Virtual Communities of Practice: Knowledge Retrieval, Contextualization and Establishment of Weak Trust in Multinational Corporations

This chapter focuses on virtual communities of practices, and whether participation in such forums improves knowledge retrieval processes by overcoming problems of contextual gaps between the sender and the receiver of knowledge. Most multinational corporations (MNCs) have invested heavily in computer systems that help employees to easily download documents, but problems still arise when the searched knowledge is removed from its context and thereby loses some or all of its meaning to the reader. This article, though, differentiates the conventional wisdom that employee socialization, resulting from physical proximity that facilitates contextualization and trust building processes allows transfer of complex and tacit knowledge, (Cohendet et al., 1999; Constant et al., 1994; Granovetter, 1972; Hansen, 1999; Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995) as in the case of communities of practice (Brown & Duguid, 1991; Wenger, 1998). Here, it will be pointed out that proximity is seldom the case of the MNC – having operations spanning the globe – which makes most communication “global rather than local” (Li et al., 2007). In this chapter it will, therefore, be questioned whether knowledge retrieval can be AbSTRACT