Communities of Practice: Going Virtual

Abstract

With the current trends towards downsizing, outsourcing and globalisation, modern organisations are reducing the numbers of people they employ. In addition, organisations now have to cope with the increasing internationalisation of business forcing collaboration and knowledge sharing across time and distance simultaneously. There is a need for new ways of thinking about how knowledge is shared in distributed groups. In this paper we explore a relatively new approach to knowledge sharing using Lave and Wenger's (1991) theory of Communities of Practice (CoPs). We investigate whether CoPs might translate to a geographically distributed international environment through a case study that explores the functioning of a CoP across national boundaries.