Communities of Practice for Policy Change

Learning in communities of practice combines reification and participation which means that it combines the creation of knowledge in models, data sets, and other types of objects with ‘learning by doing’ (Wenger, 1998). However, in current literature on communities of practice – the participatory part and its use as a ‘knowledge management’ tool in organizations – overshadows the possibility of knowledge reification in participatory ways. As learning by doing takes place in communities - existing of multiple, but connected, learning sites; the question becomes how these learning sites can share or even influence and strengthen learning experiences but also knowledge-accumulation. When interested in questions of institutional change; this question becomes even more urgent. Bottom learning in different communities of practice needs to be connected to forms of institutional learning. In this paper we will connect the notion of boundary objects in which knowledge can be transferred, translated and integrated (Carlile 2002) to participatory forms of learning in order to better understand how learning crosses the boundaries of different learning sites, and as such can create institutional learning and change. Carlile, P. R. (2002). A Pragmatic View of Knowledge and Boundaries: Boundary Objects in New Product Development. Organization Science, 13(4), 442–455. http://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.13.4.442.2953 Wenger, Etienne (1998). Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-66363-2.