HRM 2004
International conference on
Human resource management in a knowledge-based economy
2-4 June 2004, Ljubljana, Slovenia
Communities
of Practice as a Way
to a More Human-Oriented Knowledge Management
Marco Bettoni - Institute for Work Psychology, Swiss Federal Insitute of Technology Zürich, marco.bettoni@weknow.ch
Christoph Clases - Institute for Work Psychology, Swiss Federal Insitute of Technology Zürich, clases@ifap.bepr.ethz.ch
Theo Wehner - Institute for Work Psychology, Swiss Federal Insitute of Technology Zürich, wehner@ifap.bepr.ethz.ch
Abstract
After a
short historical review of the development of the concept of “Communities of
Practice” (CoP) we present examples of organisational Knowledge Management (KM)
in which Etienne Wenger's CoP model has been applied. In the main part we focus
on the business orientated KM framework that Wenger, Snyder and McDermott
proposed in 2002 by extending the original CoP approach of 1998. Finally we
conclude with a critical reflection over the necessity - within KM frameworks -
to explicitly emphasize participation in stewarding knowledge as a constitutive
element of Knowledge Management.
Keywords: Communities of Practice, Participation, Human-oriented Knowledge Management, Knowledge-oriented Cooperation