Page 466 - Handbooks of Applied Linguistics Communication Competence Language and Communication Problems Practical Solutions

444 Saskia Corder and Miriam Meyerhoff

community of practice to better understand how gender identities emerge and
what their relationship is with other social identities, as well as dynamics of
power and subordination. Many of the case studies focus on communities of
practice that are corporeally defined, and readily accessible by the researcher –
either teenagers (who are corralled in schools for a large part of the day) or
workplaces (where staff are corralled in offices). In principle, however, a com-
munity of practice might be mediated with the mutual engagement taking place
on-line or through text messaging.
The community of practice’s genesis as a theory of social learning, there-
fore, establishes two presumptions: norms are emergent, and norms are part of
the social matrix. To analyse interaction and language within a community of
practice framework is to study the emergence of norms and the gradual fixing of
their social meaning through the dual dynamics of participation and reification.

2.3. Criterial features of the community of practice
Wenger (1998: 76) defines three features as being criterial to a community of
practice. These are mutual engagement of members, members’ jointly negotiated
enterprise, and members’ shared repertoire. Clearly, the three criteria are not
themselves wholly independent; a shared repertoire will be learnt through mutual
engagement, and joint negotiation of an enterprise requires engagement. A shared
repertoire (whether linguistic or non-linguistic communicative norms) may be
further circumscribed by the enterprise members negotiate for themselves.
The following definition concisely bundles these factors and has been
widely-cited in sociolinguistics: “A community of practice is an aggregate of
people who come together around mutual engagement in an endeavor … prac-
tices emerge in the course of this mutual endeavor.” (Eckert and McConnell-
Ginet 1992: 464).

2.3.1. Importance of maintaining a focus on the criterial features
It is extremely important to be sure that all three criteria are satisfied in order to
speak of a community of practice. This has been argued elsewhere (Holmes and
Meyerhoff 1999, Meyerhoff 2002), but it is worth restating the point, since
without all three, crucial aspects of the socially situated theory of learning that
underpins the community of practice are ignored. (Differences between the
community of practice and other constructs are explored in more detail in sec-
tion 3.) There are a number of analytic frameworks which can be mobilized for
the analysis of intercultural communication. All of Wenger’s criterial features
are required to ensure that the community of practice offers something that is
clearly different, since any one of the features in the definition proposed may be
shared by other analytical frames.