PHD Dissertation Murillo: Searching For Virtual Communities of Practice

E. M.
MURILLO-OTHON
SEARCHING FOR “VIRTUAL”
COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE IN
THE USENET DISCUSSION NETWORK
Volume I of II
PhD Volume I of II
E. M. MURILLO-OTHON
PhD
2006
2006
SEARCHING FOR “VIRTUAL” COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE
IN THE USENET DISCUSSION NETWORK
Combining quantitative and qualitative methods
to identify the constructs of Wenger's theory
Volume I of II
Enrique M. MURILLO-OTHON
submitted for the degree
of Doctor of Philosophy
School of Management
University of Bradford
2006
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SEARCHING FOR “VIRTUAL” COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE
IN THE USENET DISCUSSION NETWORK
Combining quantitative and qualitative methods
to identify the constructs of Wenger's theory
Abstract: Communities of Practice (CoPs) are informal organisational groups

that spontaneously form around shared problems or disciplines. As natural
vehicles of knowledge-sharing and innovation, they are increasingly contemplated
in Knowledge Management projects. Yet CoPs have been mostly studied in stable
co-located settings, a rare circumstance in today’s turbulent workplace. This
research aims to extend CoP theory to the Internet by undertaking a systematic
search and a rigorous assessment of wholly Internet-based CoPs.
The thesis adopts Wenger’s (1998) CoP theory, specifically his constructs of
Mutual Engagement, Shared Repertoire, Joint Enterprise, Community, and
Learning/Identity-acquisition, explicitly included in the proposed model of
Internet-based CoP. The search concentrated on the Usenet discussion network;
2,842 newsgroups were examined through Netscan, an online-interaction analysis
tool, to locate eleven virtual communities exhibiting empirical traits associated
with focused energetic CoPs: professional topic, high interaction-volume, non-
conflictual focused discussions, and core-periphery structure.
A survey of community-members and a content analysis of discussions were

used to seek triangulating evidence of Wenger’s constructs, deemed present
when both methods concurred. Four communities, evenly split between
computer and non-computer topics, were assessed as Usenet-based CoPs
because they exhibited all Wenger constructs. Substantial construct evidence in
remaining communities suggests potential avenues for further research.
Establishing that extra-organisational CoPs spontaneously emerge in social

areas of the Internet provides new support to Wenger’s position that they are
naturally-occurring social structures. For individuals, they constitute a
constantly-available resource for enhancing professional practice, whereas
organisations can encourage employee engagement with extra-organisational
Internet-based CoPs to keep abreast of fast changing fields.
Keywords: communities of practice, virtual communities of practice, virtual

communities, Usenet, newsgroups, computer-mediated communication
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I
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BRIEF CONTENTS
PART ONE – THEORETICAL BACKGROUND 1

V
O 1. Introduction 2
L 2. Previous Research on Communities of Practice 19
U 3. Virtual Communities of Practice 54

M
E PART TWO – RESEARCH STRATEGY: DESIGN 95
4. Research Design 96
I
5. Methods 132
PART THREE – RESEARCH STRATEGY: EXECUTION 164
6. Usenet Search and Community Selection 165
7. Survey of Community Members 191

V
O 8. Content Analysis of Community Discussions 250
L
PART FOUR – STUDY FINDINGS 289
U
M 9. Overall Assessment of Selected Communities 290
E 10. Examining Normal Activity in Detected VCoPs 330
11. Conclusions 388

II
Afterword 423
References 424
Glossary of Internet Terms 442
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II
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CONTENTS
VOLUME I
PART ONE – THEORETICAL BACKGROUND 1
1 - Introduction 2
1.1 - Communities of practice 5
1.2 - Research aim, objectives and strategy 9
1.3 - Outline of Thesis 14
1.4 - Summary 18
2 - Previous Research on Communities of Practice 19
2.1 - Initial formulation of the Community of Practice concept 20

