StuartF

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I live in Johannesburg, South Africa. After a career of 13 years in education as a high school teacher of English and school administrator, I decided to make a radical career move. I now work as a communication specialist at a multinational management consultancy.

I still retain a keen interest in education topics, and a passion for promoting good writing. That’s why I’ve started helping out with maintenance on Wiki!

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Communities of Practice and Organisational Learning

For Etienne Wenger, learning is central to human identity. A primary focus of Wenger’s work is on learning as social participation – the individual as an active participant in the practices of social communities, and constructing his/her identity through these communities. From this understanding develops the concept of the community of practice: a group of individuals participating in communal activity, and experiencing/continuously creating their shared identity through engaging in and contributing to the practices of their communities.

For Wenger, organizational learning of the deep conceptual type is best facilitated if the realities of communities of practice are recognised when the change process is designed.

“For organisations, … learning is an issue of sustaining the interconnected communities of practice through which an organisation knows what it knows and thus becomes effective and valuable as an organisation” (Wenger, 1998, p. 8)

Wenger describes the “negotiation of meaning” as how we experience the world and our engagement in it as meaningful. If all change involves a process of learning, then effective change processes consciously facilitate negotiation of meaning. In his model that negotiation consists of two interrelated components:

• Reification: He describes this process as central to every practice. It involves taking that which is abstract and turning it into a “congealed” form, represented for example in documents and symbols. Reification is essential for preventing fluid and informal group activity from getting in the way of co-ordination and mutual understanding. Reification on its own, and insufficiently supported, is not able to support the learning process, however.

“But the power of reification – its succinctness, its portability, its potential physical presence, its focusing effect – is also its danger … Procedures can hide broader meanings in blind sequences of operations. And the knowledge of a formula can lead to the illusion that one fully understands the processes it describes.” (Wenger, 1998, p. 61)

• Participation: Participation, the second element in the negotiation of meaning, requires active involvement in social processes. It involves participants not just in translating the reified description/prescription into embodied experience, but in recontextualising its meaning. Wenger describes participation as essential for getting around the potential stiffness (or, alternatively, the ambiguity) of reification.

“… If we believe that people in organisations contribute to organisational goals by participating inventively in practices that can never be fully captured by institutionalised processes …. we will have to value the work of community building and make sure that participants have access to the resources necessary to learn what they need to learn in order to take actions and make decisions that fully engage their own knowledgeability.” (Wenger, 1998, p. 10)

Crucially, Wenger describes the relationship between reification and participation as a dialectical one: neither element can be considered in isolation if the learning/change process is to be helpfully understood.

“Explicit knowledge is … not freed from the tacit. Formal processes are not freed from the informal. In fact, in terms of meaningfulness, the opposite is more likely … In general, viewed as reification, a more abstract formulation will require more intense and specific participation to remain meaningful, not less.” (Wenger, 1998, p. 67)

Wenger calls the successful interaction of reification and participation the “alignment” of individuals with the communal learning task. Alignment requires the ability to co-ordinate perspectives and actions in order to direct energies to a common purpose. The challenge of alignment, Wenger suggests, is to connect local efforts to broader styles and discourses in ways that allow learners to invest their energy in them.

“Alignment requires specific forms of participation and reification to support the required co-ordination … With insufficient participation, our relations to broader enterprises tend to remain literal and procedural: our co-ordination tends to be based on compliance rather than participation in meaning … With insufficient reification, co-ordination across time and space may depend too much on the partiality of specific participants, or it may simply be too vague, illusory or contentious to create alignment.” (Wenger, 1998, p. 187)

To the extent that a deep conceptual change involves importing practices and perspectives from one community of practice into another, such change involves what Wenger calls “boundary encounters.” Such encounters change the way each community defines its own identity and practice. Crucial to the success of the boundary encounter is the role of highly skilled “brokers”, who straddle different communities of practice and facilitate the exchange process.

“The job of brokering is complex. It involves processes of translation, co-ordination and alignment between perspectives. It requires enough legitimacy to influence the development of a practice, mobilise attention and address conflicting interests. It also requires the ability to link practices by facilitating transactions between them, and to cause learning by introducing into a practice elements of another. Toward this end, brokering provides a participative connection – not because reification is not involved, but because what brokers press into service to connect practices is their experience of multi-membership and the possibilities for negotiation inherent in participation.” (Wenger, 1998, p. 109)