Tim on Etienne (Part I: Learning in Practice)

This post constitutes the first delicate steps in preparing myself to teach the Knowledge Management 2009 course at the University of Amsterdam. The parts are based on Wenger’s (1998) seminal work on communities of practice.

Introduction
“Perhaps more than learning itself, it is our conception of learning that needs urgent attention” (p.9). Wenger argues that our ‘modern’ conceptions of learning are indoctrinated with classroom settings, exams and cognitive teaching styles. Learning in these conceptions, is not seen as a process, but as object that can be decontextualized and fired when necessary. It leads us away from objectivistic simplifications, towards more subjectivistic wickedness, and although the latter teaches us that no simple recipe for success exists, the first is even more deceptive because it arouses false expectations (Huizing, 2007). Wenger argues for a more realistic adoption and expectation of learning, and challenges us to rethink learning, by introducing a ‘new’ social learning theory that is centered around social participation, being active participants in the practices of social communities and constructing identities in relation to these communities (p.4). This actually differs them from the more passive configuration of communities, however when the word community is used I will refer to communities of practice (CoPs).

The relevance for rethinking learning, is that modern societies come to see learning as a pivotal element in its existence and dealing with its increasing complexity and velocity . We wish to take charge of our learning competencies, thus our perspectives on learning matter. The relevance for deepening our theoretical knowledge, is that theory helps us to understand the inherent mechanisms of learning and not only its effects. After all nothing is more practical than good theory (p.9)

Wenger’s social learning theory has four premises about the nature of knowledge, knowing and knowers:

• We humans are social beings;
• Knowing is a participating in pursuing an enterprise;
• Knowledge then is a matter of competence accomplished in pursuing these enterprises; and
• Meaning is what learning is to produce.

These assumptions translate into an integration of four components, being that of community (= social configuration that uses participation to pursue a joint enterprise), meaning (= our ability to experience our life and world as meaningful), practice (= a way of talking about shared history that can sustain mutual engagement in action) and identity (= our being and becoming situated in the context of communities). For explanatory purposes, I believe Schatzki’s definition of practice is more eloquent compared to Wenger. Schatzki (2001, p.11) defines practice as “a materially mediated nexus of activity where understanding and intelligibility are ordered, a central phenomenon of human/nonhuman life”. This definition highlights the essential component of practice; the duality between reification (’materialization’ in Schatzki’s definition) and participation (which Schatzki describes as ‘activty’), to instigating negotiation of meaning (which Schatzki denotes an outcome, being ‘ordering of understanding and intelligibility’).

Components of a social theory of learning: an initial inventory (Wenger, 1998, Figure 0.1, p.5)

To position Wenger’s social learning theory within the broader field of social theories – focusing on learning as participation, its position on the vertical axis is situated between the extreme of Giddens’ (1984) structure and agency, the first gives primacy to institutions and norms guiding our actions, the latter giving primacy to the dynamics of agency and intended and unintended consequences of actors  guiding action (p.13). On the horizontal axis its theory is situated between practice and identity, the first address the production and reproduction of specific ways of engaging with the world, the latter addresses the social formation of the person and markers of membership within social configurations.

Two main axes of relevant traditions (Wenger, 1998, Figure 0.2, p.12)

We also have multi-memberships with various (or constellations of communities), which are integral parts of our life. This makes learning, as being active in various practices, a integral and continuous part of our daily activities. Memberships are about belonging, yet belonging differs from participation, therefore boundary trajectories, like legitimate peripheral participation, facilitates being and becoming legitimate and active members.

Communities of practice are on Wenger’s homepage defined as “groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly”. Although communities of practice are familiar phenomena, articulating them helps us to set various objectives for this course*, being:

• Social Learning, what are the constituents for social learning and how does it work.
• Designing for learning, if communities of practice are the configuration for learning, how can we design for learning.
• Understanding social media, Wenger’s theoretical concepts can help us understand and recognize the pitfalls and challenges of social media to live up to its claims of supporting epistemic practices and self-actualization

* These three objectives need to be subjected to further scrutiny

The Concept of Practice
Communities of practice are social configurations that support learning, by facilitating practices that reflect the pursuit of a shared enterprise and social relations. Wenger pragmatically defines practice as “what members develop in order to be able to do their job in a livable climate” (p.47). Yet, the fact that I denote the latter definition as pragmatic, already illustrates that this definition does not captures the fundamental depth we appreciate, in order to recognize and differentiate.

