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based on expertise. This may pose a challenge for organizations which have tra-
ditionally emphasized efficiency, contractual relationships and influence based
on formal roles. A good example of the challenge posed by emergent communi-
ties comes from the Xerox case described above. It took some time for Xerox
management to recognize the value of the community of practice amongst its
customer service reps. Their original attitude, like that of many other manage-
ment groups, was much more hostile. Informal gatherings of this kind run
counter to management’s desire to control activities and resources. The typical
reaction of managers is to see them as a threat to efficiency. For these reasons,
Xerox initially sought to eliminate the reps’ informal meetings. This quickly
had the apparently beneficial result of increasing the number of calls which reps
made to customers. Unfortunately, because knowledge was no longer being
shared amongst the reps, the number of repeat calls to deal with the same
machine problem also increased. Greater productivity in terms of hours on the
job was actually leading to greater inefficiency in terms of solving customer
problems. Xerox quickly relented and allowed the informal gatherings to be
reinstated.

Managed communities
With growing recognition of the advantages of emergent communities has come
an increasing effort by organizations to exploit these advantages in a more sys-
tematic way. From the grudging acceptance offered by Xerox management,
many companies have now moved towards a much more positive stance; not
only accommodating or supporting emergent communities, but even attempt-
ing to develop new communities themselves. Some of these managed commu-
nities, as we will call them, overlap with emergent communities inasmuch as
they are really formalizing and enhancing already existing identities and learning
around shared practices. Where such overlaps exist, managed communities may
find it easier to get the member engagement which – even with management
support – is still required for success.
Research on managed communities is still at a relatively early stage. Initial
studies have sometimes been sceptical about managers’ ability to develop or
sustain such communities. Thompson, for example, argues that communities
are ‘best left alone, free from interference by organisational managers and pol-
icy makers’ (Thompson, 2005, p. 151). There have also been suggestions that
such managed communities are a covert effort to overcome employee resistance
to knowledge sharing (Contu and Willmott, 2003). These criticisms certainly
reflect some aspects of the way in which the notion of community has been
taken up by managers. One of the reasons for the success of the community of
practice at Xerox, for example, was its democratic, non-hierarchical character.
As the Xerox study showed, knowledge flows much more readily in horizontal
peer-to-peer networks than in hierarchical structures, precisely because all the
network’s members see themselves as on the same side. Introducing managers
into such networks only recreates the unequal power relations that make hierar-
chies such a poor medium for knowledge sharing.

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