| Abstrakt: |
Communities of practice are often cited as important vehicles for organizational learning. However, in later work, Wenger-Trayner discusses a 'living landscape' within which professionals learn and develop their practice, crossing organizational and systemic boundaries and (re)creating personal and professional identities. There is a perceived gap between practice, and theory building about practice, which inevitably arises when research is seated entirely in the world of academia. Multiple perspectives, contributed by stakeholders from differing backgrounds, are needed to encourage attention to the demands of both rigour and relevance in deepening understandings of complex problems. Scholars need to interact with other stakeholders, such as 'users', practitioners, sponsors and clients, in participative forms of inquiry. On the other hand, it has been suggested that efforts at collaborative research between academics and practitioners will be hampered by communication difficulties between the two groups. While experience suggests that there is some justification in this argument, we believe the effort to be worthwhile in itself. The challenge is therefore to find ways to support collaborative efforts by helping members of a network to surface and share their tacit understandings, to evaluate the impact of the community's activities upon their own workplace practice, and to create a productive learning spiral. In the context of networks, research must be expanded to encompass activities relating to the on-going, messy and complex problems experienced in everyday life in organizations. A further challenge arises in efforts to capture what has been learned for onward transmission. This paper examines and reflects upon the experiences of two different networks, acting within very different landscapes of practice. The first involves a group of business improvement professionals from a range of organizations in southern England, meeting regularly to consider and discuss their methods and draw lessons for their own practice. The second group are senior managers from a range of organizations situated in the Lebanon, looking to identify and promote 'best practice' in realising benefits from information technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