and early studies
2.2 - Wenger’s social theory of learning 24
2.3 - Wenger’s theory of Communities of Practice 28
2.3.1 - MUTUAL ENGAGEMENT 31
2.3.2 - JOINT ENTERPRISE 34
2.3.3 - SHARED REPERTOIRE 35
2.3.4 - COMMUNITY 36
2.3.5 - LEARNING 37
2.3.6 - IDENTITY ACQUISITION 37
2.4 - Challenges to Wenger’s theoretical framework 38
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2.4.1 - Alternative terminology for alternative but related phenomena 40
2.4.2 - Alternative terminology for the same phenomenon 42
2.4.3 - Critiques of Wenger’s (1998) theory 47
2.5 - Summary 51
3 - Virtual Communities of Practice 54
3.1 - Reviewing the varieties of “virtual” in the literature 55
3.1.1 - Network access 57
3.1.2 - Media richness 58
3.1.3 - Participatory character 60
3.2 - Traces of Wenger’s constructs in previous studies of “virtual” CoPs 61
3.3 - Challenges to the concept of “virtual” Communities of Practice 83
3.4 – Summary 93
PART TWO – RESEARCH STRATEGY: DESIGN 95
4 - Research Design 96
4.1 - The model of “virtual” Community of Practice used in this thesis 97
4.1.1 - Model specification 97
4.1.2 - Exemplary Traits 99
4.1.2.1 - Mid-sized stable group 99
4.1.2.2 - High-volume of participant interaction 99
4.1.2.3 - Core-periphery structure 99
4.1.2.4 - Highly-focused discussions 100
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IV
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4.1.2.5 - Topic is an identifiable profession 100
4.1.2.6 - High-Quality institutional documents 101
4.1.2.7 - Non-conflictive 101
4.1.3 - Essential Traits 102
4.1.3.1 - MUTUAL ENGAGEMENT 102
4.1.3.2 - SHARED REPERTOIRE 102
4.1.3.3 - JOINT ENTERPRISE 103
4.1.3.4 - COMMUNITY 103
4.1.3.5 - LEARNING/IDENTITY ACQUISITION 103
4.1.4 - Model discussion 104
4.2 - Research aim and objectives 105
4.3 - Research Questions 109
4.3.1 - Principal Research Question 109
4.3.2 - Preliminary Research Questions 110
4.3.3 - Exemplary Trait Research Questions 112
4.3.4 - Essential Trait Research Questions 113
4.4 - Focusing the study on the Usenet discussion network 114
4.5 - Research philosophy 121
4.6 - Research strategy 126
4.6.1 - Stage I: Model Specification 126
4.6.2 - Stage II: Strategy Formulation 126
4.6.3 - Stage III: Usenet Search 127
4.6.4 - Stage IV: Participant Survey 128
4.6.5 - Stage V: Content Analysis of Discussions 128
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4.6.6 - Stage VI: CoP Assessment 129
4.6.7- The Funnel Research Strategy 129
4.7 - Summary 133
5 - Methods 134
5.1 - The Netscan analyser 134
5.2 - Social Network Analysis and the core-periphery model 139
5.3 - The Survey questionnaire: objectives and design 145
5.3.1 - What the Survey will measure 145
5.3.2 - Generation of the item pool 145
5.3.3 - Design of the web-based instrument 150
5.3.4 - Qualified review of the item pool 152
5.3.5 - Possible inclusion of validation items 152
5.3.6 - Pilot runs of the instrument 152
5.3.7 - Item evaluation 153
5.3.8 - Possible optimisation of scale length 154
5.4 - The Content Analysis: objectives and design 155
5.4.1 - Rationale and criteria for purposive sample selection 155
5.4.2 - The coding scheme 158
5.5 - Summary 162
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VOLUME II
PART THREE – RESEARCH STRATEGY: EXECUTION 164
6 - Usenet Search and Community Selection 165
6.1 - First Sub-stage: Netscan Search 167
6.2 - Second Sub-stage: Institutional document search and assessment 175
6.3 - Third Sub-stage: Core-Periphery Analysis 180
6.4 - Fourth Sub-stage: Final Selection of Survey Sample 187
6.5 - Summary 189
7 - Survey of Community Members 191
7.1 - Survey deployment 193
7.2 - Analysis of hypothesised structure questionnaire 200
7.2.1 - Item results 200
7.2.2 - Item reliability analysis 207
7.3 - Using Exploratory Factor Analysis to evaluate and improve scales 209
7.3.1 - Addressing critical EFA issues 210
7.3.1.1 - Factor extraction model 211
7.3.1.2 - Number of factors to retain 211
7.3.1.3 - Sample size 212
7.3.1.4 - Rotation technique 212
7.3.1.5 - Criterion of salient loading 213
7.3.2 - Applying EFA to Item-blocks 213
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VII
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7.3.2.1 - LEARNING block 214
7.3.2.2 - MUTUAL ENGAGEMENT block 217
7.3.2.3 - SHARED REPERTOIRE block 220
7.3.2.4 - COMMUNITY block 221
7.4 - Questionnaire validation and refined scale results 224
7.5 - Content analysis of the community question 238
7.6 - Discussion of results 242
7.7 - Survey problems and limitations 246
7.8 - Summary 248
8 - Content Analysis of Community Discussions 250
8.1 - Theoretical selection of thread sample 251
8.2 - Nudist data import and pilot coding exercises 253
8.3 - The two-stage coding procedure: message-wise and code-wise 258
8.4 - General code counts and illustrative coded threads 264
8.5 - Discussion of results 275
8.5.1 - Detected manifestations of MUTUAL ENGAGEMENT 275
8.5.2 - Detected manifestations of SHARED REPERTOIRE 279
8.5.3 - Detected manifestations of COMMUNITY 281
8.5.4 - Detected manifestations of LEARNING 281
8.5.5 - Detected manifestations of JOINT ENTERPRISE 282
8.5.6 - Additional comments 282
8.6 - Limitations of the Content Analysis 285
8.7 – Summary 287
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PART FOUR – STUDY FINDINGS 289
9 - Overall Assessment of Selected Communities 290
9.1 - Summary of detected Exemplary and Essential Traits 291
9.2 - The CPLUS virtual community 295
9.3 - The TAXES virtual community 298
9.4 - The PHYSRES virtual community 302
9.5 - The XTRPRG virtual community 305
9.6 - The MEDTRAN virtual community 307
9.7 - The COBOL virtual community 310
9.8 - The VISOBJ virtual community 313
9.9 - The UKAGRI virtual community 316
9.10 - The CRYPT virtual community 319
9.11 - The CIVWAR virtual community 320
9.12 - The FINPLAN virtual community 323
9.13 - Commonalities between successful VCoPs 325
9.14 - Summary 329
10 - Examining Normal Activity in Detected VCoPs 330
10.1 - Rationale and method used in this chapter 331
10.2 - The TAXES VCoP 333
10.3 - The CPLUS VCoP 345
10.4 - The XTRPRG VCoP 361
10.5 - The PHYSRES VCoP 373
10.6 - Summary 386
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11 - Conclusions 388
11.1 - Assessing achievement of research aims and objectives 388
11.1.1 - Research Objective One 389
11.1.2 - Research Objective Two 390
11.1.3 - Research Objective Three 390
11.1.4 - Research Objective Four 391
11.1.5 - Research Objective Five 391
11.1.6 - Research Objective Six 392
11.1.7 - General Aim of the Thesis 393
11.2 - The Research Questions addressed 394
11.2.1 - Preliminary Research Questions 394
11.2.1.1 - Preliminary1 394
11.2.2 - Essential Trait Research Questions 396
11.2.2.1 - Essential1 397
11.2.2.2 - Essential2 398
11.2.2.3 - Essential3 399
11.2.2.4 - Essential4 399
11.2.2.5 - Essential5 400
11.2.2.6 - Essential6 400
11.2.3 - Principal Research Question 401
11.2.4 - Exemplary Trait Research Questions 401
11.2.4.1 - Exemplary1 402
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11.2.4.2 - Exemplary2 402
11.2.4.3 - Exemplary3 402
11.2.4.4 - Exemplary4 403
11.2.4.5 - Exemplary5 403
11.2.4.6 - Exemplary6 403
11.2.4.7 - Exemplary7 403
11.3 - General conclusion and thesis contributions 406
11.4 - Study implications 409
11.4.1 - Implications for theory 409
11.4.2 - Implications for individuals 412
11.4.3 - Implications for organisations 414
11.4.4 - Implications for Management practice 415
11.5 - Limitations of this research 417
11.5.1 - Limitations with the sample selection procedure 417
11.5.2 - Limitations of the Survey 417
11.5.3 - Limitations of the Content Analysis 418
11.5.4 - Overall methodological evaluation 419
11.6 - Directions for further research 420
Afterword 423
References 424
Glossary of Internet Terms 442
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LIST OF FIGURES
1.1 - Research Objectives and Strategy Stages 13
1.2 - Structure of Thesis 15
2.1 - Components of Wenger’s social theory of learning 27
2.2 - Observable Traits of a CoP 30
2.3 - Timeline of significant references in CoP theory development 39
2.4 - Contrasting “Organisational” and “KM” CoP references 53
3.1 - Articles about “virtual” CoPs published in Proquest + IEEE databases 55
4.1 - The VCoP Model 98
4.2 - Triangulation of Survey and Content Analysis results 124
4.3 - The Funnel Research Strategy 130
4.4 - Research Objectives and Strategy Stages 132
5.1 - Definitions of Netscan quantitative results 137
5.2 - Posting activity of top 60 posters in soc.history.medieval 143
5.3 - Graph of ideal-pattern for core-periphery model 144
6.1 - Overview of Stage III of the Research Strategy 166
6.2A - Graph of nDiff values for MEDTRAN 185
6.2B - Posting activity at the core of MEDTRAN for 52-week sample 185
6.3A - Graph of nDiff values for GENMETH 186
6.3B - Posting activity at the core of GENMETH for 52-week sample 186
7.1 - Stages IV and V of the Funnel Research Strategy 192
7.2 - A thank-you note from a Survey respondent 198
7.3 - Parallel Analysis for the LEARNING block 215
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7.4 - Parallel Analysis for the MUTUAL ENGAGEMENT block 217
7.5 - Parallel Analysis for the SHARED REPERTOIRE block 220
7.6 - Parallel Analysis for the COMMUNITY block 222
7.7 - Link of validated scales to Wenger’s constructs 226
7.8 - Effect of Tenure on Shared sense of professional community 232
7.9 - Effect of Tenure on Members’ knowledge of each other 232
7.10 - Effect of Gender on Shared sense of professional community 233
7.11 - Effect of Gender on Members’ knowledge of each other 233
7.12 - Effect of Coreness on Members’ knowledge of each other 234
7.13 - Effect of Expertise on Acquiring new knowledge 235
7.14 - Effect of Expertise-by-Tenure on Collective problem-solving 236
7.15 - Effect of Coreness-by-Age on Shared criteria 236
7.16 - Effect of Coreness-by-Age on Sense of professional community 237
8.1 - Coded fragment from thread TAXES1 268
8.2 - Coded fragment from thread XTRPRG4 272
9.1 - The VCoP Model 291
9.2 - Excerpt from the Home Page of comp.lang.c++.moderated 295
9.3 - A response to the community question from the CPLUS newsgroup 296
9.4 - Charter of misc.taxes.moderated 298
9.5 - A thank-you note from a member of the TAXES VCoP 299
9.6 - Excerpt from the Home Page of sci.physics.research 302
9.7 - A response to the community question from the PHYSRES newsgroup 303
9.8 - Extract from the FAQ of the XTRPRG VCoP 305
9.9 - A response to the community question from the XTRPRG newsgroup 306
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9.10 - Charter of sci.med.transcription 308
9.11 - A response to the community question from the MEDTRAN VCoP 308
9.12 - A message from a core member of comp.lang.cobol 312
9.13 - A message from comp.lang.clipper.visual-objects 314
9.14 - An excerpt from the FAQ of uk.business.agriculture 317
9.15 - A response to the community question from the UKAGRI newsgroup 318
9.16 - A response to the community question from the CRYPT newsgroup 319
9.17 - Two e-mail comments to the Survey from the CIVWAR newsgroup 321
9.18 - A warning from the moderators of soc.history.war.us-civil-war 322
9.19 - A message from the Moderators of misc.invest.financial-planning 324
9.20 - A moderator warning in misc.taxes.moderated 328
10.1A - Extract from thread TAXES1, Message 1 335
10.1B - Extract from thread TAXES1, Message 2 338
10.1C - Extract from thread TAXES1, Message 3 340
10.1D - Extract from thread TAXES1, Message 4 341
10.1E - Extract from thread TAXES1, Message 5 342
10.1F - Extract from thread TAXES1, Message 6 343
10.2A - Extract from thread CPLUS2, Message 1 347
10.2B - Extract from thread CPLUS2, Message 2 350
10.2C - Extract from thread CPLUS2, Message 3 352
10.2D - Extract from thread CPLUS2, Message 4 354
10.2E - Extract from thread CPLUS2, Message 5 355
10.2F - Extract from thread CPLUS2, Message 6 357
10.3A - Extract from thread XTRPRG5, Message 1 363
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10.3B - Extract from thread XTRPRG5, Message 2 365
10.3C - Extract from thread XTRPRG5, Message 3 366
10.3D - Extract from thread XTRPRG5, Message 4 367
10.3E - Extract from thread XTRPRG5, Message 5 368
10.3F - Extract from thread XTRPRG5, Message 6 369
10.3G - Extract from thread XTRPRG5, Message 7 370
10.3H - Extract from thread XTRPRG5, Message 8 371
10.3I - Extract from thread XTRPRG5, Message 9 372
10.4A - Extract from thread PHYSRES3, Message 1 375
10.4B - Extract from thread PHYSRES3, Message 2 376
10.4C - Extract from thread PHYSRES3, Message 3 378
10.4D - Extract from thread PHYSRES3, Message 4 380
10.4E - Extract from thread PHYSRES3, Message 5 382
10.4F - Extract from thread PHYSRES3, Message 6 384
10.4G - Extract from thread PHYSRES3, Message 7 385
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LIST OF TABLES
1.1 - Recently proposed taxonomies of the Knowledge Management field 3
3.1 - Selected studies about “virtual” Communities of Practice 65
3.2 - Evidence of Wenger’s constructs in selected studies about “virtual” CoPs 66
5.1 - Netscan search for “invest” sorted by Posts (September 1-30, 2002) 136
5.2 - Newsgroups pre-selected from Table 5.1 sorted by PPRatio 139
5.3 - Smith’s interaction measures for soc.history.medieval 143
5.4 - A record of the item-generation process of the Survey instrument 149
5.5 - Response rates for the Survey pilots 153
5.6 - Initial theory-derived codes for the Content Analysis 161
6.1 - Mainstream Usenet hierarchies 169
6.2 - Original newsgroup population and progressive application of selection 171

