Communities, boundary practices and incentives for knowledge sharing?: A study of the deployment of a digital control system in a process industry as a learning activity

In recent decades, the idea of learning as embedded within communities of practice has inspired research and practice in many areas, among others in the context of workplace learning. In the present study, the collaboration between members of two different communities of practice representing different economies of meaning, technicians and foundry workers, has been studied in the context of the deployment of an automatic control and surveillance system in a process industry. The collaboration has been analyzed as a boundary practice and documented through ethnographic methods including video recordings. The results indicate that the negotiation of meaning – i. e. the site of learning in the social practice approach – between (and within) the communities is restricted and instrumental to running the system only; the workers learned very little about the system or its affordances. It is argued that, in a world of competitive business incentives for sharing knowledge, it will often be limited. Even though the concept of communities of practice is an important heuristic for understanding learning, the manner in which communities promote learning is contingent on local circumstances.