Microsoft Word 2007 ichrie conference Proceedings Final-Final 06-06-07. doc

 
LITERATURE REVIEW 
Electronic Communities of Practice (CoPs) 
Wenger (1998) described the community of practice (CoP) as an evolutionary process of learning within 
groups. A CoP is a collaborative team or group of professionals who know one other, work together, and engage in 
shared practice by interacting on an ongoing basis, thereby enhances the formation of strong inter-personal ties and 
creates norms of direct reciprocity within a small community (Lave & Wenger, 1991). Communities of practice 
develop a context of work within which members collectively construct shared identities and the social context that 
helps those identities to be shared. Such communities develop into significant “sticky” repositories for the 
development, storage and dissemination of useful knowledge (von Hippel, 1994). Recent advances in information 
technology have also shifted CoPs into an online environment where even more geographically distributed group of 
individuals can be accommodated. The formation of these virtual communities is often mediated by third parties 
such as professional associations or governmental agencies, although members in this network do not necessarily 
meet or know one another personally (Dubé, Bourhis & Jacob, 2005). Based upon generic discussions of CoPs 
(Brown & Duguid, 2001; Wasko & Faraj, 2005), this study adopted definition of CoPs as self-organizing and open 
activity systems focused on shared practice that exists primarily through computer mediated communications 
(Wasko & Faraj, 2005, p. 37).

Computer mediated communities of practice have been recognized as valuable assets to organizations. 
While the conventional wisdom suggests that participating in such communities generates value at individual level, 
it is increasingly recognized that even organizations can extract tremendous value from the knowledge created by 
those individuals. In today’s fast-paced knowledge-based economy, these communities allow organizations to tackle 
unstructured problems and share knowledge outside the traditional structural boundaries. In addition, these 
communities provide means to develop and maintain organizational memory. These mechanisms result in efficient 
forms of knowledge transfer and ultimately facilitate learning and applications at both individual and organizational 
levels. According to Lesser and Storck (2001), such communities provide both organizations and individuals with 
multiple advantages: decreased the learning curve, increased customer responsiveness, reduced rework and prevent 
reinvention, and increased innovation.