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Communities of practice in the analysis of intercultural communication 441

21. Communities of practice in the analysis
of intercultural communication

Saskia Corder and Miriam Meyerhoff

1. Introduction

Increasingly, there is a need for sociolinguists to engage and be familiar with the
notion of the ‘community of practice’. In the last fifteen years, it has spread
from its roots in the fields of language and gender, and variationist socioling-
uistics, so that in a recent volume on applied linguistics, work using methods as
diverse as conversation analysis, focus group discussions and corpus analysis
have been gathered together as studies in ‘communities of practice’ (Sarangi
and Van Leeuwen 2003). The approach has found favour outside the English-
speaking world: the term has been translated into Portuguese as comunidades de
prática (Ostermann 2003, in press), in Spanish as comunidades de práctica, in
Italian as comunità di pratiche or comunità di prassi and it is usually translated
into German as Praxisgemeinschaft(en) (the English term is also used in the
German literature, as is Handlungsgemeinschaft) (Grünhage-Monetti 2004a,
2004b). The sudden popularity and currency of the term is undoubtedly due to
many factors – some methodological, some sociological and some philosophi-
cal. One characteristic of communities of practice that touches on all three di-
mensions is the fact that a community of practice focuses neither solely on the
individual, nor solely on the community. Instead, it provides a framework for
analysing the process by which sociolinguistic meaning emerges in which the
individual and community are interdependent and inextricably linked. That is,
“the value of the concept is in the focus it affords on the mutually constitutive
nature of the individual, group, activity and meaning” (Eckert 2000: 35).
Nevertheless, we feel that familiarity with the term has spread faster than
familiarity with the analytic presuppositions and methods that are fundamental
to a community of practice analysis. Where the term is deployed as if it were
simply a (more fashionable) synonym for the ‘speech community’, ‘social net-
work’ or ‘social/cultural group’, important differences about speaker agency
and the relationship between local and supra-local social categories or meaning
are blurred and even effaced. We contend that this effacement is non-trivial. We
would argue that a proper appreciation of how the community of practice differs
from other frameworks for analysing language variation and use enhances our
ability to provide meaningful sociolinguistic explanation. In taking this posi-
tion, we follow Penelope Eckert, who has been the principal exponent of the
community of practice in sociolinguistics.