Cultivating Communities of Practice: A Guide to Managing Knowledge

Notes

Chapter 1

1. In fact, the term community of practice was coined in the context of studies of traditional apprenticeship. Apprenticeship is often thought of as a relationship between a master and a student. Yet we observed that learning took place mostly during interactions with journeymen and more advanced apprentices. Community of practice is the term we used to refer to this social structure. Once we had the concept, however, we started to see these communities in many other settings, where there was no official institution of apprenticeship. See J. Lave and E. Wenger, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

2. In 1902, in his preface to the second edition of The Division of ...