: Toward A Unified View Of Working, Learning, And Innovation. Organization Science, 2(1), 40-57.

• Other Works– Eckert, P., & Wenger, E. (1994). From School To Work:

An Apprenticeship In Institutional Identity. Palo Alto: Institute For Research On Learning.

– Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1990). Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Palo Alto: Institute For Research On Learning.


Introduction to The Early Period

• Background: from little acorns …– All of the work originated in the the Institute for Research

on Learning (IRL) at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC)

– All shared the same source material– All were concerned with theories of learning

• Context: theories of learning– Behaviourist Models = transmission of knowledge from

the teacher to the learner - “the sage on the stage” – Constructivist Models = learning as a process of mutual

transformation - “the guide by your side”


Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation

• What is a Community of Practice?– A heuristic device not a theory - left as an intuitive notion

(Lave & Wenger, 1991, p 26)

“... a set of relations among persons, activity, and world, over time and in relation with other tangential and overlapping Communities of Practice” (p 98)

• What does it do?– Learning through apprenticeship– Socialisation into a community– Creating a common understanding of:

“... what they are doing and what that means for their lives and for their communities” (p 98)


Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation

• How does it work?Legitimate Peripheral Participation (LPP)

“Legitimate Peripheral Participation provides a way to speak about relations between newcomers and old timers and about activities, identities, artefacts, and communities of knowledge and practice” (p 29)

– Legitimation is concerned with power and authority relations in the community

– Peripherality is more ambiguous, but is concerned with the degree of engagement with a practice

– Participation in an activity that has a shared meaning for the participants


Organizational Learning and Communities of Practice

• What is a Community of Practice?– An interstitial community, that is a community that exists

in the ‘gaps’ between work as it is defined (canonical practice) and work as it is actually done (non-canonical practice)

• What does it do?– Maintains a set of social relations that (indirectly) benefit

the host organization

“... to protect the organization from its own shortsightedness” (p 43)


Organizational Learning and Communities of Practice

• How does it work?– The role of LPP is acknowledged, but key activities are

seen as Narration (War Stories), Collaboration (Sharing) and Enactment - “... the authentic activity of daily work” (p 43)

– A Community of Practice acts as a:

“… community of interpretation, for it is through the continual development of these communities that the shared means for interpreting complex activity get formed, transformed, and transmitted” (p 47)


The concept of a Community of Practice in The Early Period

• Communities of Practice are concerned with learning– Knowledge is not an object but is socially constructed

and changes over time– Learning is an activity situated in a practice that has a

meaning for the participants– What is learnt might only be valid in the community in

which it was learnt

• Communities of Practice are autonomous groups– They are enacted and mutually constitutive (i.e. they are

‘wild’ or ‘untamed’)– The focus is on what happens inside the community


The Middle Period

• Principal Work– Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of Practice: Learning,

Meaning, and Identity. New York: Cambridge University Press.

• Other Works– Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of Practice: Learning as

a Social System. Systems Thinker, 9(5).– Wenger, E. (1996). Communities of Practice: The Social

Fabric of a Learning Organization. Healthcare Forum Journal, 39(4), 20 - 24.


The Middle Period

• Background: The Dawn of a New Era?– The post-industrial / technological / information society – The digital / information / knowledge revolution– The growth of the internet and the ‘dot-com’ boom

• Context: The Knowledge Based Economy– Knowledge Management = the need to generate,

preserve and ‘leverage’ (exploit) knowledge– Distributed Working = globalisation, outsourcing and an

increasingly ‘informalised’ workforce


The Dot-Com Era

NASDAQ Composite index 1994 - 2005


Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity

• What is a Community of Practice?– Mutual engagement– Joint enterprise– Shared repertoire

• What does it do?– A Community of Practice is a forum where learning takes

place and where meaning and identity are negotiated– Communities of Practice make work habitable:

“a significant amount of the processors’ communal energy goes into making their time at work a liveable realization of their marginality within the corporation and the insurance industry” (p 171)


Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity

How does it work?• No longer LPP but the interplay of four

fundamental dualities:“... a single conceptual unit that is formed by two inseparable and mutually constitutive elements whose inherent tensions and complementarity give the concept richness and dynamism” (p 66)

• Participation - Reification• Designed - Emergent• Identification - Negotiability• Local – Global


The concept of a Community of Practice in The Middle Period

• A move away from:– Communities of Practice as a way of gaining insight into

social leaning

towards – Communities of Practice as a means of problem solving

and sense-making in an organisation

• The concept becomes more theoretical and more ‘operationalised’

• Communities of Practice are linked to the external environment

• Communities of Practice can be nurtured, but they remain ‘untamed’


The Late Period• Principal Work

– Wenger, E., McDermott, R., & Snyder, W. (2002). Cultivating Communities of Practice. Boston, Mass: Harvard Business School Press.

• Other Works– Wenger, E. (2000). Communities of Practice and Social Learning

Systems. Organization, 7(2), 225 - 246.– Wenger, E., & Snyder, W. (2000). Communities of practice: The

organizational frontier. Harvard Business Review, 78(1), 139-145.– Snyder, W. M., Wenger, E., & Briggs, X. d. S. (2003).

Communities of Practice in Government: Leveraging Knowledge for Performance. The Public Manager, 32(4), 17 - 21.

– Wenger, E., White, N., Smith, J. D., & Rowe, K. (2005). Outiller sa communauté de pratique. In L. Langelier (Ed.), Guide de mise en place et d'animation de communautés de pratique intentionnelles (pp. 47 - 66). Québec: CEFRIO.