Wenger has a habit to illustrate all theoretical concept, by extensively making use of dualities. Dualities are “a pair of elements that is always present in different forms and degrees, not a spectrum that indicates movement from one pole to another” (p.67). A duality can be characterized as a creative tension. This is also the case with practice, thus practice are not merely reifications of working arrangement or processes, but practices also play part in mediating to resolve conflicts, carrying communal memory, guiding newcomers, creating habitable atmospheres. Practices have no agency on their own, yet practices connote doing, and by this doing members’ practices help them in ordering their social context, as described in the previous sentence. Practices include both explicit components (procedures, norms, metaphors) and tacit components (subtle non-verbal cues, intuitions, assumptions). Furthermore practice is not related to something practical, practices could also involve theoretical discourses and outcomes (p.48).

Meaning
The practice taken place within communities is not only about getting a job done, but it is also about giving meaning. Although the practice of creating a limited edition of a Mont Blanc Meisterstück pen is about melting a nib, moulding and polishing the raisin, preparing the filler mechanism etc., the meaning for its owners is al about subtle delicacy, writing superiority, exclusive scarcity, relating yourself with the successful and the famous etc. This is what Huizing (2007) would denote as the symbolic value, the exogenous value constructed – and residing – in the social, outside the object’s inherent properties or ‘material’ value. Wenger states practice is “about meaning as an experience in everyday life” (p.52).

Negotiation of meaning
Although situations appear familiar, by having different conversations, interpretations or impressions (or generalizing: human engagement in the world), meanings are continuously renegotiated anew. And although the word negotiating may resonate clear cut outcomes, these can also be impartial consensus, for instance in situations we denote ‘wicked’ (especially to grasp the impact of wickedness on design thinking, reading Buchanan (1992) opens your eyes). Like Latour (2007) argues in his actor-network theory, by renegotiating a meaning elements, relations or descriptions shift leading to new a new network of elements, relations and descriptions of which we have an impartial understanding, exposing other structures of lacks and wants (Knorr Cetina, 2001), requiring new unfolding of meaning, instigating an epistemic practice.

Participation
Negotiation of meaning is based on the tension (or duality) between reification and participation. Participation is “the process of taking part and also to the relation with others that reflect this process” (p.55). Furthermore, Wenger holds that participation requires mutuality or agency by human actors, thereby explicitly excluding non-human actors (in contrast to Latour’s actor-network theory). Besides, participation does not necessarily refers to harmonious relations, but can also refer to conflictual, competitive or political relationships. Participation shapes not only the individual, but also the collective (or community). And participation is not only active in actual doing, but also remains slumbering outside doing, and affecting the practice.

Reification
Reification is “treating an abstraction as substantially existing […] or a concrete [material] object” (p.58). In daily live we reify endlessly, e.g. when using metaphors (war on terror, axis of evil, freedom of speech is to say 1+1=3) or conceptions (like culture, democracy, organization) to capture a situation. By reification the practice are congealed into fixed forms, opening the practice up for (re)negotiation of meaning. Although reification is a powerful tool to stabilize practices, it is a double-edged sword, in the sense that it is also about shredding context and thus simplification of richness.

Our experiencing meaningfulness - or negotiation of meaning - is captured in the interplay of reification and participation. Although reification of a best practice is nice, it requires participation to actually realize it and make sense of it, but in participating users will uncover new uses (meanings), by which the process will be adjusted (into a new reification), influencing participation anew, and vice versa, setting of a potential perpetuum mobile. Thus by means of these three central issues negotiation of meaning, reification and participation we can engage in practice, en ultimately form communities of practice.

