Emergent communities of practice in temporary inter‐organisational partnerships

Abstract

Purpose

The paper aims to discuss the emergence of communities of practice in a temporary event organisation involving public and private partners.

Design/methodology/approach

The study employs qualitative methods in the form of 31 semi‐structured interviews, a five‐week period of participant observations and archive research in a Swedish public‐private partnership, focused on large‐scale media and entertainment event.

Findings

In the temporary event‐driven project‐based organisational structure studied, communities of practice emerged by themselves because of the complexity of the task at hand. These are called “emergent communities of practice”. Four built‐in organisational mechanisms that cultivated the emergent communities of practice were identified: trust building stability; competence contributors; competence shadows; and social glue of informal events. Surprisingly, the public/private dimension was found not to affect the emergence of the community negatively.

Research limitations/implications

Given that conclusions are based on the Swedish data, the paper recommends that similar studies be carried out in other countries.

Originality/value

The paper extends the framework of communities of practice beyond the boundaries of a single or few stable organisations by analysing communities of practice within a temporary project organisation; it introduces the concept emergent communities of practice; and it proposes four ways to cultivate communities of practice.

Citation

Juriado, R. and Gustafsson, N. (2007), "Emergent communities of practice in temporary inter‐organisational partnerships", The Learning Organization, Vol. 14 No. 1, pp. 50-61. https://doi.org/10.1108/09696470710718348