Evolving knowledge : An exploration of affinities between knowledge management and communities of practice

The concept of Knowledge Management has enjoyed the last few years an extensive and vigorous research by both practitioners and academics. Started as an ambitious effort to understand and manage knowledge assets and processes within organisations, it almost forced as to rethink and state our deep philosophical and epistemological beliefs, and pointed our attention on the far social and invisible side of the economic reality. Sociologists claim that the reason behind failures to leverage knowledge sits on the fact that knowledge cannot be seen as an object linked to an individual. They argue that knowledge in anchored and embedded in distributed and situated practices, and that individuals can access it by participating in Communities of Practice. Communities of Practice are currently earmarked as a relevant and high potential perspective to anchor our development of our understanding on organisational knowledge and knowing. In this paper, we review all major bibliographical sources for the past ten years in the Communities of Practice domain, and we discuss their relation and implications to the Knowledge Management non-technical challenges. We conclude that many open and critical issues in Knowledge Management domain can be explained and resolved by focusing on Communities of Practice.

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