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This paper aims to discuss the concepts contained in communities of practice theory (COPT) and how they might contribute to greater understanding of organizations.

The paper draws upon COPT as a means to broaden the perspective of institutional theory.

The findings provide insight into the processes surrounding organizational change. The notion of change as both intentional actions and unintended consequences is explored through a review of the case of Arthur Andersen and Company.

The study presents a historically informed case study that presents a novel theoretical approach for examinations of behavior, practices and ethics in organizations. Future work based on broader empirical examinations would enrich the findings presented in this study.

The study provides a means to examine organizations in practice and expands awareness of how behaviors in organizations evolve and might be shaped and encouraged over time.

The study introduces a novel theoretical vocabulary to the accounting academy COPT that has the potential to expand our understanding of organizations through examinations of practice.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a theoretical framework that explains the roles and viability of both cooperation and competition as they emerge in communities of practice. Although the usefulness of cooperation in communities of practice is well-understood, few studies have considered the role of internal competition, and those that have generally only explored cases in which antagonistic behavior led to the community’s collapse.

A contingency theory of communities of practice is developed based on the manifestations of members’ participation.

This theory demonstrates the root causes of fracturing and also provides a foundation for studying communities of practice that have previously defied explanation.

This manuscript explains the potential role and limitations of internal competition in communities of practice, as well as the emergence of subgroups based on differing preferences for cooperation and/or competition. Future research should examine the manifestation and ramifications of such individual differences between community members.

Practitioners can use this theoretical framework to assess communities of practice that they oversee, diagnose potential pitfalls and take corrective action to mitigate potentially toxic influences or inject additional motivating forces that would sustain the community.

This theoretical framework diverges from previous assumptions that internal competition is necessarily toxic for communities of practice, showing the value that it may offer in some contexts.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute towards understanding how entrepreneurial learning might be understood as being socially situated, embedded in everyday practice in the context of family business. The study is framed by three main principles drawn from situated learning theory. First, the family and the business are examined as overlapping communities of practice, as sites of practice‐based knowledge. Second, the concept of legitimate peripheral participation is explored in relation to members of the family business. Finally, how practice is both reproduced and transformed over time is examined in the context of two generations' participation in a family business.

The paper draws on an empirical study of two generations from five families, the founders of a business and their successors. The interview approach adopted phenomenological techniques. A thematic analysis identified conceptual frameworks to make sense of the data in a “quasi grounded” approach. Finally, the three main principles introduced from situated learning theory – communities of practice, legitimate peripheral participation, and cycles of reproduction and transformation provided a conceptual framework to analyse the empirical material.

This is an interpretive, qualitative study based on a small sample of families based in the North West of England. The findings are not intended to be generalised to a population, but to offer empirical insights that extend theoretical frameworks in order to better understand the entrepreneurial phenomenon.

The experience of the second generation both in the family business and in overlapping contexts of learning‐in‐practice brings innovation and change as well as continuity. The study also suggests that the complex process of succession might be informed by the understanding of the importance of the nature and extent of participation in the family business over time.

This paper introduces conceptual frameworks that capture the social complexity of intergenerational entrepreneurial learning and contributes an empirical illustration of situated learning theory within the context of family business. The situated learning perspective contrasts with much of the existing entrepreneurial learning literature, which has tended to focus on “the entrepreneur” and individual learning processes. This study demonstrates that applying a learning lens brings theoretical insights to the study of family business.

The purpose of this study is twofold: to examine the types of activity that nurses undertake on an online community of practice (APN‐l) as well as the types of knowledge that nurses share with one another; and to examine the factors that sustain knowledge sharing among the nurses from their local perspectives.

An in‐depth case study with mixed methods was adopted to obtain rich and naturalistic data including online observations of the messages posted in APN‐l, interviews with 27 members of APN‐l, and content analysis of online messages.

The most common type of activity performed by members of APN‐l was “Knowledge sharing,” followed by “Solicitation.” Regarding the types of knowledge shared, the most common were “Institutional practice” and “Personal opinion.” The factors that have helped sustain knowledge sharing within the online community of practice include: a self‐selection; validation of one's practice with others who share a similar working situation; a need to gain better understanding of current knowledge and best practices in the field; a non‐competitive environment; the asynchronous nature of the online communication medium; and the role of the listserv moderator.

