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Communities of practice in the analysis of intercultural communication 449

3. Relating communities of practice to other theory and methods

Eckert’s (2000) discussion of communities of practice within a U.S. high school
discusses the way in which she sees her use of the community of practice as
complementing, rather than replacing, well-established notions like social net-
work analysis and the speech community as the basis for analysing (socio)lin-
guistic variation. Eckert has argued that the explanatory power of the commu-
nity of practice is derived from the analyst acquiring close familiarity with the
community of practice itself, and also that part of its power is derived from
being able to see how very local meanings for actions and practices relate to and
articulate with supra-local social identities. We may only understand the power
dynamics within the very local domain of a community of practice if we also see
how the local dynamics challenge or reaffirm power dynamics within society at
large. This means a researcher’s analysis will always benefit from both the
bird’s-eye view (provided, for example, by the study of a speech community)
and the high degree of empathy gained through familiarity with a community of
practice.
In the following sections we spell out what seem to us the crucial dimen-
sions on which the community of practice differs from the speech community,
social networks, and intergroup theory–all of which the community of practice
has formally or informally been analogized to. We believe such analogies are
ill-informed, and we hope that by providing this summary we will provide a
ready source of information that may save others from going down possible
garden paths. Earlier work (Holmes and Meyerhoff 1999; Meyerhoff 2002) dis-
cusses the overlap and difference between communities of practice and the
speech community, intergroup theory and network analysis, hence, we princip-
ally focus in this chapter on the relationship between the community of practice
and social constructionist views of language. In particular, we look at how the
community of practice relates to Judith Butler’s notion of performativity.

3.1. Speech community
There are numerous definitions of speech community in sociolinguistics. Some
emphasize the role played by shared behaviours and shared attitudes or evalu-
ations of differences in behaviour, while others focus more on the creative ten-
sion behind conflict, or lack of convergence. As has long been recognized in psy-
chology, defining what is Other can (paradoxically) serve the important function
of clarifying what is Self. Here, when we talk about the speech community, we
will be thinking about it in terms of shared (or divergent) practices, since this
provides the closest basis for comparison with the community of practice. 6
One of the principal criticisms levelled at the way in which Labovian social
dialect surveys operationalize the speech community is that they impose exter-