Cultivating Communities of Practice: From Institutions to Practices

Where do communities of practice (CoPs) come from? What relationship do they entertain with institutions within or across which they develop? To what extent can institutions actually create CoPs? These questions are crucial, if only because of the benefits that CoPs are expected to bring, from innovation to learning to shared best practices. This article suggests that the most important relationship is between the CoP and its founding practice, which is ontologically prior to the CoP. The coming into existence of a CoP thus depends on the pre-existence of a founding practice and practical alignments. This argument counterbalances the two prevailing positions in the literature on CoPs, which focus on institutions instead of practices. In most IR literature on the topic, scholars have viewed CoPs as emerging “organically” and informally at the margins of institutions in a bottom-up fashion and from there often coming back to influence institutions bottom-up. Knowledge management scholars and institutional actors themselves have instead embraced a more agential and performative top-down approach by which CoPs can and should be cultivated to foster knowledge creation in business and international institutions alike. The article explores these positions with the help of examples drawn mainly from the European Union’s experience, including the Joint Research Centre’s attempt to cultivate CoPs from 2016 onwards.