criteria
6.3 - First Sub-stage newsgroup sample 174
6.4 - Results of Second Sub-stage 178
6.5 - Core-periphery analysis of finalist newsgroups 182
6.6 - Newsgroups selected to participate in the study 189
7.1 - Response rates for the main Survey 194
7.2 - Characteristics of the Survey sample (n =239) 195
7.3 - Item summaries for LEARNING block 201
7.4 - Item summaries for MUTUAL ENGAGEMENT block 203
7.5 - Item summaries for SHARED REPERTOIRE block 204
7.6 - Item summaries for COMMUNITY block 205
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7.7 - Item summaries for Expertise scale 206
7.8 - Descriptive statistics of hypothesised scales 208
7.9 - Reliability analysis for ‘Sharing useful information’ 208
7.10 - Reliability analysis for ‘Shared artifacts’ 209
7.11 - LEARNING block: pattern matrix 216
7.12 - MUTUAL ENGAGEMENT block: rotation sums of squared loadings 218
7.13 - MUTUAL ENGAGEMENT block: rotated factor matrix 219
7.14 - SHARED REPERTOIRE block: pattern matrix 221
7.15 - COMMUNITY block: rotation sums of squared loadings 222
7.16 - COMMUNITY block: rotated factor matrix 223
7.17 - COMMUNITY block: reliability analysis for factor 3 item-set 224
7.18 - Validated scales derived from Exploratory Factor Analysis 227
7.19 - Newsgroup-level statistics from validated scales 229
7.20 - Correlation between refined scales and Coreness, Expertise and Tenure 230
7.21 - 5-Way ANOVA of Survey data (significant effects only) 231
7.22 - Responses to the question Do you consider this newsgroup to be a 239

