Communities of Practice

Leif HommenCIRCLE

leif.hommen@circle.lu.se

Overview (1) What is a ’Community of Practice’?

Definition, Key Characteristics, & Relevance

Cognitive Aspects Working, Learning & Innovating

Governance Aspects Communities within the Firm, Localisation of

Routines, Motivations and Incentives Management by Communities (vs. Management

by Design)

Overview (2) Literature

Brown, J.S. and P. Duguid. 1991. Organizational learning and communities-of-practice: Toward a unified view of working, learning, and innovation. Organization Science 2 (1): 40-57.

Cohendet, P. and P. Llerena. 2003. Routines and incentives: the role of communities in the firm, Industrial and Corporate Change, 12 (2): 271-297.

Amin, A and P. Cohendet. 2004. ’Communities and governance of knowledge in the firm’. Chapter 6 in Architectures of knowledge: Firms, capabilities and communities. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

What is a ’Community of Practice’? (1) Definition (Lave and Wenger)

Groups of persons engaged in the same ’practice’,

communicating regularly with one another about their activities, and

seeking to improve their competence in the given ’practice’, through

construction, exchange and sharing of a common repetoire of resources

What is a ’Community of Practice’? (2) Key Characteristics of CoPs

Self-organization• Autonomy• Identity

Self-consciousness Mutual commitment Learning

• Individual acquisition of values and ’know-how’• A ’socially localized’ process

What is a ’Community of Practice’? (3) Relevance for Innovation

Intra-organizational• Collective problem-solving within organizations

leads to product and process innovation• Innovation as learning: identification, joint

production and sharing of tacit knowledge

Inter-organizational• An essential support for ’networks of innovation’• ’Relational proximity’ facilitates knowledge flows

across organizational boundaries

I. Cognitive Aspects

Working, learning, and innovating are conventionally thought to conflict Work practice: conservative Learning: problematic re: change Innovating: disrupts work & learning

Connecting these activities provides a basis for reconceiving and redesigning organizations to improve all three activities A focus on CoPs provides a relevant and

useful basis for developing a ’unified view’

Working (1) Canonical versus non-canonical practice

Practice is essential to understanding work But abstractions detached from practice tend to

distort or obscure its ’intricacies’

There is thus a basic conflict between ’espoused practice’ and ’actual practices’ of work Organizations tend to rely on ’espoused practice’ They are usually blind to ”what and who it takes to get

a job done” But ’actual practice’ is usually what determines their

success or failure

Working (2) Canonical practice: Photocopier service technicians

The company service manual as ’canonical map’: ’Directive documentation’ aimed at ’single point

failures’ A single predetermined route with no alternatives A decision tree for diagnosis and repair that assumes

’predictable’ machines’ & an ’unproblematic process’. Minimizes the amount of information provided

The training programme follows a similar approach ’Downskilling’: unhelpful and overly simplistic Assumes that ’reps’ are untrainable, uncooperative

and unskilled

Working (3) Non-canonical practice: What ’reps’ do

Trouble-shooting: Developing options where canonical approaches fail

Maintaining – and repairing -- social relations Replacing machines as the last resort

Solving problems by constructing coherent accounts out of incoherent data and documentation

Key aspects of actual practice: Narration: ’Stories’ are both adaptable (general

causal maps) and particular (detailed case histories) Collaboration: Joint development & group discussion Social Construction:Shared understanding & identity.

Learning (1) Conventional ideas of learning as

transmission – ’knowledge transfer’ increasingly under attack

A more useful alternative is to view learning as a process of construction As, e.g., in ’legitimate peripheral

participation’ (becoming an ’insider’) From this perspective, learners are not

acquiring ’expert knowledge’ Instead, they are developing ’the embodied

ability to behave as community members’

Learning (2) Groups and Communities

’Communities’ are not recognized sub- organizational groups (e.g., ’teams’)

They tend to be interstitial (e.g., involving both suppliers and customers) and to emerge independently (not by managerial fiat)

Fostering Learning Training programmes should avoid ’context stripping’ Learners need direct exposure to practitioners They also need both legitimacy and peripherality

Innovating (1) Innovation often emerges out of the interface between an

organization and its environment E.g., user-producer interaction

To innovate, an organization ’tries out’ a new concept on its environment, and reflects on the interaction E.g., making sense – and full use – of a new kind of office

equipment Drawing lessons from such reflection can be problematic,

due to a fixed ’world-view’ and ’identity’ But this kind of reconceptualization takes place continuously

within interstitial ’communities’ E.g., Adoption of ’dry photocopy’ technology depended on a

new concept of use, which emerged gradually out of experiments with new office practices and forms of work

