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Communities of practice in the analysis of intercultural communication 443

way, the culture of a group ultimately becomes a set of practices, beliefs and
values which are accepted relatively unthinkingly by the members of the group.
It follows, therefore, that intercultural communication describes a situation
in which people who have acquired different ways of life (as defined above) find
themselves in a position where they need to communicate with each other, and
the differences and similarities between the behaviours they have learnt may fa-
cilitate or impede their interaction.
We note that the word culture itself is heavily laden with cultural meaning.
Kuper (1999) discusses how, even among Western European languages, the de-
notation of culture, French civilisation, German Kultur or Bildung all differ
from each other in ways that reflect the development of local intellectual and
political traditions. 2
It will become clear in this chapter that these definitions cleave fairly closely
to the theoretical framework we will be discussing, the community of practice.

2.2. Communities of practice: a social theory of learning
Lave and Wenger’s (1991) formulation of the community of practice was orig-
inally framed as part of a more general social theory of learning. Their own re-
search had focused (respectively) on describing and understanding how profes-
sional communities of tailors and insurance company employees are inducted
and trained as new members of the workplace community of practice. They
were interested in understanding better how emergent patterns of participation
may perpetuate and reify routines for accomplishing specific tasks.
The adoption of communities of practice as a framework for describing and
analysing socially significant linguistic variation has been led by the feminist
linguists Penelope Eckert and Sally McConnell-Ginet (e.g., 1992, 1999). Eckert
and McConnell-Ginet persuasively articulated the additional point, that an indi-
vidual is a member of multiple communities of practice. Behaviours that char-
acterize members of an individual community of practice may receive their
most informative interpretation as part of a constellation of overlapping and in-
terrelated, socially meaningful, learned behaviours. Identities are mutually de-
pendent and multifaceted (Spreckels and Kotthoff in this volume). For example,
gendered behaviour (acting ‘girlish’ or ‘masculine’) takes on its gendered
meaning not solely because of its iteration within individual communities of
practice, but also because of the echoes or interactions between those behav-
iours and others that cross-cut, or are shared by, other communities of practice.
This intersection of identities and practices is explicitly activated when people
talk about ‘working class’ culture as being more ‘masculine’ than ‘middle class’
culture, or ‘British men’ being more ‘feminine’ than ‘North American men’.
To date, a lot of sociolinguistic research within a community of practice
framework has focused on using the methods and theory associated with the