The Late Period

• Background: surfing the wave– Consultancy, the ‘new reality’ of the dot-com boom (get

large or get lost) and the McKinsyite philosophy of success (move up or get out)

– “… interest in communities of practice was exploding” (Wenger, et al., 2002)

– “How to avoid a mid life crisis in your CoPs” (McDermott, 2004)

• Context: Communities of Practice to CoPs– Communities of Practice = ‘wild, untamed and unowned’– CoPs = ‘controlled, cultivated and for sale’


CoPs - The Next Big Thing?

• The lifecycle of fads and fashions

– “… the planets ... were aligned” [and the book would] “... provide a common foundation for this spreading movement” (Wenger, et al., 2002, p x)


Cultivating Communities of Practice

• What is a CoP?– CoPs are:

“... groups of people informally bound together by shared expertise and passion for a joint enterprise [which can] drive strategy, generate new lines of business, solve problems, promote the spread of best practices, develop professional skills” (pp 139 - 140)

• What does it do?– CoPs “steward knowledge” and create value by acting as

a tool for cross-organizational collaboration that:“... complements formal units to help organizations weave critical connections across formal groups and leverage knowledge for performance” (Snyder, et al., 2003)


Cultivating Communities of Practice

• How does it work?– Wenger, McDermott and Snyder (2002) do not address

this issue, but they do describe, in some detail, five stages in:

“a natural cycle of birth, growth and death” (p 68)

– Potential– Coalescing– Maturing– Stewardship – Transformation


The concept of a Community of Practice in the late period

• “The reinvention of Communities of Practice as a managerialist concept” (Cox, 2004, p 12) – CoPs are a means to an end – CoPs are not only ‘cultivated’ but also tamed

• A profound move away from earlier notions of Communities of Practice– An epistemological shift of focus from unpredictable

emergent groups to the inevitable logic of (US style) free market capitalism

– An ontological shift of focus from learning and constructivism to knowledge transfer and knowledge management


So what?

• Concepts do change over time …• … but how do we / should we use concepts?

– as sensitizing devices to help focus our investigations– as structuring devices to help us understand the results – as heuristic devices to provide us with new insights

• but– “… there is also a use of concepts which sees them

being used in a more rigorous fashion ... such an approach means that we have to pay careful attention to our sources, making sure that we give due care to the consequences that the use of a concept brings with it” (Mutch, 2003, pp 383 - 384)


CoPs and nonsense

• Is there a “Correct” definition for a Community of Practice / CoP?– Communities of Practice continue to be used in

pedagogy and in educational theory– Communities of Practice have provided insights into the

use of technology by groups and distributed teams– “CoP Theory” provides useful insights into both

Knowledge Management and Distributed Working

• Lack of attention to (implied) meaning can create confusing or conflicting accounts


CoPs and nonsense

• Lave and Wenger (1991) ≠ Brown and Duguid (1991) ≠ Wenger (1998) ≠ Wenger et al. (2002)

• We have seen how they differ in terms of specific details, but how do they differ at the conceptual level?

• To answer this we will first define three axiomatic terms: reality, representation and description


Reality

• Reality is “... that which underlies and is the truth of appearances or phenomena.” (OED)

• It is 'unperceived reality': what actually exists, rather than what is perceived by an individual.

• Reality is “out there” and exists whether we know about it or not.


Representation

• A representation is "... the operation of the mind in forming a clear image or concept.” (OED)

• It is 'perceived reality': the mental model an individual uses to characterise their view of reality.

• A representation only exists in the mind of the individual and can not be shared directly.


Description

• A description is "... a statement which describes, sets forth, or portrays'‘. (OED)

• It is an externalisation of an individual's internal model of reality made in order to communicate it to others.

• A description exists independently of an individual and can be shared between a number of individuals.


Putting them all together

• The representation is created through the perception of reality. In philosophy, this process is the concern of Ontology.

• Ontology is concerned with theories of existence, asking: “What is the essence of the world”?

• The description is created with the intention of communicating with others. In philosophy, this is the concern of Epistemology.

• Epistemology is concerned with theories of knowledge, asking: “What do we know and how do we know it”?


Conceptual Differences

Community of Practice

Lave & Wenger 1991 Wenger 1998

CoP

Wenger et al 2002


Early vs. MiddleEpistemological Shift

• Knowledge remains socially constructed; learning remains informal

• Change from LPP to dualities + create links to external world

• Change from heuristic device to operationalised ‘theory’


Lave & Wenger 1991 Wenger 1998

≠

≠

=


Early + Middle vs. LateOntological and Epistemological Shift

• Change from socially constructed knowledge to ‘objective’ knowledge

• Change from LPP / dualities to free market economics

• Change from heuristic device / theory to set of guidelines


Lave & Wenger 1991+ Wenger 1998

≠

≠

≠

Wenger, McDermott & Snyder 2002

CoP


Never Knowingly Undersold?

• When buying a product– ‘caveat emptor’ = let the buyer beware

• When dealing with Communities of Practice literature– ‘caveat lector’ = let the reader beware


Questions and/or Comments?

Chris KimbleDepartment of Computer Science, University of York

E-mail: [email protected]: http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/~kimbleMIS group: http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/mis/

http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/~kimble

http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/~kimble

http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/mis/



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Chris Kimble Leeds Reading Group 2006 Never Knowingly Undersold The changing meanings of the term Communities of Practice