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escape the usual forms of control and accountability. They do not appear on
organization charts, and are responsible to no one but to themselves. Individ-
uals only become involved voluntarily because they have something to learn
and to contribute. This allows us to distinguish such communities from teams,
which, though equally unlikely to figure on the organization chart, are much
more explicitly linked into formal systems of goal-setting and accountability.
Teams have goals and leaders, and they are accountable for delivering outputs –
reports, new products and so on – within a specific timescale. The team disbands
when the project is completed. In contrast, an emergent community is open-
ended. It has neither deadlines nor specific ‘deliverables’. Brown and Duguid
(1998) define such communities by making a distinction between ‘know-what’
and ‘know-how’ (also termed ‘explicit’ and ‘tacit’ knowledge). They argue that
know-how includes the ability to put know-what into practice and is typically
found amongst work groups engaged cooperatively in the same work practices.
One further important dimension of emergent communities has to do with
the way in which knowledge is shared. Wenger (1998) has suggested that knowl-
edge sharing within communities is facilitated by three features. First, mutual
engagement which has to do with the dynamics of interacting together socially,
leading to the development of trust and a set of mutual relationships. Second,
joint enterprise – in other words, some kind of shared norms and accountability
in behaviour. And, third, shared repertoire, which has to do with the circulation
of shared stories and concepts related to practice.
Communities exhibiting these features find that many of the usual barriers to
knowledge sharing are lowered. For example, community members have typi-
cally developed a set of shared meanings deriving from their common experience.
One consequence is that they can employ more specialized forms of language
or technical jargon for their communication. They do not have to spell out the
basic assumptions or contextual features that their insight and experience relate
to – these are already understood (Bernstein, 1975). This knowledge sharing is
facilitated by the norms of reciprocity – ‘you help me and I will help you’ – and
the levels of trust generated amongst the community.
One result of these features of communities of practice is that story-telling is
a more important way of communicating knowledge than codifying it in ICT
systems (Brown and Duguid, 1991). Stories are important because:

• They present information in an interesting way – they have a beginning, a
middle and an end, and they involve people behaving well or badly.
• They personalize the information – instead of talking about situations in the
abstract, we hear about the doings of individuals whom we might know or
have heard of.
• They bring people together, emphasizing a shared social identity and interests –
we ‘share’ knowledge rather than ‘transfer’ it.
• Stories express values – they often contain a moral about certain kinds of
behaviour leading to either positive or negative outcomes.

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