community?
7.23 - Detected instances in textual responses to open community question 241
7.24 - Evidence of Essential Traits detected by the Survey in each newsgroup 245
8.1 - Original thread sample and progressive application of selection criteria 252
8.2 - Descriptive statistics of selected threads 256
8.3 - Refined working definitions of theory-predicted codes 262
8.4 - Instances of Wenger’s constructs detected in each newsgroup 265
8.5 - Typical forms of the Shared artifacts sub-codes 279
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8.6 - Essential Traits detected in each newsgroup by the Content Analysis 284
9.1 - Stage III operationalisation of Exemplary Traits 291
9.2 - Empirical manifestations of the Exemplary Traits detected during Stage III 293
9.3 - Constructs and Sub-constructs detected by the Survey and the Content 294
analysis in each community
11.1 - The Research Questions and specific study results used to address them 405
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CONTENTS OF THE APPENDICES CD-ROM
Appendix A Research timeline
Appendix B Survey materials used at the pilot stage
Appendix C Review of Internet-based survey providers
Appendix D Survey materials used during main Survey deployment
Appendix E Complete results of Netscan Usenet searches
Appendix F BASIC routine used to import Usenet messages into MS Access
Appendix G Complete UCINET core-periphery results for 19 analysed newsgroups
Appendix H Reliability analysis of hypothesised scales
Appendix I Auxiliary Factor Analysis results
Appendix J Complete results of 5-way ANOVA
Appendix K Complete coded responses to the open community question
Appendix L Final version of EFA-validated questionnaire
Appendix M Thread sampling universe for Content Analysis sample selection
Appendix N Complete Nudist code counts for 44 analysed threads
Appendix O Nudist data project for 44 content analysed threads and Agent
newsreader with 44 original threads
Appendix P Nudist-generated reports of 44 coded threads
Appendix Q Original institutional documents of eleven studied newsgroups
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This research was partially supported through a research grant awarded by the School of
Management of Universidad Panamericana in Mexico City, which the author gratefully
acknowledges.
Surveyworld.net of The Netherlands graciously provided the researcher with free use of
their web-based survey solution, which was used in the pilot and main Survey runs.
I am grateful to the Faculty and Staff of the University of Bradford, who gave me
invaluable support during these six years as an extramural student.
I wish to thank Etienne Wenger, Molly Wasko and Robin Teigland for reading through
my complicated letters, and providing encouraging and thoughtful replies.
My greatest debt lies with my supervisor, David Spicer. He made a large contribution
to this research project, first by believing it it, then with his constant and cheerful
encouragement, and lately with many patient re-readings, and with his good-natured
insistence on high-standards. Thanks, Dave.
Mexico City, May 2006
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I dedicate this work to my parents, Enrique and Rosa María.
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PREFACE
A brief Glossary of Internet terms is included at the end of the thesis for the convenience
of the reader. Terms defined in the glossary are highlighted in the text with a dashed
underscore.
The thesis is structured around Wenger’s (1998) constructs whose presence is judged as
indicative of the existence of a CoP (see Section 2.3). Given the key role played by the
constructs, and their recurrence (mostly as nouns, but sometimes as verbs too) throughout
the thesis, they have been highlighted by writing them in SMALL CAPS FONT thus:
MUTUAL ENGAGEMENT, SHARED REPERTOIRE, JOINT ENTERPRISE, COMMUNITY AND
LEARNING/IDENTITY ACQUISITION.
Because of their excessive length, the Appendices are included in CD-ROM format in a
back pocket.
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If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange apples then you and I
will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we
exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.
George Bernard Shaw
We should not only use the brains we have, but all that we can borrow.
Thomas Woodrow Wilson
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Part One
Theoretical Background
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1
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CHAPTER ONE
Introduction
The study of Knowledge and the Firm has been a topic of increasing importance in
Management research since the early 90’s (Nonaka, 1991; Kogut and Zander, 1992;
Quinn, 1992; Starbuck, 1992; Stewart, 1994). Closely following the lead of the
Information Revolution, this focus on knowledge soon developed into a full-fledged
academic and consulting specialty, Knowledge Management (KM). As a rough
indicator of its rapid growth, Despres and Chauvel (2000) note that scientific articles
containing the keyword “knowledge management” in the ABI/INFORM database rose
from 3 in 1988 to 698 in 1998, an average yearly increase of over 100 percent.
In this short history, the KM field has spawned numerous sub-fields and conceptual
approaches, causing some authors to describe it as a fragmented field (Grover and
Davenport, 2001; Grey and Meister, 2003). The fragmentation has resulted in various
proposed taxonomies; five recent ones are shown in Table 1.1, and they in turn reflect a
diversity of views and methodologies. Nevertheless, they all identify the study of
Communities of Practice (CoPs) as a distinct KM sub-field. These have been defined as
“groups of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic,
and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an
ongoing basis” (Wenger, McDermott and Snyder, 2002: 4). Examples might include a
group of nurses who discuss patient cases over their daily lunch meeting (Wenger,
1996), or photocopier repair technicians who regularly swap stories about the
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2
Introduction
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machines they fix (Orr, 1996), or master craftsmen who produce some of the finest
flutes in the world at three workshops in the Boston area (Cook and Yanow, 1993).
Table 1.1 – Recently proposed taxonomies of the Knowledge Management field

Article
Kakabadse, Subramani, Nerur

Despres and
Binney (2001) Earl (2001) Kakabadse and and Mahapatra
Chauvel (2000)
Kouzmin (2003) (2003)
Case studies in six

Methods
Database search Database search

companies and
and ethnographic Literature review Literature review and statistical co-
interviews with 20
thematic analysis citation analysis
CKO’s
Taxonomy
7 “major clusters” “6-element KM 5 “dominant KM 8 “domains of KM

7 “schools of KM”
of KM activity spectrum” models” research”
Business Transactional KM Systems school Cognitive model Knowledge as firm

intelligence capability
Benchmarking Analytical KM Engineering school Community model Practice of KM
Datawarehousing Asset Commercial school Network model Innovation and

Management KM change
Sub-fields included in the Taxonomy
Communities of Process-based Spatial school Quantum model Philosophy of

Practice KM Knowledge
Groupware and Developmental Strategic school Philosophical Situated Learning

virtual teaming KM model and Communities
of Practice
Innovation, Innovation and Cartographic Organizational

synergies and creation KM (with school Information
creativity CoPs included Processing and IT
explicitly) Support for KM
Learning, Organizational Knowledge

