Our attempts to understand human life open a vast space of relevant questions – from the origin of the universe to the workings of the brain, from the details of every thought to the purpose of life. In this vast space of questions, the concept of practice is useful for addressing a specific slice: a focus on the experience of meaningfulness. Practice is, first and foremost, a process by which we can experience the world and our engagement with it as meaningful.

Of course, in order to engage in practice, we must be alive in a world in which we can act and interact. We must have a body with a brain that is functioning well enough to participate in social communities. We must have ways to communicate with one another. But a focus on practice is not merely a functional perspective on human activities, even activities involving multiple individuals. It does not address simply the mechanics of getting something done, individually or in groups; it is not a mechanical perspective. It includes not just bodies (or even coordinated bodies) and not just brains (even coordinated ones), but moreover that which gives meaning to the motions of bodies and the workings of brains.

Let me illustrate this point by analogy to a work of art. There are all sorts of mechanics involved in producing a painting: a canvas, brushes, color pigments, and sophisticated techniques. The image itself is but a thin veneer. Yet in the end, for the painter and for the viewer, it is the painting as an experience of meaning that counts. Similarly, in the pursuit of our enterprises, we engage in all sorts of activities with complex bodies that are the result of millenia of evolution. Still, in the end, it is the meanings we produce that matter.

I have argued in Coda I that learning involves an interaction between experience and competence. In communities of practice, the definition of competence and the production of experience are in very close interaction. Mutual engagement in a shared practice can thus be an intricate process of constant fine tuning between experience and competence. Because this process goes both ways, communities of practice are not only a context for the learning of newcomers but also, and for the same reasons, a context for new insights to be transformed into knowledge.

1. • On the one hand, a community of practice is a living context that can give newcomers access to competence and also invite a personal experience of engagement by which to incorporate that competence into an identity of participation. When these conditions are in place, communities of practice are a privileged locus for the acquisition of knowledge.

2. • On the other hand, a well-functioning community of practice is a good context to explore radically new insights without becoming fools or stuck in some dead end. A history of mutual engagement around a joint enterprise is an ideal context for this kind of leading-edge learning, which requires a strong bond of communal competence along with a deep respect for the particularity of experience. When these conditions are in place, communities of practice are a privileged locus for the creation of knowledge.

This series for Cambridge University Press is becoming widely known as an international forum for studies of situated learning and cognition.

Innovative contributions are being made by anthropology, by cognitive, developmental, and cultural psychology, by computer science, by education, and by social theory. These contributions are providing the basis for new ways of understanding the social, historical, and contextual nature of the learning, thinking, and practice that emerges from human activity. The empirical settings of these research inquiries range from the classroom to the workplace, to the high technology office, and to learning in the streets and in other communities of practice.

The situated nature of learning and remembering through activity is a central fact. It may appear obvious that human minds develop in social situations and extend their sphere of activity and communicative competencies. But cognitive theories of knowledge representation and learning alone have not provided sufficient insight into these relationships.

This series was born of the conviction that new and exciting interdisciplinary syntheses are underway as scholars and practitioners from diverse fields seek to develop theory and empirical investigations adequate for characterizing the complex relations of social and mental life, and for understanding successful learning wherever it occurs. The series invites contributions that advance our understanding of these seminal issues.

In the previous chapter, I characterized communities of practice as shared histories of learning. Over time, such histories create discontinuities between those who have been participating and those who have not. These discontinuities are revealed by the learning involved in crossing them: moving from one community of practice to another can demand quite a transformation. But practice does not create only boundaries. At the same time as boundaries form, communities of practice develop ways of maintaining connections with the rest of the world.

So far, I have focused almost exclusively on communities of practice as if they were isolated. But that focus was artificial. Communities of practice cannot be considered in isolation from the rest of the world, or understood independently of other practices. Their various enterprises are closely interconnected. Their members and their artifacts are not theirs alone. Their histories are not just internal; they are histories of articulation with the rest of the world.

