Organizational Learning and Communities of Practice; A social constructivist perspective

In this paper, the relationship between organizational learning (OL) and communities of practice (COP) is addressed. A social constructivist lens is used to analyzing the potential contributions of COP’s in supporting learning by organizations. A social constructivist approach sees organizational learning as an institutionalizing process. The attention is on the process through which individual or local knowledge is transformed into collective knowledge as well as the process through which this socially constructed knowledge influences, and is part of, local knowledge. In order to analyse COP’s contribution to OL, we use the three phases or ‘moments’ described by Berger and Luckman (1966) that can be discerned during institutionalizing knowledge: ‘externalizing, objectifying and internalizing’. Externalizing knowledge refers to the process through which personal knowledge is exchanged with others. Objectifying knowledge refers to the process through which knowledge becomes an objective reality. Internalizing knowledge refers to the process through which objectified knowledge is used by individuals in the course of their socialization. In relation to OL processes, learning can be analyzed as consisting of these three knowledge sharing activities: externalizing individual knowledge resulting in shared knowledge; objectifying shared knowledge resulting in organizational knowledge; internalizing organizational knowledge resulting in individual knowledge. These various processes that in combination make up OL processes, are visualized by the use of a OL cycle. The cycle provides a simplified picture of OL seen as a process of institutionalization. The cycle is subsequently used to analyze the possible contribution of COP’s to support organizational learning. The paper concludes that COP’s are well suited to support processes of internalization and externalization. As a result, COP’s stimulate social learning processes within organizations. However, COP’s do not seem to be the appropriate means to support the process of objectification. This means that COP’s contribution in supporting learning at the organizational level or ‘organizational learning’ is much more complicated.