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Abstract
A form of voluntary workplace engagement, communities of practice are characterised in literature as providing entities with the potential to harness the multiplier effects of collaborative processes by building on informal networks within entities. As knowledge building and sharing institutions it would be reasonable to presume that communities of practice activities have been embraced to facilitate a level of connectedness and engagement in a university context. However, evidence from the Australian higher education environment suggests that the enlistment of communities of practice processes by universities faces a number of challenges that are peculiar to academe. We suggest that academic knowledge work practices are significantly different from the business/industry related applications of communities of practice and that an understanding of the unique aspects of such practices, together with the impediments posed by a ‘corporate university’ model, require acknowledgment before the knowledge building and sharing aspects of communities of practice activities in academia can emerge.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to acknowledge support and funding from Deakin University’s Institute of Teaching and Learning as part of a Professional Development Fellowship Program and the helpful discussions with University of Southern Queensland colleagues Jacquie McDonald and Cassandra Star.
Notes
1. Cousin and Deepwell (Citation2005) point out that community can also have a more sinister side with behaviours that include exclusionary practices, low tolerance and expectation of compliance with regulation.
2. We recognise that CoPs have been embraced in a variety of settings that includes education, health and social services, management and others. We cannot hope to analyse each context in which they have been applied and will follow a theme of managerialism in the paper to highlight the contextual differences between corporation‐based CoPs and academe.
3. Refer also to Hood Citation1991, Citation1995; Pollit Citation1993; Pusey Citation1991 and Self Citation1993, for new public management in the public sector.
4. In Australia there is a growing trend towards blended learning that incorporates the use of information and communication technology into the instructional process to augment rather than replace on‐campus delivery (Eklund et al., Citation2003).
5. This state of affairs is almost reminiscent of Tapper and Palfreyman’s (Citation2000, p. 204) scenario 4 where teaching has become increasingly marginalised and where the pressures of massification, accountability and parsimony triumph.
6. Price (Citation2005) refers to a CoP in the UK that had limited success as a consequence of failure to create the underlying shared meaning of domain and distrust engendered by the presumption of tacit rather than articulated knowledge.
7. Although, as noted by one anonymous reviewer, managing a teaching only for‐profit institution may be closely aligned with an industrial production model.
8. Interestingly Lustig (Citation2005) refers to the contemporary university model as the ‘gelded age’ of higher education to illustrate how academics have been disempowered by managerialist processes.
9. Pemberton et al. (Citation2007, p. 67), refer to ‘emergent’ rather than ‘nurtured’ CoPs. However we consider that emergent relates more to what we consider ‘organic’ CoPs that develop naturally as an unintentional process. By ‘nurtured’ we mean providing recognition to the concept of CoP‐iA and devising mechanisms to sponsor or support their development without institutional management or coercion.