Community
These notes are part of a series for the book.
Outline
- Mutual engagement
- Enabling engagement
- Diversity and partiality
- Mutual relationships
- Joint enterprise
- A negotiated enterprise
- An indigenous enterprise
- Shared repertoire
- Negotiation: History and ambiguity
- Resources of mutual engagement
- Negotiating meaning in practice
Notes
‘Learning is fundamentally experiential and fundamentally social…. [and] is a matter of engagement’ (from the 13 principles defining learning, Wenger, 1998, p. 227).
Practice brings together the community of practice (COP). A COP has three dimensions, which are not necessarily explicitly stated and identified as such in the COP:
- Joint enterprise
- Mutual engagement
- Shared repertoire
| Characteristic | Mutual engagement | Joint enterprise | Shared repertoire |
|---|---|---|---|
| Properties of a community | Engaged diversity Doing things together Relationships Social complexity Community Maintenance | Negotiated enterprise Mutual accountability Interpretations Rhythms Local response | Stories Styles Artifacts Actions Tools Historical events Discourses Concepts |
Mutual engagement
Practice ‘exists because people are engaged in actions whose meaning they negotiate with one another’ (Wenger, 1998, p. 73).
When you belong to a COP, you are involved in its mutual engagement. The COP is defined by the mutual engagement.
- Membership is not just belonging to a group, having a title, or having relationships with people.
- Geographic proximity is not necessarily required to have mutual engagement (for example, you can use phone, email, radio, etc.)
A COP must have a coordinated place and/or way to bring people together in mutual engagement. Wenger calls this ‘community maintenance’ (Wenger, 1998, p. 74).
“Community” often has positive connotations and mutual engagement can lead to relationships between people, but Wenger is careful to note that COPs can have conflicts, cliques, tensions, competition, challenges. COPs are not inherently good or bad. They can generate social energy, and that energy can push us forward or hold us back.
- See also: COPs can use participation and reification to keep the COP the same or bring change to it, see Wenger, E. (1998) ‘Ch. 3, Learning’.
Joint enterprise
A joint enterprise keeps the COP together. The participants define the enterprise as they pursue it.
In the example of the claims processors, their joint enterprise was not just their job but also all the other things they do to make the job more palatable. Individually they may have different reactions to conditions, but together they are working to make claims processing a workable way to make money, have fun, handle boredom, accept less status within the company, etc.
The enterprise of a COP sits within a larger context. For example, with the claims processors their enterprise is within an industry and company, both of which also have historical contexts and which (especially the company) exerts a fair amount of control over their enterprise.
Some of the activities are within the confines of the company’s rules and some are outside it or in areas not addressed by policy, but regardless it is their response that they negotiate as a COP. The COP mediates any power (good or bad) that an institution or individual people have over it.
Shared repertoire
These are a set of shared resources (including symbols, gestures, stories, and concepts, as well as tools and ways of doing things) that the COP has adopted over time and that has become part of its practice.