Journal
INFORMATION SOCIETY
Volume 21, Issue 2, Pages 109-118Publisher
TAYLOR & FRANCIS INC
DOI: 10.1080/01972240590925311
Keywords
codification; community of practice; economics; knowledge; methodological individualism; practice theory; social capital
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Community of practice theory is inherently a social theory. As such it is distinct from more individualist accounts of human behavior, such as mainstream economics. Consequently, community of practice theory and economics favor different accounts of knowledge. Taking a community of practice perspective, this article challenges economists' attempts to reduce knowledge to information held by individuals and to reject tacit knowledge as mere uncodified explicit knowledge. The essay argues that Polanyi's notion of a tacit dimension affected numerous disciplines (including economics) because it addressed aspects of learning and identity that conventional social sciences overlooked. The article situates knowledge, identity, and learning within communities and points to ethical and epistemic entailments of community practice. In so doing it attempts to limit, rather than expand, the scope of community of practice analysis and to stress the difference, rather than the commonalities, between this and other apparently congenial forms of social analysis.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available