competencies, school (with CoPs Communication,
and employee included explicitly) Transfer and
development Replication
Organizational
Learning and
Learning
Organizations
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3
Introduction
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The concept of CoP has led to ground-breaking insights about workplace learning, one of
KM’s concerns. Researchers found that employees are constantly learning as they go about
their daily work, and much of this learning bears little relation –and is often at odds– with
formal training and canonical work procedures (Brown and Duguid, 1991; Wenger, 1998).
Rather, learning is a matter of becoming competent members of informal communities,
which through their shared practices provide a living repository for knowledge (Orr, 1990).
Thus CoPs are not confined to formal apprenticeships, but are natural social structures that
extend to all social settings where people work and accomplish things together (Wenger,
1998). Hence their relevance to business organisations concerned with knowledge.
The concept has attracted considerable interest in management research; many authors
treat it as a key element in the knowledge-based view of the firm (Kogut and Zander,
1996; Brown and Duguid, 1998; Tsoukas and Vladimirou, 2001; Grover and Davenport,
2001). As regards management practice, the explicit recognition and support of these
elusive communities is becoming the cornerstone of an increasing number of KM
programmes (Wenger and Snyder, 2000).
Research about CoPs stresses the importance of members interacting regularly with each
other because it is these interactions that build both the community and the shared
practice (Wenger, 1998). In pre-Internet days, interactions were typically face-to-face,
with all the advantages of rich communication this proximity entails (Cummings, Butler
and Kraut, 2002). Currently, with the rapid spread of Information and Communication
Technology (ICT), coupled with unrelenting globalisation, business organisations have
become “wired” and more far-flung, increasingly making stable worker co-location the
exception rather than the rule (Holtshouse, 1998). This raises the question of whether
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4
Introduction
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geographically-distributed employees, whose only link with remote colleagues is an
electronic network, can function as a CoP. Some authors argue co-location is a necessary
condition for the kind of interaction a CoP needs to work (Brown and Duguid, 2000b;
Wasko and Teigland, 2004). Others point out the leanness of the Internet medium is not
an insurmountable obstacle to rich communication (Carlson and Zmud, 1999; Burke,
Aytes and Chidambaram, 2001). Yet others argue that if participants have a shared
practice, then they share the common ground and context that allows rich interaction to
take place (Wenger et al, 2002; Brown and Duguid, 2001).
This thesis makes a contribution to the debate by performing a systematic theory-
informed search for working CoPs over a specific area of Internet known as Usenet.
The search successfully detected four Usenet-based communities exhibiting all
theoretical attributes of CoPs as defined and described by Wenger (1998).
Beyond this overview, Chapter One comprises four sections. The First provides a short
introduction to the concept of CoP. Section Two states thesis aim and objectives, and
briefly outlines the research strategy. Section Three describes the chapter structure of
the thesis. Section Four is a chapter summary.
1.1 – Communities of practice
Lave and Wenger (1991) are credited with the introduction of the term Community of
Practice. Their research involved ethnographic studies of traditional apprenticeship as
practiced in various countries and professions: butchers, Goa tailors, Yucatan midwives,
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5
Introduction
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quartermasters and non-drinking alcoholics. In each case, novices gradually became full
members of a community by learning its language, practices, and sensibilities. They
learned not through formal classes, but by being allowed to participate in the real work of
the community, albeit in a peripheral role. The authors called this mode of belonging
legitimate peripheral participation (LPP), and concluded it is the defining characteristic
of apprenticeship as a form of learning.
Because Lave and Wenger’s (1991) book pre-dates the emergence of KM, some consider
CoPs a sub-field of the Organisational Learning field (e.g. Easterby-Smith, 1997; Bell,
Whitwell and Lukas, 2002; Easterby-Smith and Lyles, 2003). However, these literature
reviews fail to mention Wenger’s (1998) book and its considerably more developed CoP
framework. Moreover, Wenger himself aligns the concept within the KM field (Wenger,
1999; Wenger, 2000a; Wenger, 2004b), as the previous section did.
Even though Lave and Wenger made LPP the focus of their research, and referred to
CoPs only peripherally, it was the latter concept that quickly caught the attention of
management researchers. First, Brown and Duguid (1991) argued organisational CoPs
were significant sites of innovation through their adaptive non-canonical practices.
Shortly afterwards came increased interest in knowledge-based theories of the firm
(Grant, 1996; Kogut and Zander, 1996; Spender, 1996a; Tsoukas, 1996) and widespread
agreement that, in the knowledge economy, knowledge is a key source of competitive
advantage and superior performance (Spender and Grant, 1996; Davenport and Prusak,
1998; Hansen, Nohria and Tierney, 1999; Von Krogh, Nonaka and Aben, 2001). This
launched KM, which went through a first wave of projects heavily biased toward
ICT-based solutions, with mostly disappointing results (McDermott, 1999a; Scarbrough,
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6
Introduction
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2003; Thompson and Walsham, 2004). In the meanwhile, some companies reported
excellent knowledge outcomes from supporting and leveraging existing CoPs (Brown
and Grey, 1995; Hanley, 1998; Wright, 1999; Barrow, 2001). Hence, second-generation
KM projects display increased understanding of the limits of ICT, the social character of
knowledge, and the essential role of intra-organisational CoPs (Blackler, 2000; Tsoukas
and Vladimirou, 2001; Newell, Robertson, Scarbrough and Swan, 2002).
Managers have thus gained increasing awareness of the advantages of CoPs, specifically:
• they foster knowledge-sharing (Stewart, 1996)
• they foster innovation at all levels (Brown and Duguid, 1991)
• they are the seat of core competences (Brown and Grey, 1995; Manville and
Foote, 1996)
• they can assume ownership and stewardship of knowledge (Wenger, 2000a)
• they transfer best practices (Wenger and Snyder, 2000)
Yet, managers attempting to harness the power of CoPs have found they pose distinct
management challenges (Wenger and Snyder, 2000). CoPs are different from formal
organisational structures, such as teams or business units. These are created by
management decree, and have specific deliverables defined for them. By contrast, CoPs are
informal, emergent structures, formed by self-selected and committed members, who pick
their own leadership, negotiate a learning enterprise, and answer only to themselves. Active
efforts to manage or direct CoPs can be counter-productive, since their success depends on
the kind of personal passion and committment that cannot be mandated (Stewart, 1997;
Thompson, 2005). Yet CoPs can be supported, “nurtured” and indirectly guided, so that
they become reliable knowledge assets for the organisation (Wenger and Snyder, 2000). In
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7
Introduction
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fact, recent studies describe some profit and non-profit organisations that by modelling
themselves after CoPs achieve pervasive innovation, high commitment from members, and
exceptional levels of collaboration (Lee and Cole, 2003; Evans and Wolf, 2005).
However, in the current business climate of rapid globalisation, flattened hierarchies and
mobile workers (Hindle, 2006), one condition for conventional CoPs is becoming
increasingly rare: stable employee co-location (Holtshouse, 1998). The most important
enabler of a CoP is regular participant interaction on the issues the community is
interested in, what Wenger (1998) calls MUTUAL ENGAGEMENT. In the past, interactions
were face-to-face, thus facilitating knowledge-sharing. With the workplace turmoil of the
21st century, this is becoming increasingly difficult, prompting one expert to ask
rethorically: “If the water cooler was a font of useful knowledge in the traditional firm,
what constitutes a virtual one?” (Prusak, 1997: xiii).
Hence the importance of critically examining the possibility of “virtual” CoPs, which this
study views as true CoPs whose interactions are regularly performed through computer
networks, particularly the Internet. This is a debated issue. Some authors, while readily
agreeing people use the Internet for sharing practices, do not believe true CoPs can be
fully Internet-based (notably Brown and Duguid, 2000b; Wasko and Teigland, 2004). By
constrast, other authors provide detailed descriptions of successful Internet-based
communities they characterise as CoPs (e.g. Saint-Onge and Wallace, 2002; Schlager,
Fusco and Schank, 2002; DeSanctis, Fayard, Roach and Jiang, 2003).
The fact that competent people like to talk shop, and the rapid spread of the Internet as
a universal communication medium, led the researcher to hypothesise that passionate
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8
Introduction
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practitioners will take advantage of the Internet to seek and ENGAGE other practitioners,
eventually cohering into true Internet-based CoPs. Based on this assumption, the thesis
devises an original Research Strategy to first detect Internet-based communities
exhibiting observable attributes frequently associated with CoPs, and then intensively
examine the best candidates among them to assess whether or not they exhibit all
theory-predicted CoP attributes.
Studies about “virtual” CoPs are hardly new, although this thesis argues previous studies
have not rigorously applied Wenger’s (1998) theory, thus rendering claims about “virtual”
CoPs problematic. Specifically, no previous study applies Wenger’s constructs of MUTUAL
ENGAGEMENT, COMMUNITY, SHARED REPERTOIRE, JOINT ENTERPRISE, and LEARNING/
IDENTITY ACQUISITION to rigorously assess whether or not a virtual community is a true
CoP. This study aims to locate Internet communities with high “CoP-potential”, and to use
the presence of Wenger’s constructs as the theoretically-grounded criteria for assessing
them as CoPs. Moreover, the constructs will be used as the guidelines for developing the
virtual CoP model, the research questions and the research design.
1.2 – Research aim, objectives and strategy
As noted before, the research starts with the assumption that passionate practitioners will
use the Internet to engage with each other thus forming Internet-based CoPs. The thesis
will pursue this working hypothesis by constructing a theory-informed model of “virtual”
CoP to provide a concrete target, and then conducting a systematic Internet search for
virtual communities that display every trait specified by the model. Therefore:
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9
Introduction
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The aim of this thesis is to extend Wenger’s (1998) theory of CoPs to the social
areas of the Internet by undertaking a systematic search for, and a rigorous
assessment of, working exemplars of “virtual” or Internet-based CoPs.
This overall aim can be organised into six specific and cumulative Research Objectives:
Research Objective One: To build a model of Internet-based CoP that is
consistent with Wenger’s theory of CoPs, and includes theory-informed criteria
that enable selection of virtual communities with high “CoP-potential”.
Research Objective Two: To design, under the guidance of the model, a
Research Strategy that will, first, enable detection of Internet-based communities
exhibiting high CoP-potential, and second, enable theory-grounded analysis of
selected communities to rigorously assess whether or not they truly are CoPs.
Research Objective Three: To conduct a highly comprehensive search of the
Internet, and to locate the virtual communities that display the strongest affinity
to the model of Internet-based CoP.
Research Objective Four: To question regular participants of selected
communities about the presence or absence of visible manifestations of
Wenger’s constructs.
Research Objective Five: To directly examine online interactions of regular
participants in selected communities to determine the presence or absence of
visible manifestations of Wenger’s constructs.
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10
Introduction
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Research Objective Six: To assess the presence or absence of Wenger’s constructs
in each community, using concurring evidence from two independent methods, and
thereby establish whether any among selected virtual communities display all
theoretical properties of CoPs, and can therefore be characterised as such.
The singular research problem that launched this study –involving an Internet search
for particular communities, and a rigorous assessment of their CoP attributes–, is
addressed through a multi-stage Research Strategy, tightly linked to the Research
Objectives, and comprising the coordinated deployment of several research methods
and Internet tools. The Strategy and its links to the Objectives is briefly outlined here,
and is fully described in Chapter Four.
Addressing Objective One first requires a review of CoP theories and previous studies
about “virtual” CoPs. Stage I of the Research Strategy can then draw upon extant theory to
build a coherent and theoretically-grounded model of Internet-based CoP. This model, in
turn, provides a blueprint for designing the remaining Stages of the Strategy.
Stage II assumes the hypothesised model is an existing Internet entity, and develops
additional Strategy Stages to enable efficient detection of suitable virtual communities and
assessment of their CoP status. A key decision is to restrict the Internet search to the Usenet
discussion network; the rationale for this is provided in Chapter Four.
Stage III of the Strategy addresses the Third Research Objective, concerning the search for
suitable virtual communities in the Usenet network. The main instrument deployed in this
Stage is Smith’s (1999) newsgroup analysis tool, Netscan, which can thoroughly search
Usenet’s principal hierarchies for newsgroups with the best profile for this study.
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11
Introduction
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Quantitative and qualitative criteria derived from the model are combined to make a
stringent newsgroup selection, and thus arrive at a narrow set of Usenet-based communities
exhibiting the highest affinity to the virtual CoP model. The methods used to perform the
search are described in Chapter Five, and their actual deployment, in Chapter Six.
Stage IV of the Research Strategy addresses Objective Four, and uses a web-based
Survey to question participants of selected communities about visible manifestations of
Wenger’s constructs. The design and development of the Survey instrument is
described in Chapter Five; the deployment and statistical analysis of results are
reported in Chapter Seven.
Stage V, which addresses Objective Five, performs a qualitative Content Analysis of a
sample of online discussions between core members of each community. The method
targets text-based manifestations of Wenger’s constructs. The design of the coding
scheme and the rationale for sample selection are described in Chapter Five; the actual
coding of discussions and the results of the analysis are reported in Chapter Eight.
Stage VI of the Strategy, which focuses on Objective Six, involves reviewing each of the
virtual communities, and making a synthesis of the quantitative and qualitative data
obtained to this point. In each community, independent evidence for Wenger’s constructs
is provided by the Survey and the Content Analysis, thus affording robust triangulation.
Evidence for the presence of each construct is deemed sufficient if both instruments
concur. Communities that display all Wenger constructs can be assessed as Usenet-based
CoPs. The review of each community and the results of the CoP-assessment are reported
in Chapter Nine.
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12
Introduction
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The preceding outline emphasises the one-to-one relationship between Research
Objectives and Strategy Stages, the latter extending over core chapters of the thesis (see
Figure 1.1). This is further elaborated in the next section which provides a complete
outline of the thesis and its chapter organisation.
Research Objectives Research Strategy Thesis Chapter
Objective One Stage I
Build a theoretically-grounded Model Specification Chapter Four

