knowledge management 2009 (4)

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Knowledge Management 2009

Course 4

Tim Hoogenboom & Bolke de Bruin

http://www.timhoogenboom.nl



Contents of Today

• Recapitulating last week

• Something on Practice

• Communities of Practice, Boundaries and Locality

• Relevance of Practice Based Approach

• Assignment



Wrapping it up



Design in a nutshell

• Design organizations as architectures for learning

• We have four design interventions (areas of influence) we need to balance:– Meaning, Time, Space, Power

• As to learning, organizations consist of 3 infrastructures– Engagement, Imagination, Alignment

• Infrastructures are specific interventions



Difficulties Design

• Design as a craft (ask any artisan)

• Design by drawing (ask any engineer)

• Design as a process (ask program manager)

• Design without a product (who should we ask… You?)

Hindsight: If we had known at the start what we know now we’d never designed it like this (p.xxv)



Design Interventions



Designing for Participation

Learning can’t be designed – it can only be frustrated or facilitated



A Design Framework

ENGAGEMENT IMAGINATION ALIGNMENT

PARTICIPATION/

REIFICATION

Combining them meaningfully in actions, interactions and creation of shared histories

Stories, playing with forms, recombinations, assumptions

Styles and discourses

DESIGNED/

EMERGENT

Situated improvisation within a regime of mutual accountability

Scenarios, possible worlds, simulations, perceiving new broad patterns

Communication, feedback, coordination, renegotiation, realignment

LOCAL/

GLOBAL

Multi-membership, brokering, peripherality, conversations

Models, maps, representations, visits, tours

Standards, shared infrastructures, centers of authority

IDENTIFICATION/

NEGOTIABILITY

Mutuality through shared action, situated negotiation, marginalization

New trajectories, empathy, stereotypes, explanations

Inspirations, fields of influence, reciprocity of power relations



Practice



Community of Practice

• Communities of practice are social configurations that support learning, by facilitating practices that reflect the pursuit of a shared enterprise and social relations.

• Practices have no agency on their own, yet practices connote doing, and by this doing members’ practices help them in ordering their social context

• Communities are a new mode of organizing between the market and the hierarchy



Practice

• Practice is the source of coherence for a community (of practice), thereby it differs from interest groups, belief groups, cultures etc.

• Practice is about the negotiation of meaning– Participation is the process of taking part and also to the relation

with others that reflect this process. – Reification is treating an abstraction as substantially existing or

as a concrete object.



Community

• In order to structure a practice a social configuration is needed

• Communities of Practice are constituted under the force of– Mutuality of engagement: Constructing and reproducing the

relationships (often called memberships) for doing things together.

– Joint enterprise: shared objective negotiated by its participants to deal with a situation as they experience it.

– Shared repertoire: Resources for negotiation of meaning that a community has adopted during its existence, and which have become part of its practice



Practice creates learning

• For communities of practice to be durable, learning is required

• Legitimate peripheral participation: To learn trajectories are necessary, trajectories created openings within communities that foster member’s learning

• Learning is a constant flux; neither inherently stable, nor randomly changeable



Practice creates boundaries

• Inherent to practice is emergence of boundaries, creating discontinuities in learning

• To overcome learning blockades boundary trajectories are vital

• To deal with boundaries our identities have to incorporate situated or partial identities and multimemberships

• Reification can also serve continuity across community of practices by brokering via boundary objects (the sprout of object-centered sociality)

• Organizations try to design boundary practices, overlaps and peripheries to bridge isolations, yet it is up to the community to appropriate them



Practice creates locality

• Practice, and thus communities of practice, is always local.

• Communities of practice always are part of broader constellations.

• These constellations are institutionalized structures

• Understanding local and global and their interplay is vital in realistic organizational design– Naïve associations hoaxing ‘a living togetherness’– KPI steering as way of understanding the practice



Relevancy PBA

• Practice Based Approach (PBA)

• Practice situated in middle of structure and agency extremes– Structure (Objectivism, functionalism, positivism)– Agency (Subjectivism, symbolic interactionism, pragmatism)

• In search for middle way: – Giddens’ structuration theory, Latour’s actor-network theory,

Wenger’s practice based approach– Think of organizational reconstitutions



Assignment

knowledge management 2009 (4)

Education

practice practice

locality practice

wengers practice

approach pba practice

relevancy pba practice

locality relevance of

difficulties design

participation learning