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Communities of practice in the analysis of intercultural communication 455

The use of the term ‘bun’ in example (7) refers to the football net, and was ex-
clusively coined as a reference term by the Female Firsts. It is worth some in-
dependent comment because it seems to appropriate part of the jargon of femi-
ninity (analogizing the goal net to a hair net around a bun). In other words, the
use of it both iterates the feminine history and life stories of the Female Firsts
and contests and redefines them as stereotyped displays of femininity.
In order to function in the Female Firsts, or in a community of practice in
general, knowledge of such specialized, technical terms is essential. It is this
knowledge that sets apart the ‘peripheral’ members from the ‘core’ members
within a community of practice and (purposefully) differentiates communities
of practice from each other. As Holmes and Stubbe (2003: 123) state “members
of a CofP [community of practice] … share a repertoire of resources which en-
ables them to communicate in a kind of verbal shorthand which is often difficult
for outsiders to penetrate”.
In this sense, using the notion of performativity within the community of
practice can help us appreciate the importance of linguistic practices in (re)cre-
ating power, status and subordination in the workplace. Cultural facts, such as
whether speakers do or do not have certain activities or strategies as part of their
repertoire, and their claim to appropriate shared history, all have an impact on
where the individual will be located in social space. Heydon (2003) provides a
particularly potent analysis drawn from interaction in police interrogations in
Australia. She first uses conversation analysis to identify conscious and uncon-
scious routines in police officers’ and suspects’ talk, and then draws on insights
from the communities of practice framework to discuss how the iteration of
some linguistic routines can be skillfully deployed by interrogating officers to
constitute a suspect as a ‘criminal’ within the culture of the police force (see
also Eades in this volume). We discuss the potential larger-scale implications of
this kind of research and what societal benefit it could have in Section 4 below.

4. Seeing the bigger picture: potential and limitations

In the first three sections of this article we have examined how communities of
practice are defined. We have then explored examples of the ways in which so-
cial practices, especially linguistic practices, provide evidence for specific com-
munities of practice and we have tried to illustrate how these very local behav-
iours intersect with other identities that members may have and how the
community of practice approach enables sociolinguists to construct a bridge
linking the local and the supra-local.
This seems to us an aspect of the community of practice approach that must
be attractive to researchers and practitioners working in the area of intercultu-
ral communication. Assuming a definition of culture as in section 2.1, intercul-