model of Internet-based CoP
Objective Two Stage II
Develop an effective strategy for Strategy Formulation Chapter Four

locating and assessing Internet CoPs
Objective Three Stage III
Comprehensively search the Internet Usenet Search Chapter Five: design

and identify virtual communities with Chapter Six: results
the strongest affinity to the model
Objective Four Stage IV
Ask community participants about the Participant Survey Chapter Five: design
presence of Wenger constructs Chapter Seven: results
Objective Five Stage V
Directly examine participant interaction Content Analysis Chapter Five: design

for the presence of Wenger constructs Chapter Eight: results
Objective Six Stage VI
Assess the presence of Wenger CoP Assessment Chapter Nine

constructs, and identify communities
displaying all the properties of CoPs
Figure 1.1 – Research Objectives and Strategy Stages

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13
Introduction
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1.3 – Outline of Thesis
The thesis is structured into four major Parts, as shown in Figure 1.2. Part One covers
the Theoretical Background of the study and includes Chapters One through Three.
Beyond this Introduction, Chapter Two reviews previous research about CoPs, starting
with a historical overview of the development of the concept. This is followed by an
explanation of Wenger’s (1998) social theory of learning, in which CoPs are but one
element. The next section concentrates on CoPs alone and presents Wenger’s
theoretical framework, with particular emphasis on the constructs he identifies as
essential elements of CoPs. The chapter ends with a comparison and contrast of
Wenger’s theory with other theories of CoPs.
Chapter Three examines the issue of “virtual” CoPs and is based on the selection and
review of 20 articles that explicitly or implicitly address the topic. The First Section
examines different meanings of the term “virtual” in the articles, and proposes a
classification of virtual communities based on three contingent variables of network
design and/or utilisation. The next section then looks at the articles through the
theoretical lens of Wenger’s constructs, to build a case about their feasibility in online
environments, and to establish the research need. The Third Section addresses
challenges to the notion of “virtual” CoP, particularly Brown and Duguid’s (2000a)
concept of Networks of Practice (NoPs), and Wasko and Teigland’s (2002; 2004)
empirical work on Electronic Networks of Practice (ENoPs).
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14
Introduction
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Chapter One – Introduction

Theoretical Chapter Two – Previous Research on Communities of Practice
Background
Chapter Three – Virtual Communities of Practice
Chapter Four – Research Design

