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Summary

There is a profound connection between identity and practice. Developing a practice requires the formation of a community whose members can engage with one another and thus acknowledge each other as participants. As a consequence, practice entails the negotiation of ways of being a person in that context. This negotiation may be silent; participants may not necessarily talk directly about that issue. But whether or not they address the question directly, they deal with it through the way they engage in action with one another and relate to one another. Inevitably, our practices deal with the profound issue of how to be a human being. In this sense, the formation of a community of practice is also the negotiation of identities.

The parallels between practice and identity are summarized in Figure 6.1. To highlight them in this chapter, I will (as I did in Coda I) go through the themes of Part I, chapter by chapter, but recast them in terms of identity. This exercise will yield the following characterizations.

• Identity as negotiated experience. We define who we are by the ways we experience our selves through participation as well as by the ways we and others reify our selves.
• Identity as community membership. We define who we are by the familiar and the unfamiliar.
• Identity as learning trajectory. We define who we are by where we have been and where we are going.
• Identity as nexus of multimembership. We define who we are by the ways we reconcile our various forms of membership into one identity.
• Identity as a relation between the local and the global. We define who we are by negotiating local ways of belonging to broader constellations and manifesting broader styles and discourses.

Summary

Learning cannot be designed. Ultimately, it belongs to the realm of experience and practice. It follows the negotiation of meaning; it moves on its own terms. It slips through the cracks; it creates its own cracks. Learning happens, design or no design.

And yet there are few more urgent tasks than to design social infrastructures that foster learning. This is true not only of schools and universities, but also of all sorts of organizations in the public and private sectors, and even of entities usually not called organizations, like states and nations. In fact, the whole human world is itself fast becoming one large organization, which is the object of design and which must support the learning we need in order to ensure there is to be a tomorrow. Those who can understand the informal yet structured, experiential yet social, character of learning – and can translate their insight into designs in the service of learning – will be the architects of our tomorrow.

By way of conclusion, I will use the concepts introduced in this book to discuss some issues of design as they relate to learning and practice, and by extension to community and identity. This discussion will do two things. It will provide a summary of the main themes and, at the same time, illustrate the use that can be made of the conceptual framework I have outlined.

Summary

Ariel runs down the stairs. She has to be at work at 8:00, and with the traffic, she will need a lot of luck to make it. She should really stop using the snooze button. The fact is, she would rather go to work earlier and come home earlier. But it's people with more seniority who get to choose their hours first: they can take the 7:00 to 3:00 schedule. She had it for a while. It's a bit hard in the morning, but when you get off at 3:00, it's like you still have the day in front of you. Staying there until 4:00 makes a big difference. But now the office needed some people to answer the phones between 3:00 and 4:00, so junior processors have to stay later. Although she has been working in the claims office for well over a year, Ariel is still considered a junior processor. She has recently been promoted to a level 6.

Predictably, it's congested between Ridgewell and Lincoln. As her car comes to a halt, Ariel grabs the rearview mirror to check her makeup. Overall, she takes good care of herself. She makes up, but discreetly, and dresses cleanly but not aggressively. Fortunately, the office is rather informal about appearance. You could spend a fortune otherwise. Of course, she could not go to work in shorts, but even jeans are OK as long as they are not torn.

Summary

I will end this first part of the book with a brief essay on the nature of knowing in practice. This essay, which is philosophical but in a lighthearted kind of way, will allow me to provide a summary of the themes introduced in Part I in the context of discussing a specific topic. Focusing on knowing for this purpose is a useful topic, but this choice should not be interpreted as assuming that knowing is all that communities of practice are about, especially if by “knowing” one refers to some instrumental kind of expertise. Communities of practice should not be reduced to purely instrumental purposes. They are about knowing, but also about being together, living meaningfully, developing a satisfying identity, and altogether being human.

