Landscapes of practice

I am attending a workshop tomorrow on Landscapes of Practice. It's being led by Etienne Wenger, he who wrote on Communities of Practice, and Legitimate Peripheral Participation. It's mentioned on the OU Platform, which warns me, to bring technical equipment. I'm packing eeePC, FlipVideo, digital recorder and camera. I've done my homework: mapped my professional landscape, and made notes on landscapes, professional practitioners and explaining my job to others.

What's it got to do with my research? I came on Etienne Wenger's work through reading the literature on engagement, which lead me to literature on collaboration, and hence to communities of practice. Of all the uses of the word 'engagement' I like Wenger's best - it means the way I understand engagement between different groups of people to mean.

Also, I think my research is about different practices of different groups, and how they overcome challenges of communicating between each other. To begin with there is the public sector meeting the private sector world of consultants, and perhaps of IT contractors. Each world brings its own culture, values and language. Then there are the professional groups that meet: IT professionals, whether programmers, analysts, testers or IT project managers with/ without PRINCE experience, and management professionals, and business professionals, whether librarians, social carers, teachers, policemen, employment advisors, immigration officials - all the businesses that you find in the public sector.

So this workshop must be worth my time out on Friday and Saturday.

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WENGER, E. (1998) Communities of practice: learning, meaning, and identity, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
J. Lave, E. Wenger. Situated learning : legitimate peripheral participation /

Knowledge and communities of practice

Wenger writing on knowledge transfer and communities of practice, argues CoP are “cornerstones of knowledge management" and suggests that there are three characteristics to communities of practice: domains, communities and practice. The combination of characteristics allows communities of practice to manage knowledge. It is their combination that enables CoP to manage knowledge.
He relates these domains to strategy.

• domain - you need knowledge to do what you want
• communities - you need people to have knowledge
• practice - you need experience to produce usable knowledge & what have we learned?

It seems to me that there is some overlap of these characteristics with the Nahapiet and Ghosal dimensions of social capital (structural, cognitive & relational), and Wenger’s description of these characteristics in relation to knowledge has given me other angles on questions to ask in interview.

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Nahapiet, J. and Ghoshal, S. (1998) 'Social capital, intellectual capital, and the organizational advantage', Academy of Management Review, 23 (2), pp. 242-266. 842
Wenger, E. (2004) 'Knowledge management as a doughnut: Shaping your knowledge strategy through communities of practice', Ivey Business Journal, 68 (3), pp. 1-8. 1051