Design
Research Strategy
Chapter Five – Methods
Chapter Six – Usenet Search and Community Selection
Execution Chapter Seven – Survey of Community Members
Chapter Eight – Content Analysis of Community Discussions
Chapter Nine – Overall Assessment of Selected Communities
Study Findings Chapter Ten – Examining Normal Activity in Detected VCoPs
Chapter Eleven – Conclusions
Figure 1.2 – Structure of Thesis
Part Two, comprising Chapters Four and Five, addresses the design of the Research
Strategy used by the thesis.
Chapter Four begins with the construction and discussion of the model of virtual CoP
that provides guidance and focus to this study. This is followed by a discussion of the
specific aims and objectives of the thesis, and by the detailed formulation of the
Research Questions. Next, the decision of focusing the search on the Usenet network is
justified, and previous studies of Usenet-based communities are reviewed. Ontological
and epistemological assumptions of the thesis are made explicit, and the logic of
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15
Introduction
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triangulation is discussed. Finally, following the guidelines afforded by the model, a
particular Research Strategy is devised in order to achieve all Research Objectives.
Chapter Five provides a detailed discussion of the various tools and methods the
Research Strategy deploys in each Stage. Specifically, four methods are explained:
Smith’s (1999) Netscan tool and measures of online interaction; the application of
Social Network Analysis to newsgroups and the core-periphery model; the web-based
Survey of newsgroup members; and the Content Analysis of newsgroup discussions.
Part Three addresses the Execution of the Research Strategy, comprising Chapters Six
through Eight.
Chapter Six describes the search for Usenet communities with strong affinity to the
virtual CoP model. It begins with a broad Usenet search using Netscan, followed by
an assessment of the affinity of analysed newsgroups to the virtual CoP model, based
on Smith’s (1999) measures of interaction, a core-periphery analysis, and a
qualitative assessment of institutional documents (such as a Charter or a FAQ)
maintained by the different newsgroups. The output of Chapter Six is the reduced
subset of stable and persistent virtual communities to be included in the study, as well
as the specific members from each community to be included in Survey and Content
Analysis samples.
Chapter Seven describes the deployment of the web-based Survey to high-coreness
members of selected communities. It then describes the use of Exploratory Factor
Analysis to validate and refine Survey scales, and the logical link between the refined
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16
Introduction
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scales and hypothesised indicators of the Wenger constructs. Statistical analyses of scales
are reported, and a list provided of Wenger constructs detected within each community.
Chapter Eight reports on the Content Analysis of 44 discussion threads (four from each
newsgroup) selected on theoretical grounds. These were imported into the textual
analysis software NUDIST, where a two-pass coding procedure was used to code every
Usenet message for the presence or absence of pre-defined manifestations of Wenger’s
constructs. Code-counts by thread and community are reported, and coding decisions
are illustrated with brief exercises. Typical manifestations of Wenger’s constructs are
described for different communities, and the chapter concludes with a list of constructs
detected in each community.
Finally, the Study Findings are collected under Part Four, which includes Chapters
Nine, Ten and Eleven.
Chapter Nine draws on the quantitative and qualitative data reported in previous
chapters to build a complete profile of each community, and assess the presence of each
of Wenger’s constructs, using concurring results of the Survey and the Content
Analysis. Four communities were found to exhibit all Wenger constructs, and were
therefore assessed as Usenet-based CoPs.
Chapter Ten then takes a different look at communities assessed as true CoPs by
performing ethnographic analysis of a short interaction episode, using the theoretical lens
of Wenger’s CoP theory. This results in a richer depiction of the day-to-day activities of
the communities and further confirms their characterisation as Usenet CoPs.
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17
Introduction
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The thesis is drawn to a close in Chapter Eleven which begins by reviewing the aim
and Research Objectives, and assessing to what extent they have been achieved. A
similar assessment is performed for the Research Questions. Thesis contributions are
discussed, as are implications for theory, for individuals and organisations. Study
limitations are discussed, and areas for future research suggested.
1.4 – Summary
This chapter introduced the concept of CoP as a sub-field of KM theory and practice.
These informal organisational groups are natural vehicles of knowledge-sharing and
innovation, and as such are increasingly valued by knowledge-based organisations. The
issue of Internet-based or “virtual” CoPs was also introduced, and placed against the
backdrop of contemporary business and technological trends.
The specific aims and Objectives of the study were mentioned, and a brief outline
provided of the multi-stage Strategy it will follow, with particular emphasis placed on
the correspondence between Strategy Stages and Research Objectives.
Having introduced the topic and the research issues, the chapter closed with an
overview of the chapter organisation of the thesis.
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18
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CHAPTER TWO
Previous Research on Communities of Practice
Communities of Practice (CoPs) have been studied by various disciplines, including
Sociology, Education and Management, but it goes beyond the scope of the thesis to
review all literatures. Hence, the review will focus on Management literature.
This chapter will achieve four purposes:
• It will present and critically discuss Wenger’s (1998) theoretical framework
of CoPs, and justify its adoption by this research on the grounds of it being
the most comprehensive and consistent extant theory.
• It will present Wenger’s constructs as visible traits that allow empirical
identification of a CoP, real or “virtual”.
• It will propose an operational definition of CoP based on Wenger’s
constructs.
• It will propose an operational definition of each construct by specifying
concrete observable manifestations.
The chapter is organised into five sections. The First reviews early CoP studies and the
evolution of the concept through the work of Wenger, Brown and Duguid, and others.
Section Two introduces Wenger’s theory of CoPs by first describing his broader social
theory of learning, of which CoPs are but one element. The Third Section then
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19
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describes CoPs in greater detail, particularly their constitutive elements, which play a
key role in this research. The Fourth Section reviews critiques of Wenger’s theory and
distinguishes between CoPs and similar phenomena described in the literature. The last
section is a chapter summary.
2.1 – Initial formulation of the Community of Practice concept and early studies
The concept of CoP was originally proposed by anthropologist Jean Lave and sociologist
Etienne Wenger in the context of their ethnographic analysis of various institutions of
apprenticeship. The focus of their research was social learning; they studied traditional
apprenticeships to understand how and why they were ancient and effective social
mechanisms for learning (Lave and Wenger, 1991). They proposed a theory of learning
whereby people learn by becoming acknowledged but peripheral members of social
communities where knowledge resides, not as abstract ideas, but as embodied and shared
practices. Hence learning would be the process of joining a community, and actually
taking part in its practices, beginning with the most basic and gradually mastering the
most complex, but always working alongside established members. The progression from
peripheral membership to full insider status they named legitimate peripheral
participation, and it is their main intended contribution and the title of their book (ibid).
Moreover, they coined the term communities of practice, to designate the communities
apprentices joined, which are the living repositories of practices. However, explaining
these communities was not their aim; they acknowledge that the concept of CoP “is left
largely as an intuitive notion” in need of further development (Lave and Wenger, 1991:
42), which is why their definition reads more like a description:
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20
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A community of practice is a set of relations among persons, activity and world,
over time and in relation with other tangential and overlapping communities of
practice. A community of practice is an intrinsic condition for the existence of
knowledge, not least because it provides the intrinsic support necessary for
making sense of its heritage. Thus participation in the cultural practice in which
any knowledge exists is an epistemological principle of learning. The social
structure of this practice, its power relations, and its conditions for legitimacy
define possibilities for learning (i.e. for legitimate peripheral participation).
(ibid: 98)
Lave and Wenger’s focus on the process of joining CoPs rather that on the CoPs
themselves left important gaps in their ground-breaking research. For instance, they
have scant a word for insiders or full members of the community, and then only in
reference to the learning opportunities they provide for apprentices. They equate
learning with peripheral participation, thereby disregarding the learning that results
from interactions among insiders, even in the absence of apprentices. More recently,
this learning of insiders has been described as the main source of energy for the
community’s continued existence (Wenger, 2000b).
It was just this learning between insiders that caught the earlier attention of Julian Orr,
another anthropologist, who conducted an ethnographic analysis of Xerox photocopier
repair technicians as they went about their work of fixing machines (Orr, 1990). It was
supposed to be an individual job, and technicians were supposed to merely follow the
repair procedures specified in the manual. In practice, though, Orr discovered the “tech
reps” had an informal but strong community that met daily for breakfast to exchange
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21
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problem-solving tips. They did this by creating and telling stories about the machines
they fixed. This narration was an effective way of communicating complex and
difficult-to-articulate knowledge about the machines. Orr learned that the official
manual reps were supposed to follow was mostly useless for the task of actually
repairing a malfunctioning machine. The copiers were complex systems, using different
kinds of paper, working in different temperature and humidity conditions, and having
different maintenance histories. All these differences rendered them idiosyncratic and
unpredictable systems which no manual could comprehensively explain. Hence, it was
the technicians who put in the necessary adaptation, working as an informal but
effective distributed team, helping and educating each other through narration, and
collectively maintaining a detailed and updated knowledge-base about the machines
they serviced.
Lacking Lave and Wenger’s (1991) CoP concept, Orr (1990) referred to his community
of technicians as an occupational community, following van Maanen and Barley
(1984). Other CoP researchers would later cite Orr’s ground-breaking study as the
earliest ethnography of a CoP (Raelin, 1997; Brown and Duguid, 2001; Teigland,
2003). (The concept of occupational community is reviewed in the Fourth Section of
this chapter.)
Brown and Duguid (1991) were the first to write about the role of intra-organisational
CoPs, noting how, through their continuously-adapting non-canonical practices, they
were significant sites of innovation. Their often-cited article was the first to argue that,
despite their near-invisibility, CoPs constituted a valid and important concern for
management, especially in knowledge-based organisations.
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22
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The mid-nineties can be characterised as a period of “emerging excitement” about the
concept of CoP (Hirsch and Levin, 1999), with enthusiastic accounts appearing in
business magazines (e.g. Brown and Gray, 1995; Manville and Foote, 1996; Stewart,
1996). A typical definition from that period, suggested by two Knowledge Management
(KM) consultants, reads thus:
A group of professionals, informally bound to one another through exposure to
a common class of problems, common pursuit of solutions, and thereby
themselves embodying a store of knowledge (Manville and Foote, 1996: 80).
Interest in the concept of CoP is partly due to the fact that it puts a name to the familiar
human experience of belonging to, and participating in, a group of like-minded peers.
Indeed, Wenger (1999) claims CoPs are natural social structures, as old as humankind,
which would make the concept more than just the latest management fashion
(Abrahamson, 1996). In addition, the mid-nineties were a time marked by the contrast
between the early promise of the knowledge-based organisation (Drucker, 1988), and
the disappointing results of first-generation KM systems (McDermott, 1999a; Stewart,
2001; Scarbrough, 2003; Thompson and Walsham, 2004). Emerging CoP theory
compellingly attributed these failures to an overly-optimitic focus on technology that
was largely unaware of the essential role of intra-organisational CoPs (Wenger, 2000a;
Swan, Newell and Robertson, 2000a; Tsoukas and Vladimirou, 2001).
After his research with Lave, Wenger shifted his attention from the process of
induction of new members to the CoP itself. He based his new theorising on
ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 1989-90 in a medical claims processing centre
operated by a large US insurance company. The results of his research were published
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23
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several years later as an ethnography of claims processors (Wenger, 1998). The book
remains, to this day, the most detailed and comprehensive treatise on CoPs (Schwen
and Hara, 2003; Plaskoff, 2003), arguably making Wenger’s theory the de facto
standard. This is also suggested by its becoming the focus of an increasing number of
critiques (e.g. Fox, 2000; Contu and Willmot, 2000; Marshall and Rollinson, 2004;
Roberts, 2006).
Wenger points out, though, that he uses the concept of CoP mainly as an “entry point”
into a broader social theory of learning, or as a way to bring together social theory and
learning theory (Wenger, 1998; 2004a). Some elements of this theory identify and
illuminate specific traits of CoPs, which in turn can be used to build a model of
Internet-based CoP. Therefore, before describing Wenger’s concept of CoP, an
overview of his social theory of learning is provided.
2.2 – Wenger’s social theory of learning
Wenger begins by noting alternative learning theories have largely focused on the
mechanics of learning –brain research, genetics, evolutionary psychology, cognitive
science, information-processing models (Wenger, 2004a). Yet, by making
meaningfulness the ultimate aim of learning, Wenger’s theory addresses a different
level. A focus on meaningfulness, coupled with the premise that meanings are
negotiated between human beings, implies that the social nature of human beings is
not a circumstantial but an essential aspect of learning. This does not deny the
possibility or value of individual learning, but asserts that meaningfulness cannot be
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24
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determined in isolation. Brown and Duguid (2000b: 139) quote Marx in pointing out
that even Robinson Crusoe, the oft-quoted model of pure economic isolation, set
about organising his castaway life “like a true-born Briton” [by keeping] “a set of
books”.
Briefly, Wenger’s (2004a) reasoning is:
• The negotiation of new meanings –not just the acquisition of new skills or
information– is fundamental to human learning.
• The ability of human beings to negotiate meaning is rooted in their social
nature.
• The negotiation of meaning is embedded in the practice of specific human
communities. These communities and their practices provide material for
learning: language, artifacts, interpretation of the world. Moreover, they
socially-define what it means to be competent with respect to a practice.
• Learning so understood transforms both a person’s ENGAGEMENT with the
world and being in the world. LEARNING is therefore a social becoming, the
ongoing negotiation of an IDENTITY that is developed in the context of
participation (and non-participation) in various CoPs.
Hence, Wenger’s main interest is Learning, not CoPs, which play an instrumental role
in his theory, albeit an essential one. CoPs make possible a focus on meaningfulness
because they locate Learning in a social structure where the meaning of Learning is
negotiated (Wenger, 2004a). Moreover, CoPs are just one of four constitutive and
interconnected elements of the theory, specifically (1998: 5):
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25
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• Meaning: a way of talking about our (changing) ability –individually and
collectively– to experience our life and the world as meaningful.
• Practice: a way of talking about the shared historical and social
resources, frameworks, and perspectives that can sustain mutual
engagement in action.
• Community [of practice]: a way of talking about the social configurations
in which our enterprises are defined as worth pursuing and our
participation is recognizable as competence.
• Identity: a way of talking about how learning changes who we are and
creates personal histories of becoming in the context of our communities.
For Wenger, then, knowing is a matter of displaying competences defined in social
communities, and therefore an act of identifying with, and belonging to, those
communities. However, at any given time the personal experience of meaning of
community members is not necessarily congruent with these socially-defined
competences. When competence and personal experience diverge, one will “pull” on
the other: either members will feel an urge to align their experience of meaning with
the competence defined by the community, or they will try to communicate their
experience to the community to change the way it defines competence. It is in this tug-
of-war where LEARNING, understood as a transformation of knowing takes place.
Hence, LEARNING is a negotiation between social competence and personal experience
(Wenger, 1998). Yet there is more at stake in this negotiation than defining a position
on the issues. Belonging to a community involves members’ IDENTITIES because they
identify with their community: the decision to belong to a CoP involves one’s sense of
self. Therefore LEARNING, whether it changes the experience of a member or the
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26
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competence of the community, involves ACQUIRING AN IDENTITY: LEARNING is an act
of becoming (ibid).
To illustrate the connections between LEARNING and the four elements, and to highlight
the distinct processes that result in LEARNING, Wenger (1998: 5) proposed a diagram,
reproduced in Figure 2.1. The diagram depicts CoPs as just one element of the full
learning theory, and it is on this element that the next section will focus.
learning as
belonging
community
[of practice]
learning as
doing
practice Learning identity
learning as
becoming
meaning
learning as
[meaningful]
experience
FIGURE 2.1 – Components of Wenger’s social theory of learning

