Community of Practice

As previously alluded to, but not yet outlined, Wenger’s (1999, pp.72-85) notion

‘community of practice’ suggests a more tractable characterization of practice, distinguishing it from less tractable terms such as culture, activity, or structure, and defines a special type of community, a ‘community of practice’ (Wenger, 1999, p.72).

This concept has relevance at a number of scales whether that is at the household level, organisational approaches, nationally agreed design and implementation practices or as internationally shared cultural practices (Macrorie, Royston and Daly, 2014, p.28). When defining a community of practice it does not automatically refer to a favorable or romanticized variant of practice. As Wenger (1999) stipulates,

communities of practice can give rise to both meaningfulness, but also hold people hostage to that experience. Wenger refers to three dimensions of practice: mutual engagement, joint enterprise, and a shared repertoire, which form the property of a community.

Practice exists because people are engaged in actions with practices existing within communities of people when these are mutually engaged in what they do. This

doesn’t mean to say that a particular characteristic aggregates a number of individuals into a community automatically; rather it is when dense relations of mutual

engagement are organized and sustained around what they do (Wenger, 1999, p.74).

Rather than entailing homogeneity, practitioners contribute to a diversity of

performances of the practice in which out of the medley results a mutual engagement.

Individuals therefore contribute through their competence and knowledge of what they do and know; yet it is also about what they don’t do and don’t know, with the contributions of others meaningfully connecting (Wenger, 1999, p.76). Mutual relationships in which people connect are therefore more than just similarities and instead contribute to particular personal features or social categories, creating tight interpersonal relationships with one another. This does not assume however that a community of practice is ‘a haven of togetherness’ where harmony and agreement is consistent as “disagreement, challenges and competition can all be forms of

participation” (Wenger, 1999, p.77). This leads Lave and Wenger (1991, p.94) to conclude that just as the individual is not considered at the centre of investigation,

mastery does not reside in the master but that it is the organization of the community of practice which the master is a part of.

The second characteristic of practice as a source of community coherence relates to the development of a joint enterprise. This is the result of the negotiation and complexity of mutual engagement (Wenger, 1999). According to Wenger (1999, p.98) joint enterprise “is not just a stated goal, but creates among participants relations of mutual accountability that become an integral part of the practice”. Some aspects of accountability can be reified in the form of ‘rules, policies, standards, and goals’

(1999, p.81). Yet, just like mutual engagement, a joint enterprise does not mean agreement; rather, within some communities disagreement can be viewed as a

productive part of the enterprise (Wenger, 1999, p.79). The enterprise of a community of practice is not just about a statement of purpose as the negotiation of a joint

enterprise reveals relations among those involved. Importantly then these relations draw to attention:

“What matters and what does not, what is important and why it is

important, what to do and not to do, what to pay attention to and what to ignore, what to talk about and what to leave unsaid, what to justify and what to take for granted, what to display and what to withhold, when actions and artifacts are good enough and when they need improvement or refinement” (Wenger, 1999, p.81).

Lastly, the final characteristic of practice which contributes to the coherence of community is the shared repertoire of a community which can include “routines, words, tools, ways of doing things, stories, gestures, symbols, genres, actions, or concepts” which the community has produced or utilized throughout its course of existence (Wenger, 1999, p.83). As a space of engagement in action, shared knowledge and negotiation of enterprises, communities of practice provide an opportunity of transformation of social practices alongside other forces already discussed at the institutional level. It enables a deeper understanding into both the transformative and reflexive learning processes in which knowledge, understandings, shared meanings, materials and competences grow and are negotiated (Macrorie, Royston and Daly, 2014).

This mutual engagement of a shared domain of interest, competence and knowledge that distinguishes members from non-members contributes to the construction of relationships and a notion of community (Macrorie, Royston and Daly, 2014). The distinction between ‘members’ and ‘non-members’ refers to communities of practice holding particular knowledge, frameworks and stories of understood ways of doing.

The distinction of being a member and non-member also draws to attention the notion of a career of practice. Just like the world of work, practices can be viewed as careers in which the individual goes through various stages including, newcomer, novice and fully-fledged member. For Shove et al. (2012, p.70) when starting off as a newcomer or outsider to such a group individuals go through a process in which they engage with and are drawn in by the practice in question. As careers develop, the individual

‘see themselves and are seen by others in a different way’ to a point where they become a fully-fledged member of the community and in certain cases identify themselves with such practice in that they become what they do such as being a ‘drug taker’ or in relation to this thesis identifying themselves as a ‘cyclist’ (Shove et al., 2012).

This contributes to social practices, informing the relations between practitioners, performances and practices (Macrorie, Royston and Daly, 2014). Where communities of practice exist provides sites of interaction between people and particular elements of practices, including particular norms, images and rules, contributing to the on-going development of the materials, meanings and competences of a particular practice. These ‘spaces’ can include both skilled individuals who continue to carry and circulate particular elements as well as new individuals who enrol and equip themselves with such elements through social interaction and knowledge

development, thus recruiting new individuals into particularized forms of practice and practice trajectories (Macrorie, Royston and Daly, 2014). Whilst this points towards the maintenance of a particular way of a practice, protecting and enabling the continuation of a practice, such spaces also enable the opportunity of innovation, which can both emerge and develop in such spaces. Methodologically, the concept of community of practice brings into focus the interaction between carriers and their careers without having to resort to methodological individualism (Macrorie, Royston and Daly, 2014, p.29).