Comunità Di Pratica: Apprendimento, Significato E Identità

Learning in Doing: Social, Cognitive and Computational Perspectives

by Etienne Wenger

"Ogni organizzazione è una costellazione di 'comunità di pratica'". Con questa idea Wenger getta le fondamenta del pensiero che le organizzazioni dovranno adottare per sopravvivere nel XXI secolo. Comunità di pratica presenta una teoria dell'apprendimento che vede il coinvolgimento nella pratica sociale come il processo fondamentale attraverso cui impariamo e diventiamo quelli che siamo. L'unità primaria di analisi non è né l'individuo né l'istituzione sociale, ma quella "comunità operativa" formata da persone che svolgono delle attività in comune in un certo arco di tempo. Per delineare la dimensione sociale dell'apprendimento, la teoria analizza in modo sistematico l'intersezione tra i problemi di comunità, pratica sociale, significato e identità. Ne emerge un ampio schema di riferimento concettuale per intendere l'apprendimento come processo partecipato e condiviso. Il volume di Etienne Wenger costituisce una lettura fondamentale per tutti coloro che, a diverso livello e con molteplici finalità - studiosi, ricercatori, consulenti, formatori, operatori -, si occupano di processi di apprendimento, di conoscenza dei (e del conoscere nei) contesti lavorativi, di azioni e trasformazioni organizzative.

Genres: Education, Nonfiction, Sociology, Philosophy, Academic, Anthropology, Business

343 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

Reviews

[Taylor Ellwood · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this book the author explores the concept of organizational design from two perspectives of practice and identity and explores how those perspectives inform the creation of community within organizations as well as the power dynamics that occur as a result. The author has some intriguing ideas to present and it's worth a read if you are interested in building community or improving the efficacy of your organization. This is an academic text, so it's not focused on how to build community, however you can get a lot of ideas from reading the text. I'd recommend it as a way of also understanding some of the dynamics in your organization so that you can make changes or make your organization sustainable.

[Lukas Vermeer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not an easy read, but worth the effort if you’re interested to learn about learning communities. Take your time to process it and negotiate your own meaning.

“Access to information without negotiability serves only to intensify the alienating effects of non-participation.”

[F J Gilbert · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found Wenger's book an extremely useful tool for thinking about learning and teaching. I like the way he has a rich conception of learning, seeing learning as something which happens in many different contexts. His notion of 'communities of practice' is rooted in the idea that people come together in an open-ended way to practice activities, and within these communities of practice learn from each other as they practice. There are many different types of communities of practice ranging from the more formal ones, such as the work-place, to the more informal ones such as pedestrians walking down the street. Each communities of practice confers upon its participants specific identities such as 'worker' or 'walker' and these identities set their participants upon specific trajectories of learning; you learn how to do your job in a certain way, or walk across the road. Communities of practice are 'porous'; people are coming in and out of them all the time. Some CoP are more porous than others though; to enter the CoP of many work environments may require many different forms of application and initiation, while to be part of a CoP such as walking down the street usually doesn't require any form of application. All CoP have practitioners who are on the peripheries of the CoP, and need 'old timers' to initiate the apprentice into the CoP: the adult teaching the child to cross the road, the newly-qualified teacher being mentored by an older colleague. Wenger's theory is that for CoPs to work properly, practitioners need to be incenticised to help newcomers learn 'on the job', but this often doesn't happen, with newcomers being subjected to decontextualised training, separate from the CoP. Learning for Wenger is an embodied, social experience where knowledge is created by the community. Wenger provides the pedagogue with a very useful language to describe learning in a rich and nuanced fashion.

[Alan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Powerful book for understanding how groups of people with shared interests learn and innovate.
I wrote an article inspired by a part of that book:

Boundaries and peripheries
http://www.connected.org/learn/bounda...