Community
Because I believe that Wenger is not quite clear about his association between community, practice and his three dimensions: mutual engagement, joint enterprise, shared repertoire, I will share some thoughts of mine on this topic. I believe that this association is about durability. Thus in order to make a practice durable, it needs to be located in a nexus of relations. This nexus of relations is called a community. Yet, the emergence and resilience of a community of practice requires conditions of sustaining mutual engagement, having a joint enterprise and sharing a repertoire. This does not means that meeting these conditions safeguards lasting stability, but its does ensure adaptability. Although the three dimensions mutually reinforce and constitute the other, I believe that there is a logical order, namely mutual engagement leads to a joint enterprise, and a this in turn leads to a shared repertoire. The dimensions will be explained now in more detail:

Mutual engagement
“Practices exist because people are engaged in actions whose meanings they negotiate with one another” (p.73). Thus it is about constructing and reproducing the relationships (often called memberships) for doing things together. Engagement can be enabled by providing the right settings or objects. With regard to the role of objects Knorr Cetina (2001) would explain this coherence via the emergence of object-centered sociality resulting in an epistemic practice. Yet, it is the right level of coherence that transforms mutual engagement into a community of practice.

Although Communities of practice are structures do deal with the inherent complexity of their context, they are not merely stable structures of homogenous thoughts and actors. Uncertainty, and thus richness, is added in mutual engagement by both diversity and partiality. Diversity is the fact that working together, and relating to each other, leads to constructing an unique identity individually (heterogeneity), as well as creating collective ways of doing things (homogeneity). Partiality is the fact that within communities we have complementary or sometimes overlapping competences, thus we need mutual engagement to be ‘complete’. O’Dell and Grayson (2001) neatly illustrated this partiality in their book ‘if only we knew, what we know’. “A shared practice thus connects participants to each other in ways that are diverse and complex” (p.77), in ways that are not only harmonic or cooperative, but also utilitarian, economic, power-related et cetera.

Joint enterprise
A joint enterprise is the result of mutual engagement. This also implied that it is not imposed, like in a mission statement or management letter, it is the negotiated result of participants of a community of practice to deal with the situation as they experience it.

Although a joint enterprise offers direction to members, members’ individual way of realizing this enterprise might be profoundly different. This also does not deny that their joint enterprise is not solely up to the execution of that community, it is situated within a broader system that limits and influences it. However, these external and structural influences are always mediated, and thus given meaning, within the community of practice. Thus their practices contain intended local understandings to meet institutional wants, but unintended understandings to circumvent bureaucracy and control. The joint enterprise also realizes mutual accountability, or commitment towards a shared objective. This accountability is sometimes reified into standards and policies, for instance, but can also be sensitivity to appropriate behaviour within the community, with the objective “to push the practice forward, as much as to keep it in check” (p.82).

Shared enterprise
After both group formation has taken place, in which actors have a truly social relation with each other (social relation as denoted by Fiske (1992) in that individuals are prepared to reciprocally adjust their behaviour towards the expectations of the other), and a common direction has been set out to deal with a situation, a durability can be further enhances by having a shared repertoire. A shared repertoire are all “resources for negotiation of meaning (p.82) […] that a community has adopted during its existence, and which have become part of its practice” (p.83). Shared repertoires have an inherent ambiguity to support negotiation of meaning; recognizable artifacts reflect the history of mutual engagement, but they serve renegotiation in new situations or at instances of non-clarity. Shared repertoires thus support a community in directing energies and in coordinating the renegotiation of meaning, and as a result render communities of practice durable.

Learning
The negotiation of meaning is a temporal process, and so is a community of practice. For a community to be durable, it is dependant on is capability to sustain learning. As Wenger argues, from this perspective “communities of practice can be seen as shared histories of learning” (p.86). Such a history is the result of the continuous diverging and converging of participation and reification.

Both reification and participation fulfill important roles in case of learning via aspects of remembering and forgetting. A museum is actually a reified legacy of our ancestors, and thus supports remembrance. By participating in a museum, we interpret or rediscover its collection and store it in our memories, again support remembrance. On forgetting Wenger is not quite clear, but it appears that renegotiation of meaning, replacing previous meanings, by re-appropriating reifications or because of shifting frames of mind meanings get altered, is actually a source of forgetting.

