Handbook of Organizational Learning and Knowledge Management, Second Edition

Introduction1

It has been twenty years since Lave and Wenger (1991) first introduced the constructs of communities of practice and legitimate peripheral participation, considered ‘nothing short of a paradigm shift in the study of learning’ (Hughes et al., 2007). It has been almost fifteen years since Wenger (1998a, 1998b, 1999) more fully developed the community of practice lens. In that time, the construct has been voraciously applied by practitioners and academicians alike, in a wide variety of settings, both live and online (Gunawardena et al., 2009). They have served numerous disciplines especially in learning and education (Pane, 2010), but also law (Hara, 2009), medicine (Egan and Jaye, 2009) and corporate functions and organizational theory (Ha, 2008; Thompson, 2005), and have even influenced governmental and social theory in general. Arguably unlike any learning construct since behavioristic programmed learning, communities of practice have become central to understanding learning in both academic and organizational settings.

Despite its popularity and pervasiveness, or perhaps because of it, the community of practice perspective is not without its criticism and critique. Some point to an insufficient focus on a particular aspect of practice or community, such as the role of power in CoPs and the situatedness of learning (Contu and Willmott, 2003). Others point out a lack of historical perspective (Engeström, 2007). Still others bemoan Wenger’s seeming abandonment of the ...