As a result, engagement in practice entails engagement in these external relations. For a job like claims processing, which is considered by many to be relatively narrow, the range of related communities of practice as well as constituencies without a shared practice is actually rather complex. It involves, among others, claims technicians, underwriters, system designers, and various levels of management at Alinsu; beyond the company, there are other claims processors, patients, benefit representatives, accounting clerks, and a variety of medical and legal professionals.

There is a profound connection between identity and practice. Developing a practice requires the formation of a community whose members can engage with one another and thus acknowledge each other as participants. As a consequence, practice entails the negotiation of ways of being a person in that context. This negotiation may be silent; participants may not necessarily talk directly about that issue. But whether or not they address the question directly, they deal with it through the way they engage in action with one another and relate to one another. Inevitably, our practices deal with the profound issue of how to be a human being. In this sense, the formation of a community of practice is also the negotiation of identities.

The parallels between practice and identity are summarized in Figure 6.1. To highlight them in this chapter, I will (as I did in Coda I) go through the themes of Part I, chapter by chapter, but recast them in terms of identity. This exercise will yield the following characterizations.

1. • Identity as negotiated experience. We define who we are by the ways we experience our selves through participation as well as by the ways we and others reify our selves.

2. • Identity as community membership. We define who we are by the familiar and the unfamiliar.

3. • Identity as learning trajectory. We define who we are by where we have been and where we are going.

4. • Identity as nexus of multimembership. We define who we are by the ways we reconcile our various forms of membership into one identity.

5. • Identity as a relation between the local and the global. We define who we are by negotiating local ways of belonging to broader constellations and manifesting broader styles and discourses.

Learning cannot be designed. Ultimately, it belongs to the realm of experience and practice. It follows the negotiation of meaning; it moves on its own terms. It slips through the cracks; it creates its own cracks. Learning happens, design or no design.

And yet there are few more urgent tasks than to design social infrastructures that foster learning. This is true not only of schools and universities, but also of all sorts of organizations in the public and private sectors, and even of entities usually not called organizations, like states and nations. In fact, the whole human world is itself fast becoming one large organization, which is the object of design and which must support the learning we need in order to ensure there is to be a tomorrow. Those who can understand the informal yet structured, experiential yet social, character of learning – and can translate their insight into designs in the service of learning – will be the architects of our tomorrow.

By way of conclusion, I will use the concepts introduced in this book to discuss some issues of design as they relate to learning and practice, and by extension to community and identity. This discussion will do two things. It will provide a summary of the main themes and, at the same time, illustrate the use that can be made of the conceptual framework I have outlined.

Ariel runs down the stairs. She has to be at work at 8:00, and with the traffic, she will need a lot of luck to make it. She should really stop using the snooze button. The fact is, she would rather go to work earlier and come home earlier. But it's people with more seniority who get to choose their hours first: they can take the 7:00 to 3:00 schedule. She had it for a while. It's a bit hard in the morning, but when you get off at 3:00, it's like you still have the day in front of you. Staying there until 4:00 makes a big difference. But now the office needed some people to answer the phones between 3:00 and 4:00, so junior processors have to stay later. Although she has been working in the claims office for well over a year, Ariel is still considered a junior processor. She has recently been promoted to a level 6.

Predictably, it's congested between Ridgewell and Lincoln. As her car comes to a halt, Ariel grabs the rearview mirror to check her makeup. Overall, she takes good care of herself. She makes up, but discreetly, and dresses cleanly but not aggressively. Fortunately, the office is rather informal about appearance. You could spend a fortune otherwise. Of course, she could not go to work in shorts, but even jeans are OK as long as they are not torn.

I will end this first part of the book with a brief essay on the nature of knowing in practice. This essay, which is philosophical but in a lighthearted kind of way, will allow me to provide a summary of the themes introduced in Part I in the context of discussing a specific topic. Focusing on knowing for this purpose is a useful topic, but this choice should not be interpreted as assuming that knowing is all that communities of practice are about, especially if by “knowing” one refers to some instrumental kind of expertise. Communities of practice should not be reduced to purely instrumental purposes. They are about knowing, but also about being together, living meaningfully, developing a satisfying identity, and altogether being human.

