Let’s Get Natural: Communities of Practice and the Discourse of Spontaneous Sharing in Knowledge Management

Contemporary models of knowledge management are often based on attempts to mimic social processes that emerge spontaneously in outside society. This paper explores the issue of how the management of knowledge has increasingly become ‘naturalized’ by importing Japanese management practices. We then discuss how academics and practitioners have extolled the ubiquitous benefits of community approach to replicate the Japanese competitive success, which has led to interest in communities of practice concept in relation to knowledge management discourse. We posit that tensions surface within organizations when they approach the natural work practices from a process perspective. We conclude by arguing that many of the practices of knowledge management operate within the rational view framework in spite of ostensively advocating natural view approaches such as Communities of Practice. For this reason, much of knowledge management.