[Crispin · Rating 5 out of 5]

if you like systems thinking and cybernetics, you'll love this. Otherwise it might be a bit dry or abstract.
Wenger provides a lens through which to understand purposeful social configurations which is evocative, poetic, logical and densely interlocking.
The central example in the book is that of an office of medical insurance claims processors. Dry on the surface (think, The Office, or The IT Crowd), but Wenger turns an anthropological eye on the apparently humdrum goings on and reveals the human richness that keeps the whole thing going.
Norah Bateson's ideas on 'symmathesy' are somewhat related, in that learning as a foundational feature of people, and other living things, is centred in the theory.
In the final chapter, Wenger seems skeptical of school-based education, aligning somewhat with the ideas of Ivan Illich, and provides a template for a more humane alternative, although it's hard to know how we could get there. Perhaps the work of Jay Gillen or Bob Moses relates here.
This book rewards notetaking, underlining, post-it notes and coming-back-to. It's a library of ideas which can be joined together in countless ways, and used as lenses for seeing in yet more ways. The consequences of this can only reveal themselves over time: a single reading cannot possible unfold everything of relevance: only real life can expose the particular configurations that might matter to a particular person. It's unusually general, yet practical, in that respect.
There's so much here and it's too fresh in my mind to really summarise it, and maybe it's not even summarisable: maybe it's 300 pages are about as succinct as it gets!
One core idea may be that social life cannot be designed, it can only be designed *for*: that institutions don't constitute the human endeavour, that the human endeavour is a *response to*, among other things, our institutions. This has major implications for how we can effectively design/influence, and move through and around, our institutions; and avoid the major recurring flaws in how we do this.
This easily takes a spot on my shelf of favourite books.

[Jan D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Where does learning happen? According to Wenger in “Communities of Practice”, groups of people who share a common concern, have common activities and a shared history. This is very much different from “Learning happens when people get information and do something with it”: Learning in school and from books can lack much of what is essential about learning for Wenger. This does not mean that training and artifacts do not play a part in learning. But they are not sources, but resources for learning.

Compared to “Legitimate Peripheral Participation”, there are fewer rich cases, although the case of the claims processing community of practice is well used and far more interesting than it first seems.

There is a close relation to practice theory (namely, Giddens) and many concepts feel rather Symbolic-Interactionism-ish.

What was a bit difficult is that there are many concepts that form groups of four or three like community/practice/identity/meaning or imagination/alignment/engagement. I was lost at times and wondered how they connect. Also, the last third felt a bit repetitive.

As a framework to think about learning and social groups, the suggested ideas are very helpful and are abstract and flexible enough to be a useful tool for thinking, yet concrete enough to make me think of many actual examples from work life, school or pasttime.

[Nathan Storring · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book will open your eyes to the many ways we all learn in everyday life. It is packed with insight and nuance. I expect it will be very useful to me in both research and working life.

My only complaint: Wenger provides too many layers of jargon to describe every single dynamic of Communities of Practice—Participation, Reification, Modes of Belonging, Negotiability, Identification, etc. Personally, I would have preferred one or two new additions to the lexicon, with the rest simply explained in plain language.

[Toby Newton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Returning to 'Communities of Practice' after a further decade of working in school leadership, I'm struck by the extent to which Wenger's ideas have permeated my own thinking and practice and the extent to which they result in something different and positive. He patiently knits together a brilliant set of formulations, which combine to present a humane approach to learning which remains elusive in most schools and, as far as I can see, all national school systems.

A Wengerian model is a more difficult trick to pull off, but worth it. How much more worth it, we won't know until more people with leadership responsibility in education, in the face of the glaring insufficiences of the current system, give evidence of a willingness to try something more 'theoretically' informed.

[Alexander Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the definitional guide and structure to considering 'communities of practice' in educational, organizational, institutional, and online settings. Although this is a really good introduction to a specialized subject, there are many ways of considering this way of thinking. This is more a supplement to make the boundary case of how practice and learning happens between fields of organizational theory, communication, and informal education theories. This should be required reading for anyone dealing with social networks, communication, or organizational theories.

[Taylor · Rating 2 out of 5]

Although I found the information in this book useful, I didn't enjoy the writing style. In chapter 1, discussing participation and reification the author would go on for paragraphs just listing similes and metaphors for what he was saying. I found this to be drawn out and boring to read, and it continued throughout the whole book. Otherwise I think I would've given this text 5 stars for what I learned reading it!

[Helene Uppin · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great lense for looking at learning, communities, and other things. Recomend to anyone who is interested in the boundary crossing phenomen (as a person who is working on the boarderline of schools, museums and universities, I found Wenger ideas extremely helpful). Also, relatively easy read. Which is always a compliment by me.

