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Communities of practice in the analysis of intercultural communication 457

5. Conclusions

Overall, we have discussed how and why the community of practice has become
such a popular analytical framework. We have proposed that the usefulness and
attractiveness of this construct must not make the researcher lenient in applying
the criterial features that Wenger outlined at its conception. We have discussed
the limits of communities of practice, and shown how their potential may be
maximized if they are used in conjunction with other theoretical constructs,
rather than in place of them.
We have examined how the notion of the community of practice is fun-
damentally connected to the theory of social constructionism and performativ-
ity, and how this helps us observe micro cultural details in order to understand
and unpackage macro cultural ‘norms’ and even make suggestions for societal
progress.
In particular, this discussion has shown that the CofP is useful in under-
standing how power and subordination in the workplace are created linguis-
tically, through speakers’ knowledge or lack of knowledge of the shared
repertoire and locally shared history in the community of practice they are
participating in.
Using the community of practice helps the researcher show that culture is
not fixed or static, but rather is negotiable, mutable and often goal-directed. It
highlights the fact that “Members of societies are agents of culture rather than
merely bearers of a culture that has been handed down to them and encoded in
grammatical form … the relationship between person and society is dynamic
and mediated through language” (Ochs 1996: 416).

Notes

1. To the best of our knowledge, the use of communities of practice as the basis for in-
tercultural communication research is – so far – limited to Grünhage-Monetti’s work.
However, as sociolinguists, we are aware that this may reflect our limited knowledge
of the field of ICC. It strikes us that one of the benefits of interdisciplinary dialogues –
such as this volume – is that it enables researchers to identify overlaps in method or
approach which may be masked by different naming conventions in different fields.
We welcome information on parallels in other disciplines.
The authors thank the editors of this volume for their comments, encouragement and
flexibility while we were writing this chapter. This chapter draws extensively on Cor-
der’s (2004) unpublished Masters dissertation. We gratefully thank the team members
of Studmuffins, Female Firsts, Your Mum and Male Firsts for being so helpful and ac-
commodating.
2. We are grateful to Niko Besnier for drawing this to our attention.
3. Not all definitions of the speech community focus on these two factors, and the notion