Innovating (2) It follows that CoPs can play a key role in ’incremental’

improvement based on innovation as ’enacting’ Essentially, this kind of ’adaptive’ innovation involves

sense-making, congruence-seeking, and identity-building activities

If an organization suppresses or ignores input from CoPs, it runs two serious risks: Undermining working and learning practices that are

vital to its success Cutting off a major source of potential innovation that

arises from work and learning

Conclusions & Implications To foster working, learning and innovating, an

organization must close the gap between espoused and actual practice To do so, it needs to reconceive itself as a

community-of-communities, and to acknowledge and support the non-canonical communities in its midst.

CoPs typically excel in ’incremental’ or ’adaptive’ innovation, but they might also contribute to ’discontinuous’ or ’radical’ innovation Here, harnessing the creative energy of CoPs would

require changes in the ’organizational archecture’ by which CoPs are linked to one another, and whose design influences their patterns of interaction.

II. Governance Aspects

The view of the firm as a ’myriad of communities’ is especially useful for understanding how ’routines’ are localized within organizations Organizational routines have been analysed as if

context does not matter – but it does!

Routines emerge out of the interaction between organizations and individuals -- a process mediated by communities, which help to ’shape’ routines. Understanding the important role played by

communities in this context has important implications for the firm’s organizational structure and incentives.

Communities within the Firm

Ob-jec-tives

A-gents

Cog. Activi-ties

Re-cruit-ment

Learn-ing

Mode

Cohe-sion

Incen-tives

Func-tional Group

Ensure given tasks

Homo-genous

Disci-plinary

Special-ization

Hierar-chical

Unin-tended learn-ing by doing

Defini-tion of

tasks

Meet given target

CoP

Devel-op skill in prac-tice

Homo-genous

Know-ledge of prac-tice

Co-opta-tion

Intend. learn-ing by doing

Interest in prac-tice

Perfor-mance in prac-tice

Epis-temic Com-munity

Pro-duce

new know-ledge

Hetero-genous

Codifi-cation & Cir-cula-tion

By peers

Intend. search and codifi-cation

Resp. Proce-dural autho-rity

Recog-nition by peers

Localisation of Routines (1) Hitherto, most work on routines has stressed the cognitive

aspect. This has led theory and research to neglect the motivational dimension, generally internal selection mechanisms relying on managerial

decisions agency (“the agents who are involved in the routine”)

Viewing the creation and distribution of knowledge as inherently and mainly linked to the distribution of power and conflicts of interests has important implications for our understanding of governance mechanisms: the “origin” is no longer inequalities in the distribution of

information instead, it resides in the need to control learning dynamics

Localisation of Routines (2) From this perspective, incentive schemes within the firm

have to avoid a number of risks specific to a collective learning framework: the risk of a lack of incentives to improve an existing routine the risk of a lack of incentives to explore new routines the risk of conflicts between individual and collective

learning C&L hypothesise that the nature and intensity of these risks

are context dependent or , “more precisely, ‘community-dependent’”.

Hence, socially localised interactions within the organisation, are a key to understanding the motivational and cognitive aspects of routines. All of this leads, quite naturally, to a focus on “communities”.

Motivations & Incentives (1) C&L propose a twofold classification of incentives:

Intrinsic incentives (e.g., pride in one’s work) Extrinsic incentives (e.g, money)

They further consider that the appropriate balance between intrinsic and extrinsic incentives will differ, according to the type of community. Hierarchical communities (e.g., functional groups)

will rely strongly on extrinsic incentive schemes. Autonomous communities (e.g., epistemic

communities) will rely strongly on intrinsic incentive schemes.

Motivations & Incentives (2) Given the existence within firms of different

communities that are apt follow different incentives, “new questions” arise about:

compatibility of the rules and routines emerging in these communities

coherence of the communities, both within the firm and in relation to each other

the frontier of the firm, given the presence within it of ‘boundary crossing’ communities

These are very good questions, which C&L try to address in what follows.

Routines, Communities & Structure of the Firm (1) For C&L, providing answers to the above questions

depends on applying some sort of functional standard. The standard they choose to begin with is, not

surprisingly for two neo-Schumpeterians, the entrepreneurial function, which has several aspects: The ability to manage strategically the adaptation,

integration and reconfiguration of resources in relation to a changing environment.

The ability to develop and diffuse a specific ‘vision’ of the firm’s context and future.

