Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Preface
- Part I Orientations
- Part II Studies
- 3 A kind of governance: rules, time and psychology in organisations
- 4 On the reflexivity between setting and practice: the ‘recruitment interview’
- 5 The situated production of stories
- 6 Orders of bidding: organising participation in auctions of fine art and antiques
- 7 Some major organisational consequences of some ‘minor’, organised conduct: evidence from a video analysis of pre-verbal service encounters in a showroom retail store
- 8 The work of the work order: document practice in face-to-face service encounters
- 9 The interactional accomplishment of a strategic plan
- 10 Peripherality, participation and communities of practice: examining the patient in dental training
- List of references
- Index
10 - Peripherality, participation and communities of practice: examining the patient in dental training
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 May 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Preface
- Part I Orientations
- Part II Studies
- 3 A kind of governance: rules, time and psychology in organisations
- 4 On the reflexivity between setting and practice: the ‘recruitment interview’
- 5 The situated production of stories
- 6 Orders of bidding: organising participation in auctions of fine art and antiques
- 7 Some major organisational consequences of some ‘minor’, organised conduct: evidence from a video analysis of pre-verbal service encounters in a showroom retail store
- 8 The work of the work order: document practice in face-to-face service encounters
- 9 The interactional accomplishment of a strategic plan
- 10 Peripherality, participation and communities of practice: examining the patient in dental training
- List of references
- Index
Summary
Introduction
The concept of ‘communities of practice’ (CoP) has gained significant purchase in the study of learning within and between organisations since it was originally introduced by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger (1991) and subsequently elaborated by Wenger (1998). The concept is bound up with a thoroughly social theory of learning that emphasises the inherently collective and participative character of becoming skilled in an occupation, a profession or indeed any activity in everyday life. A CoP involves members engaging in joint enterprise who inevitably develop a shared repertoire of skills, norms and competencies. Learning is then seen in terms of centripetal movement and shifting identity from peripheral (novice) to central participation (expert) within a particular community of practice.
The development of the concept was grounded in a series of ethnographic studies of apprenticeship, but as Ash Amin and Joanne Roberts (2008) and others (e.g. Cox 2005) argue, it is increasingly engaging a more formal, indeed managerialist, agenda:
As CoPs thinking proliferates, the original emphasis on context, process, social interaction, material practices, ambiguity, disagreement – in short the frequently idiosyncratic and always performative nature of learning – is being lost to formulaic distillations of the workings of CoPs and instrumentalist applications seeking to maximise learning and knowing through CoPs.
(Amin and Roberts 2008: 353–4)Indeed CoPs are now often positioned as knowledge management ‘tools’ (Roberts 2006) which draws debate and discussion to consider the character of ‘communities’ and how they can be fostered.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Organisation, Interaction and PracticeStudies of Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis, pp. 218 - 240Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010
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