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170 MANAGING KNOWLEDGE WORK AND INNOVATION

what we term emergent communities which develop from the bottom-up through
informal interactions within a particular social group. A second view is concerned
more with the formally defined groups which are established by organizations,
often in a top-down way, to contribute to organizational performance. These we
will term managed communities. Finally, the most recent development is the
spread of the many communities whose members interact primarily or exclu-
sively through information systems and the Internet. These online communities
may have elements of both the emergent and managed forms (and vice versa)
but are definable primarily in terms of their medium of interaction rather than
the nature of their development.

Emergent communities
Research on emergent communities has tended to build on an early and highly
influential study carried out by Lave and Wenger (1991). A key idea here was the
proposition that knowledge is not simply a cognitive phenomenon – something
which resides in the head of the individual. Instead, these authors saw knowledge
as something which emerges out of the way people learn. Their study went on
to argue that individuals learn by carrying out tasks within a specific social group
which helps them make sense of their work. What they do individually is thus
not an isolated activity, but part of a ‘social practice’ which they carry out and
experience alongside other members of their group. This dual emphasis on social
practices and the individual’s identification with a community was reflected in
Lave and Wenger’s use of the term ‘community of practice’ to denote the social
contexts that shaped individual learning. In its original formulation, the term
was not really referring to specific, identified communities but to the emergent
interplay between learning and socialization within localized groups.
Their study has two important implications for our understanding of knowl-
edge work. First, it suggests that knowledge and learning are closely tied up
with social practices. One important result of this, as we will see, is that people
generally find it much easier to share knowledge with someone who is engaged
in the same social practice as they are. The second is that knowledge work is very
often shaped by the wider communities through which individuals learn. Lave
and Wenger (1991, p. 51), for instance, describe learning in terms of ‘legitimate
peripheral participation’; a kind of informal apprenticeship through which indi-
viduals learn not so much how to mimic a particular practice but rather how to
become a practitioner. Learning is thus seen as involving a change in the individ-
ual and is related to their socialization and identity formation within a particular
community. This wider community helps to determine both what knowledge is
relevant and how it should be applied to specific tasks.
Emergent communities of this kind are of interest for a number of reasons.
For one, they are often important contexts for the sharing of knowledge across
formal boundaries within and between organizations – helping to explain the
knowledge ‘spillovers’ mentioned earlier. Also, because they emerge from the
bottom-up, and out of the way people work and the groups they work in, they

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