The ability to structure the organisation of the firm according to this vision.

Routines, Communities & Structure of the Firm (2) To accomplish all of this, the management of the firm

has to mediate between the selection environment external to the firm and the communities within the firm.

In effect, this involves the development of an internal selection environment, which can operate to achieve “relevant trade-offs’ between the incentives affecting different communities.

In particular, it is important to strike an appropriate balance between the routines of the so-called “autonomous communities”: Epistemic communities – essential for “exploration”. Communities of practice – fundamental for

“exploitation”.

Routines, Communities & Structure of the Firm (3) These communities must be given sufficient freedom

or latitude within the organisation but not so much that they lose all integration with the

hierarchical communities.

“Project” organisation represents an effort to escape from this difficult balancing act but one can question its cumulativeness.

These considerations have important implications for the governance structure of the firm.

Routines, Communities & Structure of the Firm (4) Transaction costs economics – arguably, the dominant

approach to understanding firm governance – begins from the perspective that the firm is essentially “an information processing machine”. Thus, its point of departure is the distribution of information. It applies a “make-or-buy” logic to informational issues.

Evolutionary economics takes a different approach, and is concerned instead with the firm as a knowledge-producing/learning organisation. Its point of departure is distributed knowledge and

distributed learning processes. It cannot apply a “make-or-buy” logic to issues of

knowledge and learning.

Routines, Communities & Structure of the Firm (5) Notwithstanding these considerations, firms do not

face an “all-or-nothing” choice between these two theoretical perspectives and the practices they imply.

Rather, firms tend to apply the “evolutionary” perspective to their core activities. In effect, core activities are decoupled from the

market. Similarly, firms tend to apply the “transaction costs”

perspective to peripheral activities. Peripheral activities are effectively coupled to the

market.

Routines, Communities & Structure of the Firm (6) Based on these considerations, C&L

maintain that firms have a dual governance structure -- in which the frontier between core and

periphery is subject to change.

Within this framework, the most difficult problems concern management of the core activities and the communities they involve – but these are also the most important

problems to solve for firms that seek to innovate.

Management by Communities (vs. Management by Design) 1 Amin and Cohendet outline a set of

principles regarding ’Communities and Governance of Knowledge in the Firm’

To begin, they ´distinguish between:Management by Design

• Top-down; Static view of ’knowledge’

Management by Communities• Bottom-up; Dynamic view of ’knowing’

Management by Communities (vs. Management by Design) 2 A&C advocate ’management by

communities’, which means: Enactment: value and support learning

based on practical experimentation Engagement: provide and maintain the

’architecture for certain kinds of interaction’• Emphasis on ’sociality, not trust’

Strike a Balance between exploration and exploitation

Management by Communities (vs. Management by Design) 3 Two advantages of management by

communities:Communities absorb some critical costs

of knowledge-generation• skills, experience, routines• sunk costs of building ’infrastructure’

Communities do not require costly external incentive schemes

• Incentive schemes of communities are ’internal to the practices of communities’

Management by Communities (vs. Management by Design) 4 Limits of Communities:

Parochialism• Discrimination towards other communities;

incompatibility with organizational priorities Lack of Variety

• The ’tendency for communities to be relatively homogenous’; low interaction with other communities

Internal hierarchy• Each community has its ’core’; and ’key actors’

may be stronly motivated by self interest.

Management by Communities (vs. Management by Design) 5

o Back to B&D’s idea of the firm as ”a community-of-communities”.

o Here, the key management problem

concerns the ’organizational architecture’ by which CoPs are linked to one another.

o Organizational design influences CoPs’ patterns of interaction – which, in turn, may or may not lead to innovation

Management by Communities (vs. Management by Design) 6 In linking heterogenous communities within

the firm, two factors are especially important: Degree of repetition of interaction between

communities• Recurrent interaction, cooperation, coordination

through reciprocal adjustment

Quality of communication between communities

• Shared codes, common ’language’, culture

Management by Communities (vs. Management by Design) 7

Weak Repeti-tiveness of Interaction

Strong Repeti-tiveness of Interaction

Poor Quality of Communi-cation

Weak commu-nicative cul-ture

Strong tacit culture

Strong Quality of Communi-cation

Strong codified culture

Strong communi-cative culture

Management by Communities (vs. Management by Design) 8 Weak Repeti-

tiveness of Interaction

Strong Repeti-tiveness of Interaction

Poor Quality of Communi-cation

Traditional sequential process

Overlapping problem solving

Strong Quality of Communi-cation

Modular organization

Evolutionary organization