Community of Practice versus Practice of the Community: Knowing in collaborative work

How do software developers, field service technicians, and medieval cathedral builders accomplish collaborative work? This paper looks at how they learn from each other by building and sharing knowledge across time and space. To illustrate this, we first present Community of Practice (CoP) as a way of understanding collaborative work which puts focus on the community and its social interaction. CoP, introduced by Lave and Wenger (1991), is based on the fundamental belief that dividing theory from practice is unsound. Hence CoP contradicted traditional theories of learning, where learning and working often are conceived as separate processes. Using Orr’s (1996) rendition of service technician’s work, it is shown that stories act as repositories of accumulated wisdom in keeping track of facts, sequences and their context. Representations made by a CoP to aid their work, are termed Reifications which can be stories, tools, artefacts etc. Practice is seen as a duality of Participation and Reification which both require and enable each other. We find however, that CoP based analyses tend to focus on the human actors in that you start out by looking for the communities and what defines them. We also present examples of alternative approaches that illuminate the technology and artefacts that are present in collaboration. Berg(1997) uses Actor-Network Theory (ANT) to illustrate the responsibility awarded to artefacts in the process of documenting a hospital-patient’s fluid balance. Hutchins(1995) describes navigation as a joint accomplishment of artefacts and people. Turnbull(1993) sees a wooden template as a chief enabler of building gothic cathedrals without use of structural mathematics. Facets of knowledge/knowing is discussed, their accumulation and transfer by stressing the value of both the social and the technical approach.