Flowers and bits

I will start with two odd questions. The first one was concocted long ago by Zen teachers to help their students think more sharply: What does a flower know about being a flower? The second question is the information-age version of the first: What does a computer know about being a flower?

The question of what a flower knows about being a flower is somewhat troubling because there seem to be two contradictory answers. Being a flower is to no one as transparent, immediately obvious, fully internalized, and natural as it is to a flower: spreading those leaves, absorbing that specific spectrum of light from the sun, taking the energy in, building protein, sucking nutrients from its roots, growing, budding, blooming, being visited by a bee.

Summary

Being alive as human beings means that we are constantly engaged in the pursuit of enterprises of all kinds, from ensuring our physical survival to seeking the most lofty pleasures. As we define these enterprises and engage in their pursuit together, we interact with each other and with the world and we tune our relations with each other and with the world accordingly. In other words, we learn.

Over time, this collective learning results in practices that reflect both the pursuit of our enterprises and the attendant social relations. These practices are thus the property of a kind of community created over time by the sustained pursuit of a shared enterprise. It makes sense, therefore, to call these kinds of communities communities of practice.

Claims processors: a community of practice

Ariel and her colleagues do not come to Alinsu to form a community of practice; they come to earn a living. Gathered in Alinsu's office by their need for work, they want to fulfill their individual production quota. They want to make money in order to go on with their own lives, which they see taking place mostly outside of the office. They do focus on their work, but they keep glancing at the clock, waiting for the moment they are free to leave. For most of the time they spend at Alinsu, most of them would rather be somewhere else doing something else. Everyone knows this, employees and employer alike.

Summary

As a nickname for the COB worksheet, the claims processors' expression “the C, F, and J thing” is quite telling. It names the activity not by reference to the insurance concepts it implements but by reference to lines in the worksheet. Indeed, the location of the data and the calculation are prescribed in terms of lines within the worksheet itself, to the point where knowing what to do next does not require any interpretation of the worksheet's underlying purpose. If one assumes that the worksheet has been designed correctly, then one need not take any responsibility for the outcome of the calculation and its implementation of actual contractual relations. The worksheet was specifically designed with this assumption in mind. Instead of giving claims processors the capacity to figure out how to do the calculation, the designers of the worksheet decided to prescribe exactly how to do it, step by step. The form removed from the execution of the procedure the need to assume responsibility for its meaning.

This kind of form is very common, not only in claims processing but in all kinds of activities. Many people who fill out U.S. tax returns, for instance, would be hard-pressed to explain the exact meanings of some of the calculations involved in the various forms, tables, and worksheets, as intended by those who designed them.

Summary

Organizations are social designs directed at practice. Indeed, it is through the practices they bring together that organizations can do what they do, know what they know, and learn what they learn. Communities of practice are thus key to an organization's competence and to the evolution of that competence. I have argued, however, that communities of practice differ from institutional entities along three dimensions.

1) They negotiate their own enterprise, though they may at times construct a conforming response to institutional prescriptions (Chapter 2).
2) They arise, evolve, and dissolve according to their own learning, though they may do so in response to institutional events (Chapter 3).
3) They shape their own boundaries, though their boundaries may at times happen to be congruent with institutional boundaries (Chapter 4).

The contrast detailed here is one between organizational design and lived practice. From this perspective, there are two views of an organization like Alinsu:

1) the designed organization, which I will often call the “institution” to distinguish it from the organization as lived in practice
2) the practice (or, more accurately, the constellation of practices), which gives life to the organization and is often a response to the designed organization.

Both aspects contribute to making the organization what it is. Indeed, the organization itself could be defined as the interaction of these two aspects. Besides corporations like Alinsu, this characterization applies to nonprofit organizations and even subunits such as agencies, departments, or business units.

Summary

The negotiation of meaning is a fundamentally temporal process, and one must therefore understand practice in its temporal dimension. Some communities of practice exist over centuries – for example, communities of artisans who pass their craft from generation to generation. Some are shorter-lived but intense enough to give rise to an indigenous practice and to transform the identities of those involved. For instance, such communities may form as people come together to handle a disaster. The development of practice takes time, but what defines a community of practice in its temporal dimension is not just a matter of a specific minimum amount of time. Rather, it is a matter of sustaining enough mutual engagement in pursuing an enterprise together to share some significant learning. From this perspective, communities of practice can be thought of as shared histories of learning.

In this chapter I discuss the internal dynamics that constitute these shared histories of learning. Toward this end, I will take up the themes introduced in the last two chapters, but with a focus on time and learning.

1) I will first talk about participation and reification as forms of memory, as sources of continuity and discontinuity, and thus as channels by which one can influence the evolution of a practice.
2) I will then discuss the development of practice with reference to the three dimensions introduced in Chapter 2. I will argue that learning along these three dimensions is what produces practice as an emergent structure.
3) Finally, I will turn to the learning by which newcomers can join a practice, that is, by which generational discontinuities are also continuities.

Summary

Monochrome or black & white (B/W) TV signals are transmitted by very few stations now. It is still well worth our while, however, to understand monochrome TV. There are several reasons for this:

Summary

As indicated in the introduction, new types of receivers and receiver circuitry are being introduced continually. In this chapter we will look at some of them.

An integrated AM/FM receiver

The receiver we consider here is one of the Sony Walkman series that is designed to drive lightweight stereo headphones rather than a speaker. The headphones are so intrinsic to the design that their cord also serves as the FM antenna! The schematic is shown in Fig. 3.1.

We begin by directing our attention to the lower right-hand corner of the schematic. Rather than returning one headphone lead from each channel directly to ground, the ground return for both channels is through L7. This has a reactance of about 1.4 kΩ in the FM band but less than an ohm for audio frequencies. Thus one side of each headphone is AC grounded for audio, but a significant FM signal is developed across L7 and coupled via C39 to the RF input of the receiver. This capacitor's reactance is less than 50Ω in the FM band. Diodes D1 and D2 serve to prevent overdriving IC1. For reception of distant FM stations, Sl-1 couples the FM antenna circuitry directly to a bandpass filter. For local reception, the coupling is via R16, which attenuates the larger local signals. In the AM position, C1 AC grounds any FM signal received by the FM antenna. The DC potential on this line is .85 V for FM, but it gets pulled down to zero in the AM position of 57-7. This line is tied to the internal voltage regulator of 1C1 and may be a shutdown line. The 3 V input to the regulator (pin 26 of IC1) provides a regulated 1.3 V output on pin 8 when the voltage on pin 15 is at the normal value of .85 V (for FM). When pin 15 is grounded in the AM position, the regulator output shuts down, removing supply voltage from the FM front-end portion of 1C1. This supply line is bypassed to ground by C2 and C40. The grounded end of each of the parallel tuned circuits is returned to this 1.3 V regulated supply line. Therefore, they are AC grounded but not DC grounded. This is analogous to the ZN414 TRF 1C receiver of Chapter 1.

Summary

In Chapter 6,1 talked about identity in terms of belonging to communities of practice. But to make sense of the formation of identity in a context such as the institutional non-participation described in Chapter 7, it is necessary to consider modes of belonging other than engagement in practice. The claims processors' experience of both participation and non-participation is deeply part of their daily practice, but it also reaches beyond the walls of their office. In order to do their job, they must align their activities and their interpretations of events with structures, forces, and purposes beyond their community of practice and so find their place in broader business processes. Their identities as workers are affected by the picture they build of their position. They see themselves as participants in social processes and configurations that extend beyond their direct engagement in their own practice. They have to make some sense of many artifacts they encounter coming from practices they do not have access to. They may have to use their imagination to get a picture of these broader connections. They have an image of Alinsu, for instance, even though they have not had direct involvement with most of the practices that constitute the corporation. Yet this image is no less significant and, in a sense, no less real than their daily involvement at work.

