Comparing Organisation and Communities of Practice

We have all been part of an organisation or a Communities of Practice at one point in our lives where our participation was required either at our place of work, school e.t.c. Both Communities of Practice and Organisations are both social structures.


In my own opinion, an organisation is a group of individuals who are united together and become one entity, working towards a collective goal. There are organisations all around us such as Middlesex university, tesco e.t.c.


One of the approach to managing knowledge that organisations use is setting up communities of practice (Storey and Barnett, 2000; Ardichvili, Page and Wentling, 2003). Communities of Practice as defined by Wenger are groups of people who have a common interest and have a shared practice. Wenger is supported by other authors such as (Kimble and Hildreth, 2005). Wenger also picked out three characteristics which are present in all Communities of Practice and they include area of interest, community and shared practice. I agree with Wenger’s work. Communities of Practice could also not include face to face interaction among members but could also be virtual where communication is with the aid of technological devices. An example of Communities of Practice would be the group I joined in my senior year, we were six in number and met during our thursday lunch break. Our interest was in hard maths and each member participated in discussions and research on how to solve specific problems that we had and the interesting thing was that when solutions were derived we each learnt how to solve that problem and took notes for future reference. We were nameless though.



The issue about Communities of Practice could sometimes be formal arose in the class discussion. Personally, I support that Communities of Practice are informal because if Communities of Practice are formal, then it means that some of them operate like organisations and are therefore, bureaucratic in nature instead of being autonomous and this would hinder communication among members and therefore, hinder the sharing of knowledge. Schenkel and Teigland also said their paper that Communities of Practice are different from typical organisations as they are informal.

What I think are the differences between Communities of Practice and Organizations
Communities of Practice Organisation

They are informal formal in nature

They are flexible as its informal Not really flexible due to their
formal nature

Autonomous or self – organising Bureaucratic

Members behaviour is based on Behaviour is based on organisational
Shared practice culture

Members individual interest are core Organisation’s goal are central to
to the community organisation

Main aim is to share knowledge Main aim is for profit making

What is Strategy?

Strategy like knowledge management is also another interest of organisations/ businesses. Strategy was defined by (Quinn, 1980) as the plan to blend together an organisation’s aims / goals, policies and outcome as one. Other authors like (Davies, 2000) had a similar definition which supports Quinn’s. I am in support of both authors definition of strategy as it covers all the different necessary areas of which includes organisational goals, policies and actions taken.

Nevertheless, I thought about this hard and from the research done, I concluded that this definition does not bring into view the dynamic nature of the external environment of an organisation. To me, it assumes that the external environments of organisations are static in nature which is not true at all. The external environment is dynamic or ever changing as a result of the factors affecting it which Porter identified as Buyers, Suppliers, competitive rivalry among competitors, entry barriers and substitute goods.

Strategy in organisations are classified in 3 ways namely Corporate, Business and functional strategies. Corporate strategy is concerned with the overall strategy of the organisation which is aligned with both the business and functional strategies. For instance, the corporate strategy of the Gucci group famously known as Gucci is their brand image. On the other hand the business strategy is concerned with the different businesses which the organisation engages in. One of Gucci’s business strategy is their design strategy for their female collection. Functional strategy is the strategy that involves the everyday functioning of the organisation.

Knowledge is an important area to consider when formulating a strategy for an organisation and therefore knowledge needs to be well managed, the knowledge management would need to be well aligned with the organisational strategy (Halawi, 2000)