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Communities of practice in the analysis of intercultural communication 445

For example, mutual engagement may define a social network, a joint enter-
prise may define a group (as in intergroup theory), and a shared repertoire de-
fines membership in a speech community. In characterizing the speech commu-
nity in this manner, we follow Labov’s (1972) definition of a speech community
most closely, with its emphasis not only on shared norms but shared evaluations
of those norms. Evaluations of the norms admit the possibility that some members
of a speech community will select and some will avoid specific forms. A shared
3
repertoire may emerge as a consequence of mutual engagement – this is the
basic assumption of Communication Accommodation Theory (Giles and Coup-
land 1991, Gallois et al. 1995, and see Brabant et al. in this volume) after all –
but principles of intergroup theory may be operative without a jointly negotiated
enterprise.
These three criterial features provide more than just descriptive clarity.
Note, in particular, the importance of the jointly negotiated enterprise in defin-
ing a community of practice. They also have theoretical and methodological
significance. The combination of these three criteria provides a theoretical focus
on speaker agency and historicity. It also means that the methods most naturally
suited to collecting and analysing data within a community of practice involve
the researcher’s own longitudinal, ethnographic engagement with the commu-
nity of practice (see Kotthoff in this volume; Gumperz and Cook-Gumperz in
this volume). This in turn imposes limits on the kinds of communication and so-
ciolinguistic questions it will be most useful for answering (we return to this
point in section 4).

2.3.2. Core vs. peripheral membership
It is useful in communities of practice to make a distinction between core (ex-
pert) members of communities of practice and members who are more periph-
eral to the community of practice, either because they are novices in the com-
munity, or because they choose not to adopt all the practices associated with
core membership. Cheshire (1982) recorded a number of adolescents for her so-
ciolinguistic study of the Reading vernacular, and she grouped the speakers into
core, secondary and peripheral members. Though she framed her analysis in
terms of a social network (the core vs. secondary/peripheral membership divi-
sion was made partly on the classic network measure of reciprocal naming of
‘friends’), she also made the division based on how actively individuals partici-
pated in typical social practices. In this way, her work foreshadows the commu-
nity of practice turn in sociolinguistics. Cheshire found neat analogues of the
core/non-core distinction in the teenagers’ linguistic practices, with core members
using more of the regional vernacular forms (in negation, subject–verb agree-
ment, and complementizers in relative clauses) and non-core members using
more of the supra-local, standard variants.