Flowers and bits

I will start with two odd questions. The first one was concocted long ago by Zen teachers to help their students think more sharply: What does a flower know about being a flower? The second question is the information-age version of the first: What does a computer know about being a flower?

The question of what a flower knows about being a flower is somewhat troubling because there seem to be two contradictory answers. Being a flower is to no one as transparent, immediately obvious, fully internalized, and natural as it is to a flower: spreading those leaves, absorbing that specific spectrum of light from the sun, taking the energy in, building protein, sucking nutrients from its roots, growing, budding, blooming, being visited by a bee.

Being alive as human beings means that we are constantly engaged in the pursuit of enterprises of all kinds, from ensuring our physical survival to seeking the most lofty pleasures. As we define these enterprises and engage in their pursuit together, we interact with each other and with the world and we tune our relations with each other and with the world accordingly. In other words, we learn.

Over time, this collective learning results in practices that reflect both the pursuit of our enterprises and the attendant social relations. These practices are thus the property of a kind of community created over time by the sustained pursuit of a shared enterprise. It makes sense, therefore, to call these kinds of communities communities of practice.

Claims processors: a community of practice

Ariel and her colleagues do not come to Alinsu to form a community of practice; they come to earn a living. Gathered in Alinsu's office by their need for work, they want to fulfill their individual production quota. They want to make money in order to go on with their own lives, which they see taking place mostly outside of the office. They do focus on their work, but they keep glancing at the clock, waiting for the moment they are free to leave. For most of the time they spend at Alinsu, most of them would rather be somewhere else doing something else. Everyone knows this, employees and employer alike.

As a nickname for the COB worksheet, the claims processors' expression “the C, F, and J thing” is quite telling. It names the activity not by reference to the insurance concepts it implements but by reference to lines in the worksheet. Indeed, the location of the data and the calculation are prescribed in terms of lines within the worksheet itself, to the point where knowing what to do next does not require any interpretation of the worksheet's underlying purpose. If one assumes that the worksheet has been designed correctly, then one need not take any responsibility for the outcome of the calculation and its implementation of actual contractual relations. The worksheet was specifically designed with this assumption in mind. Instead of giving claims processors the capacity to figure out how to do the calculation, the designers of the worksheet decided to prescribe exactly how to do it, step by step. The form removed from the execution of the procedure the need to assume responsibility for its meaning.

This kind of form is very common, not only in claims processing but in all kinds of activities. Many people who fill out U.S. tax returns, for instance, would be hard-pressed to explain the exact meanings of some of the calculations involved in the various forms, tables, and worksheets, as intended by those who designed them.

Organizations are social designs directed at practice. Indeed, it is through the practices they bring together that organizations can do what they do, know what they know, and learn what they learn. Communities of practice are thus key to an organization's competence and to the evolution of that competence. I have argued, however, that communities of practice differ from institutional entities along three dimensions.

1. 1) They negotiate their own enterprise, though they may at times construct a conforming response to institutional prescriptions (Chapter 2).

2. 2) They arise, evolve, and dissolve according to their own learning, though they may do so in response to institutional events (Chapter 3).

3. 3) They shape their own boundaries, though their boundaries may at times happen to be congruent with institutional boundaries (Chapter 4).

The contrast detailed here is one between organizational design and lived practice. From this perspective, there are two views of an organization like Alinsu:

1. 1) the designed organization, which I will often call the “institution” to distinguish it from the organization as lived in practice

2. 2) the practice (or, more accurately, the constellation of practices), which gives life to the organization and is often a response to the designed organization.

Both aspects contribute to making the organization what it is. Indeed, the organization itself could be defined as the interaction of these two aspects. Besides corporations like Alinsu, this characterization applies to nonprofit organizations and even subunits such as agencies, departments, or business units.

The negotiation of meaning is a fundamentally temporal process, and one must therefore understand practice in its temporal dimension. Some communities of practice exist over centuries – for example, communities of artisans who pass their craft from generation to generation. Some are shorter-lived but intense enough to give rise to an indigenous practice and to transform the identities of those involved. For instance, such communities may form as people come together to handle a disaster. The development of practice takes time, but what defines a community of practice in its temporal dimension is not just a matter of a specific minimum amount of time. Rather, it is a matter of sustaining enough mutual engagement in pursuing an enterprise together to share some significant learning. From this perspective, communities of practice can be thought of as shared histories of learning.

