Contours of collaboration: Understanding emerging communities of practice in economic development

Economic development is an industry that pits localities against one another in pursuit of vital, community-sustaining jobs. Despite this competitive context, an established literature documents significant benefits to collaboration between economic developers and, notably, practitioners’ awareness of these benefits. While much of the existing literature focuses on the benefits of cooperation or developers’ attitudes toward cooperation, there has been limited emphasis on how these practices evolve in social terms. This paper draws on qualitative interviews with 30 economic developers and allied practitioners to interrogate the dimensions of cooperation in the Midwestern state of Missouri. It argues that we can usefully understand the relationships that shape cooperation between competing practitioners as a distributed community of practice. The study highlights the ways that economic developers have shaped the domain, community, and practice of economic development to facilitate social processes of shared learning. Participants in this research describe a community environment where cooperation is an accepted norm, but where collaborative knowledge generation and problem solving could be extended through greater intentional community formation.