To investigate the ways in which communities of practice affect individuals' identity development, qualitative research methods were used to understand the impact solo travel had on American women's identity development. A theoretical framework developed from the disciplines of tourism, feminism and adult education was used to inform the study. Using a combined method methods approach (naturalistic inquiry and grounded theory), three components of the backpacker community of practice were identified which gave rise to a model of identity development within a particular community. This study has implications for adult education theory as it clearly suggests the interrelatedness of the social context in which this learning takes place (communities of practice), and adult development theory (identity formation). In practical terms it illustrates and also challenges the notion of identity change as irreversible, suggesting learners need constant support to retain new ways of viewing the world and themselves.

Medarbetarnas kunskap och kompetens är företagens viktigaste resurs för att hålla sig konkurrenskraftiga. Det är därför av största vikt att denna resurs bevaras och utvecklas inom organisationen genom kunskapsöverföring mellan anställda. Företags ledningsgrupper består av individer som anses ha hög kunskap och kompetens och som tillsammans ansvarar för hela verksamheten. Denna studie syftar till att undersöka vilka faktorer som påverkar möjligheterna för medlemmarna i två ledningsgrupper med hög respektive låg omsättning av personal att dela med sig och ta del av kunskapen inom gruppen. Genom intervjuer av halvstrukturerad karaktär med fyra medlemmar ur respektive ledningsgrupp kunde åtta olika faktorer urskiljas. Dessa var relationer inom gruppen, förändrade spelregler, social interaktion, en trygg konstellation, inställning till förändring, öppenhet för nya idéer, den förväntade följden av kunskapsdelningen samt frånvaro av konkurrens. De åtta faktorerna påverkar kunskapsdelningen i de två ledningsgrupperna på olika sätt som en följd av deras personalomsättning, vissa positivt och andra negativt. Av medlemmarna i ledningsgrupperna ansågs kunskap vara underordnat personliga egenskaper, vilka även är svåra att överföra och ersätta. Studien visade att en hög personalomsättning ger bättre förutsättningar för kunskapsdelning än vad en låg personalomsättning gör.

Typically, ephemeral aspects of material culture, such as gestures and sound, are often overlooked in the reconstruction of culture history which is unfortunate since sound-related artefacts offer clues to our understanding of practices and interactions between groups of individuals. With a music archaeological perspective, my research discusses aerophones recovered from the G-752Rj site in the southern portion of the Greater Nicoya archaeological region associated with pre-Columbian Tempisque (500 B.C. to A.D. 300) communities. I examine variation and/or consistency within the production, consumption, and deposition of these instruments to investigate intra-site micro-scale levels of community of practice. I propose an innovative approach at identifying communities of practice by analyzing sound and gestures within an instrument’s construction. / Graduate / 2017-08-08 / 0324 / 0336 / 0986 / katrina.kosyk@mail.mcgill.ca

Thesis advisor: Jane E. Regan / Few would dispute the notion that consumerism is a prevailing feature of American culture. The extent to which consumer culture dominates the way most people see the world makes imagining alternatives to consumerism almost impossible. This stultification of imagination is highly problematic. As it stands, consumer culture, measured by the principles of Catholic Social Teaching, demonstrably tends to inhibit human flourishing on personal, social, and global levels. There is a need to transform consumer culture in order to support human flourishing more robustly, and this barrenness of imagination impedes that transformation. This dissertation assumes that it is a task of teachers in faith to educate toward cultural alternatives that better support human flourishing. This task requires engaging in and developing what Scripture scholar Walter Brueggemann calls "prophetic imagination." The prophetic imagination involves both deconstructing the taken-for-granted dominant culture and entering into a community whose practices, values, and ideals effect an alternative culture. While here focused on consumer culture, this model of educating for prophetic imagination has broader applicability; it can also be used, for example, to challenge cultures of racism, sexism, and militarism. This education in imagination develops in what scholars of management Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger call "communities of practice." Jesus and his disciples model for Christians a community of practice that imagines and acts prophetically. Communities of practice that educate for prophetic imagination ought to measure their own imagination against Jesus's prophetic imagination, shaped by his understanding of the Reign of God. This portrait of communities of prophetic practice is fleshed out in an exploration of empirical studies of communities that engage learners and draw them into an imagination that re-shapes not only how they see what the world is but also how they envision what the world can be. Communities of practice that educate for prophetic imagination can foster the transformation of consumer culture into a culture that better supports human flourishing. In order to do so, however, they must start with an anthropology that adequately understands what flourishing entails. These communities ought to be attentive to three aspects of the human person that tend to be given short shrift in consumer culture: the person's role as a creative producer, the person's inherent relationality, and the person's need embrace finitude, the limitations of human capability. The Church should be utilizing communities of practice to overcome the sterility of imagination and contribute to a culture of what might be called humanizing plenitude. This culture supports the fullness of human thriving by re-imagining what that thriving entails and engaging in practices to facilitate it. The Church as teacher can be involved in this education for the purpose of cultural transformation to enhance human flourishing in various arenas. Finally, this dissertation particularly proposes that this education can happen in higher education, in parishes, and in collaboration with the wider community. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2017. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Religious Education and Pastoral Ministry.

