| Author(s) |
Title and
Publication Data |
Brief Description |
| John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid |
"Organizational
Learning and Communities of Practice: Toward A Unified View of Working, Learning and
Innovation"
from Management
Science (February 1991) |
Brown and
Duguid, both with Xerox’ Palo
Alto Research Center (PARC), wrote this seminal article about Communities of Practice in
1991. It is as relevant and useful today as when it was first written. |
| John Seely Brown and Estee Solomon Gray |
"The People Are the
Company" from Fast Company magazine (November 1995) |
Brown and Gray describe how companies such as
Xerox and National Semiconductor are learning to foster and support communities of
practice as a means of sharing knowledge. |
| John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid |
"Balancing Act:
How to Capture Knowledge Without Killing It" from Harvard Business Review
(May-June 2000)
|
Brown and Duguid point up the important
distinction between a process orientation and a practice orientation and discuss how these
two orientations differ in their approach to capturing and deploying organizational
knowledge. |
| Richard McDermott |
"Why Information
Technology Inspired But Cannot Deliver Knowledge Management"
from California Management Review (Summer 1999) |
In this article, McDermott contrasts the
information- technology-centered approach to sharing knowledge with the community-centered
approach. |
| Richard McDermott |
"Learning Across Teams"
from Knowledge Management Review (Summer 1999) |
In this article, McDermott describes what he
calls "the double-knit" organization, one in which teams and communities of
practice not only interface but are also interlaced. |
| Richard McDermott |
Nurturing Three Dimensional CoPs
from Knowledge Management Review (Fall 1999) |
Here, McDermott describes different kinds of
CoPs and how they vary along three dimensions: the kind of knowledge to be shared, the
strength of the bonds among members of the community, and the linkages between new
knowledge and everyday work. |
| John Sharp |
"Communities
of Practice: A Review of the Literature" "Key Hypotheses in Supporting
Communities of Practice" |
In two thoughtful papers, John Sharp examines
many aspects of CoPs, including what it takes to support them. He also provides
several links to other relevant sources. |
| David Stamp |
"Communities of
Practice: Learning is Social, Training is Irrelevant?" cover story from Training
Magazine (February 1997). |
Stamp examines the story of the Xerox repair
technicians at length, contrasting it with conventional approaches to training. |
| Thomas A. Stewart |
"The Invisible Key to
Success" from FORTUNE (Aug 5, 1996). |
Stewart provides an early, honest look at the
pros and cons of CoPs. He points out the need for a light hand when he cites Valdis
Krebs' "Fertilize the soil but stay out of the garden." |
| John Storck and Patricia A. Hill |
"Knowledge Diffusion
through Strategic Communities" from Sloan Management
Review (Winter 2000). |
The authors describe a "strategic
community of practice" consisting of a group of IT managers at Xerox. The point
of application is Xerox's transition from a proprietary IT architecture to an industry
standard. |
| Etienne Wenger |
"Communities of Practice: The Social
Fabric of a Learning Organization" from Health Forum Journal (1996) |
Wenger focuses on learning and discusses where
and how it happens in organizations -- mainly in Communities of Practice. |
| Etienne Wenger |
"Communities of
Practice: Learning as A Social System" from the Systems
Thinker (June 1998) |
Wenger, the reigning authority on communities
of practice, describes in detail the nature, life cycle and functioning of a community of
practice. |
| Etienne Wenger |
"Communities of
Practice: The Organizational Frontier" from the Harvard
Business Review (Jan-Feb 2000) |
Wenger lays out the basics of CoPs in his
first HBR article, asserting that they might well reinvent organizations -- if managers
can learn to nourish and support them. |
Communities of Practice:
Learning, Meaning and Identity. Etienne Wenger, Cambridge University Press
(1998).
Cultivating Communities of Practice.
Etienne Wenger, Richard McDermott & William M. Snyder. Harvard
Business School Press (2002).
Leveraging Communities of Practice for
Strategic Advantage. Hubert St. Onge & Debra Wallace.
Butterworth-Heinemann (2003).
The Social Life of Information.
John Seely Brown & Paul Duguid. Harvard Business School Press
(2002).
