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Knowledge Sharing and Communities of Practice 147

part of rich social networks. ” Critics maintain that this oversimplifi es knowledge and
in particular, ignores the social context of knowledge (e.g., Seely Brown and Duguid
2000 ; Conrad and Poole 2002 ).
People or interaction-based approaches, on the other hand, place a great deal of
emphasis on knowledge-sharing interactions, which in today ’ s organizations tend to
be associated with CoPs ( Thomas, Kellogg, and Ericson 2001 ). This social constructivist
approach to learning and knowledge transfer seems to be much better suited to the
discipline of knowledge management.

The Social Nature of Knowledge

KM needs to view knowledge as something that is actively constructed in a social
setting ( McDermott 2000 ). Group members produce knowledge by their interactions
and a group memory is created. Social constructivism views knowledge not as an
objective entity but as a subjective, social artifact ( Berger and Luckmann 1966 ). Social
constructivists argue that knowledge is produced through the shared understandings
that emerge through social interactions. As individuals and groups of people com-
municate, they mutually infl uence each other ’ s views and create or change shared
constructions of reality ( Klimecki and Lassleben 1999 ). The social constructivist per-
spective views knowledge as context dependent and thus as something that cannot
be completely separated from “ knowers ” ( Lave and Wenger 1991 ). Context helps
distinguish between knowledge management and document management: whereas
the latter can be carried out in a more or less automated manner, the former cannot
be accomplished without involving people as well as tangible content.
Huysman and DeWit (2002 ) describe a collective acceptance of shared knowledge
as being the key method of generating value to the organization. Until knowledge is
collectively accepted and institutionalized across the organization, organizational level
learning cannot occur and organizational memory cannot be developed. Ortenblad
(2002) explained that unlike the functionalist paradigm in which learning starts in
the individual, the interpretive paradigm suggests that learning begins in the relation-
ships between individuals. As the community grows and its knowledge base is more
broadly shared across the organization, the community ’ s practices become regularly,
widely, and suffi ciently adopted so as to be described as institutionalized knowledge
( Huysman and DeWit 2002 ).
Since individual memory is limited, we need to embed this knowledge in useful,
more permanent forms such as documents, e-mails, and so on. This institutionalized
knowledge then becomes an organizational legacy that remains in the corporate