Etienne Wenger: Communities of Practice

Overview of Wenger's Book

Wenger's vignettes are an insightful portrayal of the nitty-gritty, day-by-day responses, achievements, communications, social relationships, learnings, concerns and frustrations of office life and of using the computer system. They are instructive, but they are by no means as interesting and delightful as Flora Thompson's descriptions of everyday life of rural 1890s Oxforshire, for reasons that might become clearer below.

Wenger uses these vignettes as a launching pad to discuss and offer a way to understand our everyday learning when we are operating as part of 'communities of practice'. In rather high-register language, sporting many polysyllabic words with Greek and Latin roots, he discusses three main issues, practice, identity and design, and in the latter formulates a theoretical proposal that we may understand and articulate our 'design for learning' in terms of four 'dimensions' and three 'components'. The dimensions are:

• Meaning, ranging between participation and reification: direct engagement with concrete things and events versus making into a concrete thing something which is not concrete but abstract. [p.231, 57]

• Time, or rather the result of time passing, which ranges between design and emergence: epitomized in the (designed) piece of software on one hand and practice on the other, which is not the result of this design but rather a response to it. [p.233]

• Space, ranging between local and global.

• Power, ranging between 'identification' and 'negotiability' (setting up a framework but depending on the framework being negotiable): design "can thrive on participation or impose itself through non-participation". [p.235]

These dimensions are distinct but interrelated tradeoffs. The three components [p.237] are:

• Facilities of engagement, such as mutuality, competence and continuity;
• Facilities of imagination, such as orientation, reflection and exploration;
• Facilities of alignment, such as convergence, coordination and arbitration.

He then discusses how this framework may throw light on organisation and education.

There is much more in his book, but that is how I understand its main messages. His book is beloved of academic management scientists especially those involved in knowledge management ...

Comment from a Dooyeweerdian Perspective

Richness with Diversity

Here are a few aspects of everyday life that are found in the vignettes, which are permeated with a notion of good or bad:

• Ariel is always trying to achieve her production targets, and that gives the flavour to the whole morning.
• Ariel was therefore horrified when she found she needed to deal with two apparent errors in her previous work.
• One she accepted was her fault. The other she contested, and spent time filling in the form to make her case.
• She was very pleased when her case was accepted.
• But she nevertheless managed to gain 'production' early in the afternoon.
• She did this because she always plans to do all the easy cases first, and leave the complex ones to the end of the day.
• She finds the afternoon drags slowly (we might surmise that this is because she is no longer motivated to gain production, but she does not reflect on this).
• Communication with others is kept sparse because of wanting to reach production targets as soon as possible.
• She needs help from other processors with things she cannot do or does not understand, and offers help to others.
• When a phone call comes in the middle of entering information about a claim on the computer, she resigns herself to losing all the information and having to re-enter it later, because the computer will not save partly-entered cases when she tries to access the records of the customer on the phone. What a waste of time!
• The customer is a bit annoying - but nowhere so bad as some can be.
• She had dressed neatly because there would be important visitors that day, and tidied up her desk. On her desk were a couple of personal photographs, which made it 'her' space.
• When they came by her she just got on with her work, because she knew they had no connection with her.
• and so on.

Many of these it is difficult to fit into Wenger's framework of four dimensions and three components, without reducing their poignancy. Some can be linked to his concepts of identity, learning, etc., but doing this leaves a lot of the reality outside. Most have an element of space, time and meaning and some have elements of power, but these four dimensions fail to cover the whole reality as expressed in the vignettes, and draw our attention away from, rather than towards, important aspects. His framework makes it difficult to distinguish certain things from each other. For example, to understand life we need to be able to differentiate fun and delight from their opposites like boredom and aversion, and from other aspects like justice and injustice, generosity and meanness, loyalty and unfaithfulness. Examples of most of these can be found in the selection of points above drawn from the vignettes.

It seems to me that Wenger's framework would benefit from adding a third 'arm' beside his dimensions and components: that of spheres of meaning, or aspects as Dooyeweerd understands them. The points above illustrate a number of his aspects (click on each aspect to find out more about its kernel meaning if you wish):

Richness with Vitality

Created: 21 November 2009 Last updated: