Communities of Practice Vs Organisations

Communities of Practice

Wenger et al. (2002, p. 4) defined Communities of Practice as groups of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis.

Edurne Loyarte and Olga Rivera in their paper “communities of practice: a model for their cultivation” say that communities of practice are not part of formal structures they also go ahead to say that they are informal entities that exist in the mind of each member (2007). I personally do not take this view. In my opinion, communities of practice could be part of a formal structure.

Take Middlesex University for example, it might encourage it lecturers (in the same field) to socialise outside of the university in order to share knowledge they might have. If these lecturers decide to meet say once every month to pool or share knowledge, can we now say because the structure or nature of their meetings are informal that they are not part of Middlesex University which is a formal organisation? I do not think so.

Communities of practice can help play an important role in an organisation by encouraging faster learning this might occur if the activities of the community of practice are aligned with the strategy of the organisation. Samo Palvin (2006) points out that both the community of practice and the organisation benefit from this. The organisation would benefit because there would be innovation which would lead to faster problem solving, quality and cost could also be improved. The community of practice could also benefit as knowledge would be shared faster.

Etienne Wenger(1999) points out that communities of practice unites three components namely people, knowledge and experience. Seeing as COP’s are made up of three components:
· the domain which signifies the area of knowledge that causes the people to meet
· the community which signifies the people that make up the community and usually in that domain and
· the practice which signifies knowledge, e.t.c. the members of the community discuss or share with each other.

It is very important that Communities of practice not be confused with teams as the term communities of practice are sometimes used incorrectly. It is also sometimes confused with a range of groups and even functional departments. (Paul et al 2000).Taking all of this into consideration, I understand a community of practice as a group of people that have a common interest and interact or meet regularly in such a way that each member of the community contributes/ shares and acquires knowledge from the other members for example the imperial team could be said to be a community of practice.


Organisations
The Oxford English dictionary defines an “organisation as an organised body of people with a particular purpose”. As stated in my earlier blog can be said to be a group of people working together to achieve a collective goal. I would also like to point out that organisations usually have objectives through which the goal or set of goals could be achieved and a strategy or set of strategies to optimally achieve their goals.

Differences between an organisation and a community of practice

As pointed out in my earlier blog on organisations and communities of practice, some noticeable differences between organisations and communities of practice are:

· Communities of practice usually have a shared domain of interest unlike organisations that have vast domains of interest.
· An organisation usually has a defined name while a community may or may not have a name.
· The main goal of an organisation is to gain profit while the goal of a community of practice is to gain knowledge.
· An organisation is usually formal in its structure while a community of practise might be formal or informal.
· Organisations usually have a hierarchy structure (i.e. leadership), communities of practice do not.
· An organistion ususally has well defined goals, objectives and strtegies that might help in achieving these goals, this is not always the case for communities of practice.

Although Communities of practices and organisations are different in so many ways, they can both be said to be social structures.

REFERENCES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

· Loyarte. E and Rivera. O (2007) “communities of practice: a model for their cultivation” Journal of knowledge management vol. 11 no. 3 2007, pp. 67-77
· Wenger, E., McDermott, R.A. and Snyder, W. (2002), Cultivating Communities of Practice: A Guide to Managing Knowledge, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA.
· Palvin. S (2006) “Community of practice in a small research institute” journal of knowledge management. Vol 10. No 4
· Hildreth. P, Kimble. C, Wright. P (2000). “Communities of practice in the distributed international environment”. Journal of Knowledge Management. Vol 4, No 1
· The Oxford English Dictionary