This study contributes to the growing knowledge base of communities of practice that span organizational boundary. Administrators can use the coding schema developed in this study to gauge current activities of existing online communities of practice. Additionally, they can use the six factors to sustain knowledge sharing community for fostering new/existing online communities of practice.

This paper aims to explore graduate student experiences of ecohealth communities of practice in Canada, West and Central Africa and Central America, to better understand the role of student knowledge in advancing innovative practices in transdisciplinary, participatory and equitable research approaches.

This ethnographic analysis builds on observations of graduate student participants in ecohealth communities of practice activities, along with 26 in-depth interviews conducted in 2011 with graduate students and professionals trained in ecosystem approaches to health. Interviews are transcribed by the author, and coded and analyzed using a grounded theory approach.

Although ecohealth communities of practice open new space for students to experiment with innovative practices in transdisciplinary, participatory and equitable research approaches, the surrounding disciplinary, top-down structure of academic and professional careers continue to pose significant obstacles to how students can take up the principles of ecohealth in practice. Through their collective experiences of these obstacles, students have considerable knowledge about the opportunities and constraints that the ecohealth communities of practice afford; however, this student knowledge has not yet been systematized or adequately mobilized.

Student knowledge gained through shared experiences of ecohealth communities of practice appears to be a critical, necessary and underused component in working on systemic change in the structure of sustainability leadership in higher education. However, more research is needed to understand how greater emphasis could be placed on putting students in charge of confronting the conditions of their own training, to collectively produce alternatives that challenge dominant structural norms.

The ethnographic approach re-centers student voices within debates about the relevance of ecohealth communities of practice for realizing the aims of transdisciplinary, participatory and equitable research approaches within the context of international sustainability challenges and graduate training.

This paper examines events management as a Community of Practice (CoP) and to demonstrate that knowledge management and practice within events operate as a CoP. The paper adds to the events management literature which is currently superficial in considering events conceptually as a CoP.

An interpretive and inductive approach was adopted for the research which incorporated quantitative and qualitative methods undertaken in a United Kingdom setting. Twenty-five in-depth semi-structured interviews with event professionals were conducted and this was complemented by a survey of 215 event professionals.

The findings demonstrate that within the evolving events industry, as well as reflected in aspects of the academic literature, events can be depicted as a “domain” which connects event professionals to a “community”. The themes emerging revealed that there are modes of working, shared values and practices, a shared identity and a desire to work as a wider collective in order to maintain and enhance knowledge and practice, which are in keeping with a CoP framework.

This study provides new insight on an under-researched area concerning knowledge and practice development within events management.

This is a novel study that considers how the emergent field of events management should be considered as a CoP. It addresses a gap in the literature pertaining to knowledge and practice creation within events management from a CoP perspective.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the premise that organizationally defined communities of practice can be a valuable strategic learning tool for management.

It is a quantitative study in a single organization. The authors analyzed data from 1,082 employees using hierarchical (multi-level) linear modeling.

Management can support learning and influence engagement and identification by defining communities of practice and establishing goals, but this is not always successful. Engagement may be a short-term phenomenon, dependent significantly on the type of practice or project in which community members are allowed or decide, to participate. Identification, on the other hand, may need practices that support longer-term individual development aims allowing and supporting the achievement of personal ambition or competence.

Future studies of organizationally defined communities of practice could use established scales to measure leadership, engagement and identification.

When implementing this type of organizationally defined community of practice, attention to the types of practices or projects to which the employees can contribute seems to be most important.

The authors show that: the dynamics within communities of practice (CoP) designed by top management teams have an impact on CoP members’ identification and engagement; organizationally defined CoP may be part of a broader landscape of professional practice (LoP); engagement, objectives and practices, and not only identification and knowledgeability, are key to the dynamics of CoP and LoP; senior management’s leadership role in setting up successful CoP is equivocal.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the collaborative practices of virtual teams carrying out knowledge‐based work and the tools required/used to assemble “collective” artefacts.