The duality of reification and participation also forms a source of continuity and discontinuity of practices. With regard to participation boundary trajectories within the community of practice leads to (dis)continuities. The shifting of core members to other communities, or demoting them towards the boundaries of a community, or visa versa members shift from the edge towards the core of the community, e.g. because of traineeships (which are a form of legitimate peripheral participation), promotions or job rotation. Also reification can be a source of (dis)continuities, via the introduction of idiosyncratic structures or objects, e.g. because of implementing a no-claims bonus system or internet self-service. This could lead to a radical transformation of the practice, thereby discontinuing the previous one.

The duality of reification and participation also serves internal politics, by “affording control over the kinds of meaning that can be created in a certain contexts and the kinds of person that participants can become” (p.93). Reifications can ensure shifts in certain directions by means of policies, standards and norms. Participation can ensure clockwise movements, for instance by using charisma, or displaying discrimination, or showing friendship.

Engagement in practice is the source of learning, actually you learn the practice. There is a natural link between the nature of competence and the process in which it is to be acquired, instead of being put in a classroom to learn, independent of their value and use in practice. Wenger argues that we can speak of learning, when we “change our ability to engage in practice” (p.95). Or more popularly stated, learning is the ability to distinguish, upon which we can act. The fact that learning is in constant state of flux (perhaps the need to learn is everlasting, however what we (need to) learn is surely ephemeral), is reflected in emergent nature of communities of practice. Communities have no form start and end dates, but will linger as long as the necessity of learning is recognized and sustained by its members, which makes these communities highly perturbable as also resilient.

Boundary
As is the case with meaning, also communities of practices are situated within a broader system, whose practices can not be fully understood independently of other practices. Often practices are a result of setting them apart from other practices.

Participation and reification not only play a part within the community of practice, the duality also plays a part outside the community. Reification can establish expressive markers of membership to demarcate a community of practice, for instance the hells angles tattoos, alumni groups, the striped suits of management, Goths dressed in black. Yet participation can also shed boundaries, by excluding outsiders or using a subtle jargon.  As may be clear, these boundaries do not necessarily follow institutional boundaries.

In order to bridge these different communities, both participation and reification can be used, as long both have ‘multi-memberships’ or legitimacy within multiple communities.  In case the emphasis is on reification, Wenger discusses the use of boundary objects, in case of participation Wenger uses brokering.

The first type of continuity across boundaries can take place by introducing a reification of a community that can serve another community. This is what Star and Griesemer (1989) defined as a boundary object, ‘an object that serve to coordinate the perspectives of various constituencies for some purpose’ (p.106). These boundary objects connect communities of practice without they having a shared practice, but use forms of reification to bride disjoint forms of participation. For instance, an ERP system connects various departments, and it can act as a conversation piece, without having an explicit shared practice (they know of). When a boundary object serves multiple constituencies, each has only partial control over the interpretation of the object, as is the case also with the ERP system (A sees it as billing engine, another as JIT, another as call center support tool etc cetera). Although objects belong to multiple practices, they become boundary objects if perspectives needs to be coordinated.

Regarding the design of these artifacts that bridge boundaries, Wenger provides some bright remarks. For instance, although designers consider the use of an object (which is why they call them ‘users’), an artifact is always an object used within a practice or used between practices. Therefore designing IT is not about using IT, but enabling for participation with IT. In the current landscape of social media as IT-based systems, Wenger’s design matters, even become even more important. Living up to the promise of media as being social, its success depends entirely on being able to trigger mechanisms of sociality.  Sociality as mentioned before is the tendency to associate or form groups (see for a more detailed elaboration on design for sociality the ICIS 2007 award winning paper by Bouman, Hoogenboom, Jansen, Huizing and De Bruin, 2007)

The second type of bridging of boundaries can take place via brokering. Brokering is the use of multi-memberships to transfer some element of practice into another. Multimemberships does not entail brokering, but boundary spanning (Levina and Vaast, 2005).  Pragmatically stated: Brokering contains doing something based on something you bring along. Brokers reside at the boundary of a practice, in order to avoid to become full members, in which they lack the ability to unobtrusively participate in other practice. Yet, at the same time they need to avoid that they are being rejected as intruders. Brokering is about managing the coexistence of multi-membership and non-membership. The competences of brokers include reconcile ignorance, translate interpretations, coordinate conflicts and laying participative connections.

