Communities of Practice and organizations

Communities of practice and organizations are two completely different things but I believe there is a relationship between them. First I will try to give simple definitions to what a community of practice and what an organization is and then through a personal experience example present how CoPs and organizations can be related.

Communities of practice


Communities of practice was a new term for me. What does it mean? According to D. Nicolini, S. Gherardi and D. Yanow (2003) communities of practice are communities, named or unnamed, formal or informal formed by people with similar interests and they are fundamental for learning.
In simple words, I would say that, a community of practice is formed when a group of people with similar interests, backgrounds, knowledge and passion are gathered together and share all those elements to come up with new ideas, solutions, etc.
According to Etienne Wenger (2004) a community of practice has 3 characteristics.

• The domain


• The community


• The practice
  

To remember these characteristics, I think of them as 'WWI' (who, what & Interaction). Who for who are forming this domain (for example doctors, engineers, colleagues). Interaction to describe the relationship between the members of the CoP and What for what is the practice (engineering, medical, etc.). This is just a method I use, you might find that it does not work for you but if you find it useful you are welcome to use it.

Organization

In the dictionary according to http://www.answers.com (2009) the word organization has various definitions, but all the definitions share the same essence which led me to perceive the term organization as individual or grouped resources (human & not human) working together and/or individually to contribute into performing a task/goal/target/particular purpose. Moreover, D.K. Banner and T. E. Gagné (1995) believe that all organizations no matter of their size or nature include some common characteristics as boundaries, social interaction, culture, activity systems and goals.

Thinking Greek

By tracing the roots of the word organization you can see that it comes from the Greek word 'όργανο' (organo) which means tool. Having this in mind it's easy to see the essence of the word organization. Individuals, groups, teams working together as an entity or a ‘tool’ to achieve a goal.While searching the internet for the definition and concept of organization I came across a document by Dr. H. Eugene Baker III. In one of the slides used by Dr. Baker (2008) a diagram is used showing which the various elements of an organization are. I believe that this diagram can help us understand which the most important aspects of an organization. The mentioned elements are size, culture, technology, environment, goals & strategies, and structure. If you think about an organization, I believe that the aforementioned elements (or at least some of them) will come up naturally while trying to characterize the organization. For example, if you think about Microsoft, you are going to think about a large organization, computer software, money, power, etc. All these characteristics can be embodied in the organization elements (size, culture, technology, etc)




Can Communities of Practice exist within organizations?


After giving some broad explanation to what a community of practice and what an organization are the question is, is there a relation between them? Even though they are two completely different things, I believe that a community of practice can exist within an organization as (wenger website ref) E. Wenger points out a lot of organizations recognize the usefulness of CoPs and have embraced the concept. Furthermore, from my own experience I can give an example of how a CoP can exist in an organization. While working for a bank as a summer intern with some more interns that were studying at the same school as me without even knowing we had create our own CoP. On our first day we were introduced to the organization and we had a briefing on how the organization works, what were the goals and what were our roles in the organization. We were split up in two groups but more or less we all had the same duties which included user support, data entry and repairing/setting-up computers. Every day during our brake we would meet at a café next to our building and we shared our experiences and knowledge and that made life easier for all of us as when we were back at our offices when we came across problems that someone else had faced before we already knew what to do. No one of us knew the term community of practice back then and as E. Wenger (2004) points out a lot of CoPs in organizations are spontaneous and not formal and so was the case with our CoP. Through this small CoP the individual members benefited because we acquired new knowledge and we could be more efficient in our job but, naturally the organization also benefited from this because as we were working faster and more efficiently

In conclusion, for me, it is amazing now looking back to those days and see that what was going on was not simply a chat over coffee but something far more than that. CoPs in organizations are very common in my opinion, especially informal CoPs, as all the time people interact to share experiences and knowledge and help each other.




References


Nicolini, D., S. Gherardi, and D. Yanow. 2003. Knowing in Organizations: A Practice-based Approach. M.E. Sharpe.

Banner, D.K. and T.E., Gagné. 1995. Designing Effective Organizations: Traditional & Transformational Views. SAGE.

Wenger, E. 2004. Communities of practice a brief introduction. http://www.ewenger.com/theory/
(accessed January 30, 2009).

Organization. 2009. http://www.answers.com/organization (accessed January 24, 2009).

Baker, H.E. (2008). Organizations and organization theory. http://www.unf.edu/%7Egbaker/Man4201/Chapt001a.PDF (accessed January 28, 2009).




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