Davenport, Elisabeth and Hall, Hazel (2001) New knowledge and micro-level online organization: 'communities of practice' as a development framework. In: Proceedings of the 34th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos. ISBN 0-7695-0981-9

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Abstract/Description

The role of communities of practice in knowledge creation is recognized in a number of contexts. The authors take a socio-technical perspective and identify four characteristics of such communities: situated learning, situated action, distributed cognition and social infrastructure. These are combined into a loosely normative framework to define and analyze communities of practice at the level of online micro-organization. The framework is applied to three development projects: a reference service, a virtual enterprise initiative and a simulation of an electronic shopping mall. The authors discuss its potential in explaining and stimulating new knowledge in micro-level online work environments

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