[Miguel Panão · Rating 5 out of 5]

Insightful and inspiring. The language is uncommon but isn’t all learning a challenge to “uncommonness”. The reasoning of what makes a community of practice is clear and helps to better understand of the ones we consciously participate and the one we can build transforming our current learnings practices into learning communities.

[Jeff Wilsbacher · Rating 3 out of 5]

The idea that digital communities can transmit tacit information is tough. In humanities past chicken sexers, UK airplane spotters and a handful of others taught these skills though practice and correction. This book suggests tacit knowledge can be codified...and I’m not sure it can.

[Andrew]

As mentioned in What Matters at Work

[Yisu Z. · Rating 4 out of 5]

三星半。不夸张的说Wenger凭借这本书，只手把学习理论的解释权从心理学家那里夺了过来，把知识、社区、实践作为他的概念核心。有意思的是他这么做的方法完全抛开了学科知识体系（如果之前和Jean Lave的合作还有一点人类学影子的话）。他把所有对他产生影响的人都放在了脚注里（比方布迪厄变成了「对实践理论最有研究的学者」），并且自己发明了一套术语。Wenger也是一个不依赖于大学体制的人，所以CoP天生就自带管理培训光环。一本如此受热捧却又有点不协调的书。启发还是有。以后想追溯一下这本书在教育领域内的影响。

[Mills College Library]

153.15 W474 1999

[Nicholas · Rating 4 out of 5]

thick reading but full of brilliant gems. A wonderful theory of learning, often exquisitely put, though also thick in academic theoretical writing at times as well.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this twice while completing various courses in graduate school. I hated it the first time around, but the second time I read it was in a much more meaningful context. The idea that organizations are really just made up of many communities of practice really hit home for me the second time around and since I've been able to see examples of this clearly illustrated in both my professional (I work in education) and personal life.

[Sandy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is Wenger's more theoretical work on Communities of Practice. I read it for a paper I was doing that dealt with one. It was very good for that deeper understanding of what one is but it wasn't so much a how-to (which is a bit more complicated). Some of his later works seem to focus on that more. If you want a good grounding in the essence and psychology of communities of practice as a method of organizational knowledge sharing, this would be it.

[William · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wenger introduces an important theoretical construct with this book, which focuses on the hidden influence of cohesive groups bound by their common activities. Primarily for the education audience, he focuses on organizational learning and the development of local expertise through CoP. This is generally for an academic audience.

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book provides an in-depth qualitative data analysis about Wenger's research with "communities of practice," or groups of people that form around collective, sustained tasks.

This is an important book for anyone interested in group-formation or identity co-constituted from within the self and as a member of different groups.

[Michiel Poell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Een geweldig boek waardoor je op een heel nieuwe manier gaat kijken naar de organisatiestructuur.
Wanneer leren mensen van elkaar? Wat stelt mensen in staat om van elkaar te leren? Een theorie over social learning. Het boek is in het begin misschien verwarrend, maar voor mij is dat een teken dat er nieuwe inzichten ontstaan!

[Stuart Macalpine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant. A study of the way that learning or simply living is embedded in a complex web of meaning making in which we balance our participation with the things or reifications that represent the order, ideas, institutions or things we work with. It is enormously useful in thinking about every aspect of learning and community. An absolutely essential read. Powerful.

[David Kirschner · Rating 3 out of 5]

Useful in some parts, not useful to me for most of it. I've already gotten most of what Wenger was saying in one form or another over the years and was looking to this to really help me think more deeply about CoPs. It was okay for that purpose. The best part was reading the ethnographic material in the front. Really do like the book's organization.

[Steven · Rating 4 out of 5]

So far, it seems like an insightful study of how certain communities cohere around common practices and how unique and flexible meanings are negotiated within these communities. I'm only about half way through.

[Jess Haggerty]

So far, this book has been very interesting in detailing how people who share the same interests or enact the same experiences come together to form communities. It is also interesting to see how being a member of a community of practice has an effect on identity.

[Grumpylibrarian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Coursework

[Kara Poe Alexander · Rating 5 out of 5]

Valuable book for educators about social learning and the ways individuals are embedded in "communities of practice" that foster learning and pass on values. Excellent read.

[Dr. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well-written analysis of learning, moving beyond teaching and the classroom.

[Leslie · Rating 2 out of 5]

"It was okay." Hard to digest for someone who just wants to apply the concepts, but hopefully laid the foundational theory to read Wenger's other books.