Albeit Wenger makes a difference between brokering and (boundary) objects, it is my belief that it should be seen as a duality, an inextricably  interplay that need depend on each other. I already illustrated in my thesis (Hoogenboom, 2006) that brokers need objects to connect, and objects need brokers to signify. Perhaps also both should not be seen as duality but in perspective of Latour’s (2007) sense of mediation, in that both ‘materialize a network of agency comprising multiple actors (including community members, but also the objects they use), which collectively produces something different from what any of its components can produce’  (Harris, 2007).

Next to discussing the forms (reification and participation) through which members engage in other practices, Wenger also discusses the various ways of assembling that enables mutual engagement. Wenger distinguishes two categories of assembling, which have to do with temporality, namely boundary encounters and boundary connections.

Boundary encounters are ephemeral connection, which take place via:

• One-on-one encounters (having a rendez-vouz with someone);
• Immersions (visiting on the job), and;
• Delegations (which are really exchange programs).

If the connections become more durable, Wenger calls these connections boundary connections. Boundary connections come in three tastes, via boundary practices, overlaps and peripheries.In case of boundary practices a temporary practice is set in which members get a specific role, in order to fulfill the joint enterprise within that community.  In reality this can be seen as project teams or task forces. The danger of these boundary practices that they become so self-involved, that they become a community of practice in their own right. The latter is not  harmful in it self, but seen from a boundary encounter perspective it is, because its original justification was to connect practices. In case of overlaps there is not a specific boundary enterprise, but two practices actually overlap. For instance although an organizational has multiple service desk, all share the practice of incident registration and call handling. In case of peripheries communities of practice that connect with the rest of the world by providing peripheral experiences. These peripheries can be thought of as observing a senior while doing his job, or – in a more rich setting – an apprenticeship. But in this case mutual engagement is become progressively looser when moving from the core to the boundary of the community. If boundaries are considered sources of discontinuity, peripheries can be considered are sources of continuity.

Wenger points to the fact that ‘boundaries and peripheries are woven together’ (p.120), the claim should be that it is (again) a duality. Because of peripheries you experience boundaries, and because of boundaries you experience peripheries. As you become a trainee – which is a essential form of legitimate peripheral participation –  you often notice the boundaries and your non-belonging to a community. However, it can also be seen as a position where ‘outsiders’  are kept to prevent them moving further inward. For instance people keep seeing you as trainee, precluding you becoming a full member.

‘By weaving boundaries and peripheries, a landscape of practice forms a complex texture of distinction and association, opening and closing, limits and latitude, gates and entries, participation and non-participation’ (p.121).

Locality
‘Calling every imaginable social configuration a community of practice would render the concept meaningless’ (p.123). In this chapter Wenger investigates a meaningful level of analysis to study communities of practice. Practice, and thus communities of practice, is always local. Denoting broader configurations like culture, organizations or social networks communities would be misleading because it would overlook the substantial multiplicity and substantial disconnectedness. Communities often exist because of a tightly coupled fabric of members, artifacts and routines, whereas organizations are constellations of loosely coupled local practices.

Communities of practice are neither about interactions, because these constitute single events, and neither about global configurations, because these structures inhabit discontinuities, inevitably demarcating idiosyncratic practices. What makes the concept communities of practice impossible to pinpoint, is the fact that these are ’soft’ systems. Soft systems are conceptual systems that are configured within our own conception, avoiding a priori and objective assessment of all variables (Checkland and Poultner, 2006). This also implies that these ’systems’ refute any deterministic managerial control (like exercised in case of ‘hard systems thinking’). Thus communities can not be designed, they can only be designed for. Thus meaning is only meaning to someone, and different for everyone. Thus communities only exist in our head as a conceptual phenomenon, a are not a real phenomenon we can spy, we can only spy its traces. Yet, to provide some ’sharp’ edges on this ‘soft’ concept of communities of practice, Wenger lists indicators:

