Communities of practice in the distributed international environment

By Paul M. Hildreth, Chris Kimble, Peter C. Wright. Journal of Knowledge Management, 2000

402 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Modern commercial organisations are facing pressures which have caused them to lose personnel. When they lose people, they also lose their knowledge. Organisations also have to cope with the internationalisation of business forcing collaboration and knowledge sharing across time and distance. Knowledge management (KM) claims to tackle these issues. This paper looks at an area where KM does not offer sufficient support, that is, the sharing of knowledge that is not easy to articulate. The focus in this paper is on communities of practice in commercial organisations. We do this by exploring knowledge sharing in Lave and Wenger’s (1991) theory of communities of practice and investigating how communities of practice may translate to a distributed international environment. The paper reports on two case studies that explore the functioning of communities of practice across international boundaries.

Subfields: Communication, Management Information Systems, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/feeadf609fcce388c42c6ddfa3ae90f22be80005

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Communication

1. Alexander Ardichvili
2. Tim L. Wentling

In Management Information Systems

1. Guy Paré
2. Paul M. Leonardi

In Sociology and Political Science

1. Alexander Ardichvili
2. Tim L. Wentling
3. F. Geijsel
4. Line Dubé
5. Guy Paré
6. Paul M. Leonardi

Citations in the corpus

• Towards a Typology of Virtual Communities of Practice (2006, background): “Most VCoPs need some face-to-face time to be the most effective (Deloitte Research, 2001) and the resulting stronger personal relationships seem to be essential to carry the group through extended periods of virtual communication (Hildreth et al., 2000).”
• Trust as an antecedent to knowledge sharing in virtual communities of practice (2007, background): “Information and communication technologies are now extending the boundaries of traditional face-to-face communities by creating virtual communities that enable global asynchronous and real-time collaboration (Hildreth and Kimble 2000).”
• Communities of practice as stimulating forces for collective learning (2006, background): “The importance of learning explicitly from each other, and developing or generating a collective outcome, is the most ideal situation for organizations (Hildreth et al., 2000; Brown and Duguid, 1996).”
• Cultural influences on knowledge sharing through online communities of practice (2006, background): “Thus, distributed virtual CoPs, which make use of such technologies, are becoming an increasingly popular way for knowledge sharing among geographically dispersed employees (Hildreth et al., 2000; Wenger et al., 2002).”
• Communities of practice and organizational performance (2001, background): “As indicated above, members of a community of practice establish their legitimacy through interaction about their practice.(3)”