Introduction1

It has been twenty years since Lave and Wenger (1991) first introduced the constructs of communities of practice and legitimate peripheral participation, considered ‘nothing short of a paradigm shift in the study of learning’ (Hughes et al., 2007). It has been almost fifteen years since Wenger (1998a, 1998b, 1999) more fully developed the community of practice lens. In that time, the construct has been voraciously applied by practitioners and academicians alike, in a wide variety of settings, both live and online (Gunawardena et al., 2009). They have served numerous disciplines especially in learning and education (Pane, 2010), but also law (Hara, 2009), medicine (Egan and Jaye, 2009) and corporate functions and organizational theory (Ha, 2008; Thompson, 2005), and have even influenced governmental and social theory in general. Arguably unlike any learning construct since behavioristic programmed learning, communities of practice have become central to understanding learning in both academic and organizational settings.

Despite its popularity and pervasiveness, or perhaps because of it, the community of practice perspective is not without its criticism and critique. Some point to an insufficient focus on a particular aspect of practice or community, such as the role of power in CoPs and the situatedness of learning (Contu and Willmott, 2003). Others point out a lack of historical perspective (Engeström, 2007). Still others bemoan Wenger’s seeming abandonment of the neo-liberal political undertones of Lave and Wenger to an overtly conventional managerialism (Hughes et al., 2007). One criticism that takes center stage in most critiques, however, is a slipperiness and elusiveness unbefitting of a theory of strong learning (Barton and Tusting, 2005), which potentially could threaten its theoretical power. Interestingly, most of the criticisms seem to ignore the further comprehensive treatment of communities of practice (Wenger, 1998a). Indeed, much of the research focuses primarily on Lave and Wenger (e.g. Fuller, 2007) and pays little attention to the modes of belonging, economies of meaning, reification and participation, and other more phenomenological concepts introduced in later works.

Communities, the core of the human social system, have been studied for decades in anthropology, sociology, and psychology. Tönnies (2001), the nineteenth-century sociologist, distinguishes between Gemeinschaft (the personal community as a living organism) and Gesellschaft (society as a mechanical aggregate). Dewey (1916) treats the community’s relationship to a public education system. Marx, Weber, and Durkheim embrace the collective as the foundation for their philosophical systems. Current focus, then, is a continuation of a tradition started some hundred years ago examining a human tendency to commune that is thousands of years old. In past and present works, the elusiveness and abstractness which serves as a critique of CoPs needs to be recognized as inherent in the subject matter itself. Modernity has liquidated many traditional forms of relating and seeking them out is a complex task. As Bauman so keenly points out:

[C]ommunity stands for the kind of world which is not, regrettably, available to us—but which we would dearly hope to inhabit and which we hope to repossess. . . . [I]t is always in the future. ‘Community’ is nowadays another name for paradise lost—but one which we dearly hope to return, and so we feverishly seek the roads that may bring us there. Paradise lost or a paradise still hoped to be found; one way or another, this is definitely not a paradise that we inhabit and not the paradise that we know from our own experience.

(Bauman, 2001: 3)

What is required, then, is to examine those elements that are most difficult to put our finger on: the intersubjective components of community relationships, identity, the negotiation of meaning through participation and reification that are outlined in Wenger (1998a). This chapter provides one instantiation of how to theoretically and practically address some of these less tangible elements. It derives from my work as chief architect for a community infrastructure at a global pharmaceutical company. The purpose of this project was to seek ways to expedite the building shared history in communities through stable membership. What proved critical was fostering the intersubjective elements of community: identity, models of belonging, mutual trust, and reciprocity concerning the practice and communities in general. This chapter will examine this work and its outcomes.