The purpose of this thesis is to explore how taste is constructed at the micro-social level of a community of practice and to investigate the dynamics that underlie the process of taste-making. An ethnographic research was conducted in the context of an arts cooperative focusing on how members maintain status boundaries from dissimilar others (inter-group dynamics) and how they negotiate intra-group taste heterogeneity (internal dynamics). The findings indicate that the community symbolically demarcates itself from outgroups in an “us versus them” fashion by continuously juxtaposing its practices to those of competitive actors through “sayings” as well as “doings”. They also begin to mark out the appropriation processes through which members employ distaste to resignify and internalise meaning to their practices (a) by exhibiting tastes of outsiders if they can successfully negotiate their intent (recontextualising exo-cultural elements), (b) by negating tastes that are prevalent in the field in order to criticise subtly outgroup practices (appropriating practice through conspicuous absence) and (c) by negotiating the ‘tastefulness’ of objects that are not valued for their aesthetics by outsiders in order to provoke (resignifying prevailing aesthetics). Finally, the study conceptualises taste-making within the community as an ongoing dialogical process amongst members with heterogeneous views about “tastefulness”. Depending on their status, members employ strategies that help them either to actualise tastes that they favour in the context of the community or to deal with the exhibition of tastes that they are not in accordance with. The thesis makes a theoretical contribution to three areas; First, to literature on taste formation by accounting for the holistic outlook of community-based taste-making practices; Second, to our understanding of negative symbolic consumption by exhibiting the appropriation processes through which distaste endows meaning to practices; Third, to the stream of works on marketplace cultures by proposing a new conceptualisation of intra-group heterogeneity.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Oregon State University, 2007. / Printout. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 108-114). Also available on the World Wide Web.

Thesis (M.Ed.)--York University, 2003. Graduate Programme in Education. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 100-102). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL:http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url%5Fver=Z39.88-2004&res%5Fdat=xri:pqdiss&rft%5Fval%5Ffmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&rft%5Fdat=xri:pqdiss:MQ99292

