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
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Concerning the argument that arose in class, about communities of practice being formal or informal. It is true that they are usually informal in nature but I also believe that the can be a part of a formal organisation. A good example is what you gave in your third paragraph when you said organisations set up communities of practices in order to manage knowledge.
ReplyDeleteit was a good article and I totally agree with funsho who said communities of practice are informal and the example of yours supports the statement that cop are informal, on the whole it was a good article.
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