Community of Practice Ellipse

Abstract

The literature on organizational learning and knowledge management seldom exhibits integrative features (see, for example, Ambrosini et al, 2001, Reinhardt, 2000, Pawlowsky, 1999 for the argument). In order to provide some convergence and coherence in our discussions, several dichotomies such as theory-practice, content-process, learning-knowledge, and individual-social must be addressed (for example, Easterby-Smith & Lyles, 2003). Interdisciplinary fields like management learning, meaning both the management of learning and the learning of management, can be helpful for bridging some of the gaps existing among these dichotomies (Burgoyne & Reynolds, 1997). Burgoyne reviewed (1975) and updated (2003) various learning theories and their relevance to management learning, and in so doing, identified various schools of thought such as conditioning; cognitive and experiential. These schools are defined with respect to their differences, which originate in the different assumptions each makes about the nature of people. In fact, these various schools of thought are drawn from management development programs and differences among individuals are significant in all of them. However these ideas can be applied to the learning experiences of organizations. Furthering his discussion of the learning schools of thought, Burgoyne (2003) also suggests `situated learning` within the `communities of practice` as another learning theory. Organizational activities related to learning and knowledge management can also be argued with regard to the SECI model of Nonaka & Takeuchi (1995). According to this tacit-explicit knowledge interaction model, “socialization” is the process of creating tacit knowledge from tacit knowledge, whereas “externalization” is that of articulating tacit knowledge into explicit concepts. “Combination” involves the process of systemizing concepts into an explicit knowledge system. “Internalization” is a process of embodying explicit knowledge into tacit knowledge. Nonaka et al (2003) suggests that at the foundation of SECI modeling lies `ba`, the context that knowledge needs to exist, in which it is shared, created, and utilized. Although the concept of `ba` shows some similarities with that of `community of practice`, they can be differentiated according to the nature of the learning and participation that takes

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 0 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.