Locality
These notes are part of a series for the book.
Outline
- The locality of practice
- A level of analysis
- Constellations of practices
- Practices, discourses, and styles
- The geography of practice
- The local and the global
Notes
‘Learning involves an interplay between the local and the global’ (from the 13 principles defining learning, Wenger, 1998, p. 228).
A community of practice (COP) is a mid-level category for analysis — it is bigger than a single interaction, but smaller than a nation. A COP isn’t necessarily explicitly reified as such, so you can look for these characteristics to determine if a group is a COP (full list is at Wenger, 1998, pp. 125-126). In general, they are the characteristics of a group who work together — a shared knowledge of history, skills, perspectives, and identities of members which can lead to faster communications and problem-solving.
Interconnected COPs can form constellations of practice. For example, multiple COPs that all work for the same company, or within the same industry, or in the same professions. COPs form constellations for some of the same reasons as seen in the shared characteristics of a COP (full list is at Wenger, 1998, p. 127), including shared history, artifacts, and resources.
In part, COPs define themselves in terms of the way they negotiate their space within constellations. The COPs in a constellation interact with:
- Boundary objects and brokering
- Boundary practices, overlaps, and peripheries
- Styles that are shared, adapted, reused, and reinterpreted
- Discourses across boundaries
When styles and discourses spread across a constellation, they create continuity between and across the COPs, but that’s not the same as a shared practice.