In this chapter I discuss the internal dynamics that constitute these shared histories of learning. Toward this end, I will take up the themes introduced in the last two chapters, but with a focus on time and learning.

1. 1) I will first talk about participation and reification as forms of memory, as sources of continuity and discontinuity, and thus as channels by which one can influence the evolution of a practice.

2. 2) I will then discuss the development of practice with reference to the three dimensions introduced in Chapter 2.I will argue that learning along these three dimensions is what produces practice as an emergent structure.

3. 3) Finally, I will turn to the learning by which newcomers can join a practice, that is, by which generational discontinuities are also continuities.

In Chapter 6,1 talked about identity in terms of belonging to communities of practice. But to make sense of the formation of identity in a context such as the institutional non-participation described in Chapter 7, it is necessary to consider modes of belonging other than engagement in practice. The claims processors' experience of both participation and non-participation is deeply part of their daily practice, but it also reaches beyond the walls of their office. In order to do their job, they must align their activities and their interpretations of events with structures, forces, and purposes beyond their community of practice and so find their place in broader business processes. Their identities as workers are affected by the picture they build of their position. They see themselves as participants in social processes and configurations that extend beyond their direct engagement in their own practice. They have to make some sense of many artifacts they encounter coming from practices they do not have access to. They may have to use their imagination to get a picture of these broader connections. They have an image of Alinsu, for instance, even though they have not had direct involvement with most of the practices that constitute the corporation. Yet this image is no less significant and, in a sense, no less real than their daily involvement at work.

Is claims processing in general a community of practice? Should any work group be considered a community of practice? What about a whole company? What about an academic department or a classroom? What about a single individual or a family? What about a couple of lovers who see each other once a week or an older couple who have lived their entire lives together? What about a hitchhiker and a motorist who share a ride? What about a nation, Asians, or the English-speaking world? What about the commuters on a transit system or the theater-going crowd in New York? What about a tribe of mountain gorillas? Some of these configurations fit the concept of community of practice squarely, some are more or less marginal cases, and some really stretch the idea.

Calling every imaginable social configuration a community of practice would render the concept meaningless. On the other hand, encumbering the concept with too restrictive a definition would only make it less useful. It is not necessary, for instance, to develop a simple metric that would yield a clear-cut answer for each of the social configurations just listed by specifying exact ranges of size, duration, proximity, amount of interaction, or types of activities.

I find it more important to explore, as I have done so far, the perspective that underlies the concept of practice, and thus develop a framework by which to articulate to what degree, in which ways, and to what purpose it is (or is not) useful to view a social configuration as a community of practice.

I have argued that we know who we are by what is familiar and by what we can negotiate and make use of, and that we know who we are not by what is unfamiliar, unwieldy, and out of our purview. This is an important point. We not only produce our identities through the practices we engage in, but we also define ourselves through practices we do not engage in. Our identities are constituted not only by what we are but also by what we are not. To the extent that we can come in contact with other ways of being, what we are not can even become a large part of how we define ourselves. For instance, we define ourselves in a small but not insignificant way by our regular contacts with various professionals from whom we receive services. Though we remain mostly non-participants, our service encounters often let us know just enough about their practices to gain some sense of what it is we are not, what we wish we were, what we would not dream of being, or what we are glad not to be. In other words, non-participation is, in a reverse kind of fashion, as much a source of identity as participation.

Our relations to communities of practice thus involve both participation and non-participation, and our identities are shaped by combinations of the two. In this chapter, I will explore the notion of identity of non-participation by:

1. 1) defining a range of interactions between participation and non-participation, and in particular distinguishing between peripherality and marginality

2. 2) distinguishing between various sources of participation and non-participation

3. 3) using the example of claims processing to describe some institutional forms of non-participation and their effects on practice.