Summary

Is claims processing in general a community of practice? Should any work group be considered a community of practice? What about a whole company? What about an academic department or a classroom? What about a single individual or a family? What about a couple of lovers who see each other once a week or an older couple who have lived their entire lives together? What about a hitchhiker and a motorist who share a ride? What about a nation, Asians, or the English-speaking world? What about the commuters on a transit system or the theater-going crowd in New York? What about a tribe of mountain gorillas? Some of these configurations fit the concept of community of practice squarely, some are more or less marginal cases, and some really stretch the idea.

Calling every imaginable social configuration a community of practice would render the concept meaningless. On the other hand, encumbering the concept with too restrictive a definition would only make it less useful. It is not necessary, for instance, to develop a simple metric that would yield a clear-cut answer for each of the social configurations just listed by specifying exact ranges of size, duration, proximity, amount of interaction, or types of activities.

I find it more important to explore, as I have done so far, the perspective that underlies the concept of practice, and thus develop a framework by which to articulate to what degree, in which ways, and to what purpose it is (or is not) useful to view a social configuration as a community of practice.

Summary

I have argued that we know who we are by what is familiar and by what we can negotiate and make use of, and that we know who we are not by what is unfamiliar, unwieldy, and out of our purview. This is an important point. We not only produce our identities through the practices we engage in, but we also define ourselves through practices we do not engage in. Our identities are constituted not only by what we are but also by what we are not. To the extent that we can come in contact with other ways of being, what we are not can even become a large part of how we define ourselves. For instance, we define ourselves in a small but not insignificant way by our regular contacts with various professionals from whom we receive services. Though we remain mostly non-participants, our service encounters often let us know just enough about their practices to gain some sense of what it is we are not, what we wish we were, what we would not dream of being, or what we are glad not to be. In other words, non-participation is, in a reverse kind of fashion, as much a source of identity as participation.

Our relations to communities of practice thus involve both participation and non-participation, and our identities are shaped by combinations of the two. In this chapter, I will explore the notion of identity of non-participation by:

1) defining a range of interactions between participation and non-participation, and in particular distinguishing between peripherality and marginality
2) distinguishing between various sources of participation and non-participation
3) using the example of claims processing to describe some institutional forms of non-participation and their effects on practice.

Summary

Issues of identity came up on a number of occasions in Part I, but I did not address the topic directly. It is now time to turn to it. Focusing on identity, however, is not a change of topic but rather a shift in focus within the same general topic. Issues of identity are an integral aspect of a social theory of learning and are thus inseparable from issues of practice, community, and meaning. Focusing on identity within this context extends the framework in two directions:

1) it narrows the focus onto the person, but from a social perspective
2) it expands the focus beyond communities of practice, calling attention to broader processes of identification and social structures.

In addition, focusing on identity brings to the fore the issues of nonparticipation as well as participation, and of exclusion as well as inclusion. Our identity includes our ability and our inability to shape the meanings that define our communities and our forms of belonging.

The individual and the collective

I will use the concept of identity to focus on the person without assuming the individual self as a point of departure. Building an identity consists of negotiating the meanings of our experience of membership in social communities. The concept of identity serves as a pivot between the social and the individual, so that each can be talked about in terms of the other.

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Chapter 6 - Identity in practice

Summary

Part I - Practice

Synopsis: Design for learning

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Index of abbreviations

Vignette I: Welcome to claims processing!

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Contents

Coda I: Knowing in practice

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Index

Intro I: The concept of practice

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Coda 0: Understanding

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Chapter 11 - Organizations

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Chapter 3 - Learning

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6 - Monochrome TV

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3 - Modern receiver circuitry

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Acknowledgments

Chapter 8 - Modes of belonging

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Chapter 5 - Locality

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Chapter 7 - Participation and non-participation

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Index

Intro II: A focus on identity

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