The vast majority of recent work on communities of practice is devoted to community management (i.e. discovering, building, and maintaining communities), dismissing or undermining community practices and how they are technologically mediated (i.e. the practice‐specific tools and artefacts involved). This paper investigates existing practices and makes use of scenarios to envision new distributed collective practices in a designated application domain. The instruments used include both empirical tools (i.e. survey of current practice and expert interviews) and analytical tools (i.e. scenarios of use, walkthroughs, and virtual prototyping) to provide insight towards the design of practice‐oriented toolkits.

The proposed approach is validated in the context of an electronic village of local interest with a thematic focus on regional tourism, highlighting the key role of “collective” knowledge management in information‐based industries whose products are non‐material (intangible) and knowledge is central to gaining competitive advantage. The results include a general model for practice‐oriented toolkits conceived of as separate software components from (but interoperable to) the community support system and devised to establish a place for engaging in the practice the community is about. This model is then used to build an operational toolkit for assembling vacation packages by cross‐organization virtual communities of practice.

Virtual communities of practice (or partnerships) necessitate smooth integration of community management and practice‐specific tasks and tools. Community management tasks can be supported by augmenting capabilities of existing community portals to allow for community registration, role undertaking, declaration of virtual assets, etc. Practice‐oriented tasks should be designed in such a way so as to capture and accommodate domain‐specific vocabulary.

Model‐based techniques and domain‐specific design languages are used as the unifying mechanism (i.e. software factory) for integrating community management and practice‐oriented artefacts. These techniques are designed and implemented into a software platform so as to facilitate the systematic accumulation and reuse of knowledge towards the construction of collective artefacts.

This paper aims to understand the impact of the job switching behavior on different stages of the communities of practice’s life cycle. Job switching has been viewed from both positive and negative point of views, and its impact on certain organizational factors might be found in literature. Job switching/job hopping behavior of an individual might be fueled by socio-economic factors as well as fun, but it has serious implication for the companies. But an understanding of how this new employee might influence the communities of practice, given which stage is the community in, is something that has not been studied yet. This work is an attempt in that direction.

Using integrative review technique, this paper forwards a conceptual framework based on the literature reviewed and builds a model using an understanding of the nuances of each stage of the life cycle of communities of practice.

The model proposes the impact of switching on each stage of the life cycle of communities of practice. It is observed that at each stage a new entrant who is a “job hopper” might either help or hinder the progress of a community of practice.

This paper gives a new impetus to the research on communities of practice in contemporary perspective. The model proposed could be tested using data from real communities of practice. This paper limits itself to the proposal of the model and does not engage in testing it.

Organizations and managers may use the model to understand how a new entrant to the organization will complement the existing life cycle phase of the communities of practice within.

The conceptual model proposed is unique in its context of job switching behavior and its effect on communities of practice. Research on communities of practice from this contemporary perspective might bring important research directions in future.

Over the last 50 years the social legitimacy of public relations has improved by standardising and monitoring the education and training of its practitioners. While successful in developing a professional development trajectory from novice to competent practitioner, the profession has struggled to fully understand the development trajectory of its senior public relations practitioners. The diversity of occupational contexts in which public relations is practised, the condition of professional seniority and the knowledge and tools required for working at occupational boundaries is challenging for senior public relations practitioners. It is also a challenge therefore, for the profession to develop and support the learning required for senior practice beyond competency frameworks. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This paper employs socio-cultural learning theory and supporting empirical evidence gained in semi-structured interviews with senior practitioners in the field to explore what senior practice entails and how senior professionals learn.

Communities of practice is useful for understanding novice practitioner learning but has insufficient explanatory power for understanding senior practitioner learning. There is an urgent need for support for senior public relations learning that moves beyond reified competency frameworks and enables senior practitioners to function autonomously outside the core community of practice. Seniority requires its learners to embrace uncertainty and confront the challenge of creating new knowledges and in the everyday practices of their professional lives.

“Communities of practice” has been influential in the fields of management and organisations (Bolisani and Scarso, 2014). This paper employs the idea of a learning process that takes place in “constellations of practices” (Wenger, 1998) to offer a view of senior practice as boundary dwelling (Engestrom, 2009) rather than boundary spanning and learning as situated (Lave and Wenger, 1991) in the liminal spaces those boundaries provide.