From the computerization movement to computerization: a case study of community of practice (original) (raw)

Computer-Mediated Community in a High-Tech Organization

THE FIRM AS A COLLABORATIVE COMMUNITY

Yet there is more assertion than evidence about how CMC actually affects work relations and organizations. Have applications such as listserves, email, and instant messaging (IM) fostered new forms of organization that are less bounded than traditional bureaucratic hierarchies? Analysts have asserted that CMC aids rapid communication and information access among employees, making easier inexpensive and convenient communication with far-flung communities of work. They argue that CMC provides the means for leaping over ...

Local Virtuality in a High-Tech Networked Organization

What are networked organizations? The focus of discussions of the networked organization has been on the boundary-spanning nature of these new organizational structures. Yet, the role of the group in these networked organizations has remained unclear. Furthermore, little is known about how computer-mediated communication is used to bridge group and organizational boundaries. In particular, the role of new media in the context of existing communication patterns has received little attention. We examine how employees at a high-tech company, referred to as KME, communicate with members of the work group, other colleagues in the organization, and colleagues outside the organization to better understand their boundary-spanning communications. We thank Lynne Howarth and Joseph Cothrel for their advice and Julie Wang for her editorial assistance. We especially want to thank all the employees at KME who completed the survey, and even more so, those employees who also participated in the interviews and observations. pect that frequent communication would occur at a distance. However, we do not expect that communication outside the organization would be larger than group-based communication or communication with other colleagues in the organization. We expect that the fact that people are co-located would facilitate local communication.

Local Virtuality in an Organization: Implications for Community of Practice

Communities and Technologies 2005, 2005

This volume consists of the papers presented at the second international conference on Communities and Technologies (C&T 2005). After a very successful first conference in 2003 in Amsterdam, the second one attracted about the same number of submissions and workshop proposals. This suggests that the scholarly interest in the relationships between communities and technologies is lasting, and that the C&T conference has become a major international forum for presenting and discussing this work.

Computer Mediated Communications and Communities of Practice

papers.ssrn.com, 1998

Within the Knowledge Management context there is growing interest in computer support for group knowledge sharing and the role that Communities of Practice play in this. Communities of Practice are groups of individuals with a common purpose and who share some background, language or experience. The community is regenerated as newcomers join the group and old-timers leave. The newcomers have access to the old-timers and learn from them. This generally takes place through situated learning. New group knowledge is also created as members of the community have a problem to solve and swap experiences and anecdotes to solve the problem, possibly arriving at a novel solution. This may then be further shared through anecdotes so that it eventually becomes part of the group’s store of collective knowledge. Communities of Practice provide an excellent forum for knowledge sharing and a vital question is whether the new communications media, which provide new possibilities for collaboration and distributed working, could support the existence of such groups in a distributed environment. This question takes on an added relevance with the rapid internationalisation of business [Castells 1996] that can spread the distribution over national boundaries posing problems of cultural and temporal as well as physical distance. This paper reports on a case study which was the first stage in exploring whether Computer Mediated Communications technologies (CMCs) can support distributed international Communities of Practice. The aim of the case study was to explore the possible existence of Communities of Practice in an international organisation, to identify such groups and to ascertain the media used.

Internet technology in support of the concept of “communities-of-practice”: the case of Xerox

Accounting, Management and Information Technologies, 1998

Work practices usually differ fundamentally from the way that organizations describe their operations in manuals, training programs, etc. This paper focuses on the way that certain work practices are supported at Xerox, and the conclusions of this effort are related to complementary investigations on learning and innovation. Here we propose that the combination of work, learning and innovation should be reconsidered within the framework of informal "communities-of-practice." Information Technology tends to be used in order to reinforce the old work and study paradigms. This paper suggests a different use of IT, a use especially well suited to intra-and internets, with the aim of supporting informal structures rather than formal procedures. The case of Xerox Corporation is used as an example.

Virtual Communities of Practice: Theory, Measurement and Organizational Implications

Communities of Practice (CoPs) are informal groups people form around shared problems or disciplines. As natural drivers of knowledge-sharing and innovation, they are the cornerstone of Knowledge Management programs, and are viewed by organizational scholars as a key element of the knowledge-based view of the firm. Nowadays, employees and organizations face considerable turmoil from phenomena such as globalization, rapid technological change, and the increasingly mobile workforce. This hinders employees from regular engagement in face-to-face CoPs, thus increasing the need for virtual CoPs that engage effectively over the Internet. This book reports a systematic search for Usenet-based CoPs that displayed all the traits of co-located CoPs as described in seminal studies. The study used surveys and content analyses as measurement instruments, and found four fully compliant virtual CoPs. The implication for employees is that they can enhance their professional skills through virtual CoP engagement. Organizations, in turn, can foster this engagement in extra-organizational CoPs to tap the rich knowledge ecologies in which businesses work today and keep abreast of fast changing fields.