• Sustained mutual relationships – mutual engagement;
• Shared ways of engaging in doing this together – mutual engagement;
• The rapid flow of information and propagation of innovation – joint enterprise;
• Absence of introductory preambles, as if conversations and interactions were merely the continuation of an ongoing process – mutual engagement;
• Very quick setup of a problem to be discussed – joint enterprise;
• Substantial overlap in participants’ descriptions of who belongs – joint enterprise;
• Knowing what others know, what they can do, and how they can contribute to an enterprise – join enterprise;
• Mutually defining identities – mutual engagement;
• The ability to assess the appropriateness of actions and products – shared repertoire;
• Specific tools, representations, and other artifacts – shared repertoire;
• Local lore, shared stories, inside jokes, knowing laughter – shared repertoire;
• Jargon and shortcuts to communication as well as the ease of producing new ones – shared repertoire;
• Certain styles recognized as displaying membership – shared repertoire, and;
• A shared discourse reflecting a certain perspective on the world – joint enterprise.

In order to understand larger structures, like organizations, cultures, nations, in terms of communities of practice, Wenger introduces the concept of constellations of interconnected practices. Constellation refers ‘to a grouping of stellar objects that are seen as a configuration even though they may not be particularly close to one another, of the same kind, or of the same size’ (p.127). Constellations are necessary to create continuities – in the form of durable interactions – among these communities, which can be a result of boundary objects, brokering, boundary practices or elements of styles and elements of discourses. I have to say that I am rather puzzled about why Wenger explicates the latter two, instead of capturing them as examples of shared repertoire. Anyway, styles can be seen as imitative ways of behaving, while discourses are about the importing of elements from outside crafts or expertise.

What is interesting that Wenger attemps to reorient the locus of contemporary literature from structuralist theories towards practice-based theories. The dogmatic focus on themes like globalization, outsourcing and merging, appears to render focus on communities of practices insignificant in favor to studying constellations. Albeit, constellations are actually embodiments of practices, in which each practice acts autonomously and each influences their overarching host. Thus a practice-based approach sitting between the micro (actions of the individual) and the marco (actions attributed to the structure) is a quite feasible undertaking, in comparison to studying ants (the individuals) or the non-communicative (the corporate). Understanding both levels of the local and the global and their inherent duality, provides even more insight.

As a first example, think of social software. Our social software solutions reflect these dogmatic fixations on constellations. Straightforward ways of engagement, as seen in communities of practices, are ignored in favor of rather ill-socialized conceptions of participation. In Hyves forming a group of friends is executed by the singular event of accepting an invitation. This event reflects a rather naïve outlook on such rich processes as ‘living together’ or ‘being friends’ (it is rather about ‘association’ or participation). A more realistic conception of relation would take the ephemeral character of relations into account. To re-affirm the existence of a relation between people continuous work and interaction is required (which is actually more about engagement). Because of their ‘hard’ outlook on ‘soft’ phenomena these technologies also tend to ignore the subtle nuances of localized meaning and relations. They tend to generalize towards a universal reification of relation (in LinkedIn you are either linked or you’re not, while displaying notions of proximity and temporality would provide a richer repertoire). Perhaps it is legitimate to wonder what makes these representations of social software actually ‘social’.

A second example of the detachment of  the local and the global is seen in the use of Balanced Score Cards (BSC). In case of BSC’s localized meanings are aggregated into objective steering mechanisms for organization’s management (or as Wenger likes to call them: constellations). To accomplish these corporate aggregates relentless data-shredding is necessary to simplify and objectify complexity. What becomes of these aggregates then are rather restricted representations of communal activities, and do not provide insight about the practices that took place.

While this might appear as a plea for localism and practice-based understanding, it is rather a plea to honor to apparent duality between the local and global to make sense of learning, practice, meaning, negotiation etc. And having the right level of analysis, being it a community of practice or broader configuration, like an organization, might help us in understanding these processes, whilst we need not neglect one in favor of the other.