Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger - Community of Practice - 1991

As new practitioners discuss their problems with their fellows, or learn from their colleagues how to integrate the practice with the rest of their business workflow; in such a way, the CoP becomes a repository and dissemination mechanism combined for best practice - Etienne Wenger Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity (1998).

They theorized that knowledge is developed through social and spontaneous communities that are driven by common interests and passions, whereas innovation lies in the interaction between different communities.

A community of practice defines itself along three dimensions:

• What it is about: A joint enterprise as understood and continually renegotiated by its members.
• How it functions: A mutual engagement that bind members together into a social entity.
• What capability it has produced: The shared repertoire of communal resources (routines, sensibilities, artifacts, vocabulary, styles, etc.) that members have developed over time.

Lave and Wenger

Etienne Wenger has a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence from the University of California at Irvine and joined the Institute for Research on Learning, Palo Alto. He is now an independent consultant specializing in developing communities of practice within organizations).

Further Readings

Communities