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Recalling communities of practice

This is one of the few books that I have kept from my PhD days. Why might this one be worth a second look? Etienne Wenger, a social learning theorist turned management guru, develops the concept of ‘communities of practice’ in this book. It builds on an earlier account of apprenticeship – defined as increasing participation in socio-cultural practices – across five diverse social groups. Communities of Practice is an ethnography of learning within a large U.S. company. Wenger uses vignettes of a day in the life of a health insurance claims processor (‘Ariel’), and her various interactions with colleagues and objects in performing her job, to develop a social theory of learning. The theory emphasises the importance, for individuals, of learning through participation in activities (rather than acquiring knowledge in mental representations) and, for groups, of developing communities through ongoing interaction (‘mutual engagement’) and by developing resources (a ‘shared repertoire’) that bring meaning to those activities; that is, negotiating on a daily basis the joint enterprise of a community. The book has received over 35,000 citations to date according to Google Scholar; the idea of communities of practice has been influential among researchers and practitioners alike within health services, and more widely across the public and private sector. In health services research, use of ethnography (e.g. non-participant observation) as a method for analysing health care practices, and the idea that key processes – such as professional learning or service innovation – are interactive and social in nature, have become reasonably well established. This article’s purpose is to return to Communities of Practice and see what insights the book’s original approach might offer to current debate on practices of learning in health services research literature. The vignettes of everyday work from Wenger’s oneyear ethnography of insurance claims processing are relatively short (the two vignettes represent 20 pages of a 318-page book) and little methodological detail is provided. However, Wenger does state that he was an ‘observer-participant’, rather than a non-participant which is more often seen in contemporary health services research. He sought to become as immersed as possible in the setting, ‘by attending training classes, including exams for new recruits and a mock job interview. . . I processed claims at my own desk and participated in the conversations and social events in the unit’ (p. 284). Such an approach allowed Wenger to provide a fine-grained description of working life in the company, including interactions in the elevator, dress codes, the office layout, the documents and systems used for processing claims, reporting of conversations (‘I can’t understand your note’) and gossip (‘what’s the big deal with that mud bath?’), the sharing of birthday cake, and perceptions of work (e.g. ‘this stupid system’, ‘that was a pretty quick morning . . . a unit meeting always helps’). This rich detail is used to develop and illustrate different aspects of the concept of communities of practice – for example, that work takes place in a historical and social context in which the tacit and explicit are combined. Such attentiveness to the reporting of situational detail might add further insight to future ethnographies conducted within health services research, by offering a way of describing the ‘invisible work’ performed by health care professionals, notably informal activities that are surely familiar to us as part of ‘work’ but rarely recognised as such in formal evaluations. The concept of communities of practice draws on, and seeks to synthesise, a range of social theories of learning, including the interplay between social structures (e.g. professions or organisations) and human agency, and the ‘everyday’ nature of learning through situated or practical experience. However, current theorisations of communities of practice tend to neglect this underpinning theoretical background. While Wenger’s engagement with such wide-ranging ideas in