Another cog in the machine: Designing communities of practice in professional bureaucracies

SummaryThis paper explores the purposeful design and development of a community of practice within a professional bureaucracy. The view of communities of practice has shifted from fundamentally organic entities to ones that can be deliberately designed and developed and they have frequently been presented as a panacea for knowledge sharing and creation, a basis for innovation in organizations. However, evidence that organizations have succeeded to achieve this challenge is lacking. Through the processual analysis of such an organizational intervention, this longitudinal study shows that these two contexts – the community of practice and the professional bureaucracy – do not mesh well and create tensions for those employees who are also community of practice members. This implies that the community of practice approach may not serve all types of organizations. The findings also lead to the reconsideration of communities of practice in organizations and a critique of the main appraisal of this approach is presented. It is suggested that communities of practice should be regarded as a social phenomenon rather than an organizational learning tool.

► We provide a processual analysis of a CoP purposeful design and development.
► Tensions surface when professional bureaucracy employees become CoP members.
► CoPs should be regarded as a social phenomenon rather than an organizational tool.