COPs IN THE ORGANIZATIONAL WORLD

Communities of Practice (CoPs) are developing in importance for the organizational world. In the field of knowledge management there is increasing importance being placed on the social aspects of knowledge and how it can be managed, as opposed to how technology can be utilized. Technology, it is now being argued as a supportive mechanism rather than a driver for the management of knowledge. People, it is also maintained, prefer to share their knowledge on a face-to-face basis rather than through electronically mediated means. Once the knowledge is shared in a tacit manner, there remains the issue of how it may be shared through technology, as information to be accessed as required. Much has been made of the difficulties associated with turning so-called tacit knowledge into explicit. One way of characterizing this problem is to see explicit knowledge as recordable (on paper, computer disk, etc.), and tacit as inherently difficult to record and hence to share through such media as computers. A possible solution to this is to see sharing tacit knowledge as a process, achieved through human interaction, rather than as simple content. CoPs can contribute to this by connecting people so that they can collaborate and share their tacit (personal) knowledge about a particular work context or practice. Thus railway engineers will meet to discuss issues such as how to devise good signalling; midwives will meet to discuss best practice in drugs for childbirth and so on. As Wenger (2001) argues they are people who “share an interest in a domain of human endeavour and engage in a process of collective learning that creates bonds between them” (p. 2). Here, in the Encyclopedia of Communities of Practice in Information and Knowledge Management, for the first time, we combine discussions of how CoPs can assist organizations, both voluntarily and privately funded, from both practitioners and academics. These discussions come from a wide variety of industrial sectors and from across the world.