There is a strong push in public health for multi-faceted partnerships to develop practice-relevant evidence that effectively address complex risk factors like tobacco use. Consequently, new partnership structures that cross-cut different social groups are emerging to harness their distinct knowledge and generate actionable breakthroughs. Little is known about these structures, particularly informal ones that hinge on voluntary group membership like Communities of Practice (CoPs). Specifically, little is known about the factors/processes that enable people representing different social groups to translate their knowledge across group boundaries and co-create knowledge that informs action in these informal structures. Calls to develop/test theories, frameworks, and models are made to enlighten these gaps. This study responded to these calls by developing and testing a conceptual framework. The framework asserts that a shared identity, member identification / sense of belonging, social capital and psychological safety contribute to diverse people cohering into a collective, which was deemed important to enable knowledge to translate across group boundaries. The study examined how each factor influenced and inter-related to influence the use of CoP-related knowledge and its different types (with an emphasis on conceptual and instrumental uses). The study also examined what factors contributed to or detracted from these relationships in the context of the Program Training and Consultation Centre’s tobacco control specific Learning through Evidence and Action Reflection Network (LEARN) Community of Practice (CoP) project. Following a pragmatist orientation, a two-phased quant-QUAL sequential, explanatory mixed-methods embedded case study design was employed. The LEARN CoP project formed the case study and two CoPs that comprised that project formed the embedded units. Phase I of the study involved a quantitative survey that was completed by 35 of 58 eligible LEARN CoP members. The Phase II dominant qualitative study involved ~90 minute audio-recorded telephone interviews of 14 LEARN CoP members (seven per embedded unit) who comprised a subset of Phase I survey respondents (nested sampling approach). CoP documents (meeting minutes, audio-recorded meetings, Community Charters and Learning Agendas, WebEx™ discussion posts) served as supplementary data sources. Phase I quantitative analyses examined whether each factor of interest predicted knowledge use using simple and multiple linear regression, tested an analytic model that proposed shared identity led to knowledge use via the mediators member identification, social capital and psychological safety using Baron & Kenny’s (1986) mediation approach and Goodman’s Test (1960) for confirmation. As a prelude to the Phase II qualitative study, descriptive statistics, t-tests and ANOVA were conducted to discern how the LEARN CoP and more specifically each of its embedded units (CoP A and CoP B) were developing with respect to the factors of interest and what differences existed between the two communities. Phase I findings loosely informed the focus of the Phase II qualitative study and data were coded and analysed using open, axial and selective coding procedures (Strauss & Corbin, 1990). Phase I and Phase II data were compared and contrasted in the discussion, with greater emphasis placed on the qualitative findings. Overall findings revealed that in the LEARN CoP case, each factor in the conceptual framework influenced how members used knowledge gained in the CoP. These factors also inter-related in ways that helped diverse members to cohere in ways that influenced knowledge use. Shared identity, member identification / sense of belonging and psychological safety were related to conceptual types of knowledge use (increased awareness, learning as a result of CoP knowledge). Social capital was the only factor that was related to both conceptual and instrumental types of CoP knowledge use (e.g., knowledge gained from the CoP was used to inform decision making or applied in some fashion in practice). However, member identification / sense of belonging emerged as an important theme that motivated members to interact and build social capital which in turn led to instrumental types of knowledge use. A superordinate identity (shaped by a common and actionable purpose) helped members to jel together despite representing different social groups by serving as an anchor point for member identification / sense of belonging. The CoP’s ‘alignment’ with the philosophies, culture and priorities of important entity’s that shaped the CoP’s work (e.g., government and the organizations that members represented) also influenced the use of CoP knowledge. Other factors including relevant knowledge, leadership (including member roles), and a variety of mechanisms that enabled interaction (i.e., in-person meetings, WebEx, teleconferences, structured time for practice sharing, working groups) contributed to or detracted from the relationships found in the study. Solving complex problems like tobacco-related chronic diseases necessitates building multi-faceted partnership structures that connect different configurations of an existing or desired system and their respective knowledge. This is not an easy task because it requires bringing together people representing potentially different social identities that possess their own ways of thinking and doing, which can limit knowledge use. This study sought to understand how factors that help diverse people to cohere into a collective enhance knowledge use. The study highlights the need to understand identity-based issues at play when people from different social groups are brought together in partnership structures like the formally instituted, voluntary CoP examined. Cultivating a shared identity and sense of belonging can bridge silos and motivate people to engage in behaviours that build rich pools of social capital. These factors together can enhance the co-creation and use of evidence and collective action that can save lives.

Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern, a set of problems or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis (Wenger et al, 2002). An understanding of why working, technical professionals participate in knowledge- based communities of practice can provide better opportunities to support individual and organizational knowledge management strategies. Online communities of practice were investigated at two global corporations: Xerox and IBM. At Xerox, Eureka is an internal network service designed to support knowledge sharing and problem solving by a community of practice for field service technicians. It allows the submission of problems from field service technicians and the retrieval of validated solutions for use and adaptation, by all members of the global Eureka community. At IBM Corporation, public network based communities of practice were investigated that focused on db2™ and Websphere™ software technology. Unlike the Xerox Eureka community of practice, knowledge contributions at IBM communities of practice are not validated prior to submission and access is open to public participation globally by IBM employees and by independent users of IBM software technology. The purpose of this case study research was to explore and to describe how and why participants became members of communities of practice – what influenced them to join and to participate. We collected survey data from participants in these communities, to examine the relationships among members’ expectations of purpose, their relationship to the community of practice, their attitudes toward information handling, the costs and benefits of membership, the size of the community of practice and the resulting participation behaviour in these knowledge-based communities of practice at Xerox Corporation and IBM Corporation. As one aspect of exploring user behaviour, we investigated the applicability of two theoretical frameworks for understanding user behaviour in these communities, based on propositions from normative and utility theory and from public goods critical mass theory. The research study provides a test for the explanatory power of public goods, utility and normative theories in a new area; namely, online knowledge-based communities of practice in workplace contexts. This analysis provided support for the applicability of utility theory and for some aspects of public goods-based theory/critical mass theory. The findings of the case study point out some differences in the two communities of practice. A majority of the IBM-based community members reported belonging to multiple communities (6-10) and using access to the community to form online social networks and to meet members outside the community at in-person meetings. They reported their participation as being self-directed and on an ad hoc basis. Most respondents were community members for less than 2 years. In contrast, a majority of Eureka members reported belonging only to the Eureka community and do not report forming online social networks in Eureka. Participation in Eureka is seamlessly integrated into prescribed, standard work practices of the company and supported by company management and with resources. Most respondents were community members for over 5 years. The analysis of members’ contributing behaviour in two online communities of practice reaffirms that the majority of members are passive participants with a core group of regular message contributors. Message composition is a careful and deliberate activity requiring communication discipline, time and effort. Members in both settings reported a strong desire to spend more time in their communities (and more time per visit). Communities of practice are dynamic complex entities that present not only a theoretical challenge but also a practical challenge. This study’s results point to the complexity of facilitating communities of practice: benefits dynamics and flow and permanence dynamics of membership can only be externally managed to a limited extent. The participants’ roles need to be conceptualized in ways that support different types of participation while at the same time highlighting the inherently cooperative nature of self-managed communities of practice.

Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern, a set of problems or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis (Wenger et al, 2002). An understanding of why working, technical professionals participate in knowledge- based communities of practice can provide better opportunities to support individual and organizational knowledge management strategies. Online communities of practice were investigated at two global corporations: Xerox and IBM. At Xerox, Eureka is an internal network service designed to support knowledge sharing and problem solving by a community of practice for field service technicians. It allows the submission of problems from field service technicians and the retrieval of validated solutions for use and adaptation, by all members of the global Eureka community. At IBM Corporation, public network based communities of practice were investigated that focused on db2™ and Websphere™ software technology. Unlike the Xerox Eureka community of practice, knowledge contributions at IBM communities of practice are not validated prior to submission and access is open to public participation globally by IBM employees and by independent users of IBM software technology. The purpose of this case study research was to explore and to describe how and why participants became members of communities of practice – what influenced them to join and to participate. We collected survey data from participants in these communities, to examine the relationships among members’ expectations of purpose, their relationship to the community of practice, their attitudes toward information handling, the costs and benefits of membership, the size of the community of practice and the resulting participation behaviour in these knowledge-based communities of practice at Xerox Corporation and IBM Corporation. As one aspect of exploring user behaviour, we investigated the applicability of two theoretical frameworks for understanding user behaviour in these communities, based on propositions from normative and utility theory and from public goods critical mass theory. The research study provides a test for the explanatory power of public goods, utility and normative theories in a new area; namely, online knowledge-based communities of practice in workplace contexts. This analysis provided support for the applicability of utility theory and for some aspects of public goods-based theory/critical mass theory. The findings of the case study point out some differences in the two communities of practice. A majority of the IBM-based community members reported belonging to multiple communities (6-10) and using access to the community to form online social networks and to meet members outside the community at in-person meetings. They reported their participation as being self-directed and on an ad hoc basis. Most respondents were community members for less than 2 years. In contrast, a majority of Eureka members reported belonging only to the Eureka community and do not report forming online social networks in Eureka. Participation in Eureka is seamlessly integrated into prescribed, standard work practices of the company and supported by company management and with resources. Most respondents were community members for over 5 years. The analysis of members’ contributing behaviour in two online communities of practice reaffirms that the majority of members are passive participants with a core group of regular message contributors. Message composition is a careful and deliberate activity requiring communication discipline, time and effort. Members in both settings reported a strong desire to spend more time in their communities (and more time per visit). Communities of practice are dynamic complex entities that present not only a theoretical challenge but also a practical challenge. This study’s results point to the complexity of facilitating communities of practice: benefits dynamics and flow and permanence dynamics of membership can only be externally managed to a limited extent. The participants’ roles need to be conceptualized in ways that support different types of participation while at the same time highlighting the inherently cooperative nature of self-managed communities of practice.