To read this content please select one of the options below:

Communities of practice in the distributed international environment

Paul Hildreth (Paul Hildreth is a Research Student, Department of Computer Science, University of York, UK.)
Chris Kimble (Chris Kimble is a Lecturer at the Department of Computer Science, University of York, UK.)
Peter Wright (Peter Wright is a Lecturer at the Department of Computer Science, University of York, UK.)

Journal of Knowledge Management

ISSN: 1367-3270

Article publication date: 1 March 2000

5375

Abstract

Modern commercial organisations are facing pressures which have caused them to lose personnel. When they lose people, they also lose their knowledge. Organisations also have to cope with the internationalisation of business forcing collaboration and knowledge sharing across time and distance. Knowledge management (KM) claims to tackle these issues. This paper looks at an area where KM does not offer sufficient support, that is, the sharing of knowledge that is not easy to articulate. The focus in this paper is on communities of practice in commercial organisations. We do this by exploring knowledge sharing in Lave and Wenger’s (1991) theory of communities of practice and investigating how communities of practice may translate to a distributed international environment. The paper reports on two case studies that explore the functioning of communities of practice across international boundaries.

Keywords

Citation

Hildreth, P., Kimble, C. and Wright, P. (2000), "Communities of practice in the distributed international environment", Journal of Knowledge Management, Vol. 4 No. 1, pp. 27-38. https://doi.org/10.1108/13673270010315920

Publisher

:

MCB UP Ltd

Copyright © 2000, MCB UP Limited

Related articles