Knowledge Management in a Virtual Community of Practice using Discourse Analysis

The topic of Community-of-Practice (CoP) has been discussed in the management literature in the earlier part of 1990’s, and since attracted a lot of attention from academics and professionals around the globe. Communities of Practice (CoP) have become a strategic approach for fostering learning and transferring knowledge. However, there are a few studies, which explain what makes a community to engage in a discussion to share their knowledge and experience. This paper discusses the anatomy of a CoP, and examines a number of knowledge management tools such as story telling and discourse analysis to illustrate how knowledge is transferred and learning takes place in a virtual Community of Practice. Results are presented from a ‘live’ virtual community of practice, which is in the maturity period of its life cycle to discuss the role of domain experts and moderators how they facilitate to engage the community in dialogues and help generate the new knowledge. Also using Nonaka and Takeuchi’s knowledge spiral model it is explained how learning takes place in this virtual community of practice.