(after Wenger, 1998: 5)
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27
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2.3 – Wenger’s theory of Communities of Practice
Within his social theory of learning, Wenger joins the elements of practice and
community by describing three dimensions of practice as the source of coherence of a
community (of practice), i.e. as what makes that particular kind of community cohere.
These dimensions thus become constitutive or defining elements of CoPs (Wenger,
1998):
• MUTUAL ENGAGEMENT: members build the community and the practice
by conducting practice-related interactions with each other on a regular
basis.
• a JOINT ENTERPRISE: members collectively negotiate what their CoP is all
about (i.e. they negotiate meanings) and hold each other accountable to
this understanding.
• a SHARED REPERTOIRE: over time, members develop a set of shared
resources that allow them to more effectively ENGAGE.
Wenger’s use of the term practice is very specific to his theoretical characterisation of
a CoP. He views practice as an emergent social structure that members of a community
collectively develop through their negotiation of meaning in order to address the
challenges of their ENTERPRISE. The claims processors, for instance, developed an
indigenous practice to accomplish the job in a manner satisfying for themselves
(Wenger, 1998). This practice imported elements of broader professional practices,
such as law and medicine. Yet it also developed new elements that were an original
response to local challenges. Ultimately the practice was a complex, adaptable, ad-hoc
solution, wholly-owned by the community of claims processors.

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28
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These qualifications are important because “practice” has at least two other common
usages in the Management literature. First, practice is used to refer to a particular
procedure that has yielded good results elsewhere, which is the sense intended when
speaking of sharing or transferring “best practices” (e.g. O’Dell and Grayson, 1998;
Szulanski, 2003). Second, practice is also used to refer to the way things are done in a
particular discipline, that by definition transcends any local CoPs (Brown and Duguid,
2001). An attentive look at these three usages reveals that practice is always created
and validated by a community, or as Wenger notes, practice is always social practice.
Yet, it is important to specify the scope, because the communities can be big and loose
(such as the medical community) or small and tight (as are most CoPs), just as the
practice can be very general (as, say, the field of cardiology), or very particular (as that
of the claims processors).
As noted earlier, Wenger defines MUTUAL ENGAGEMENT, JOINT ENTERPRISE and
SHARED REPERTOIRE as dimensions of practice. Therefore, if practice is the indigenous
ad-hoc response of a CoP to the challenges of its ENTERPRISE, then MUTUAL
ENGAGEMENT is the “effective” dimension of practice, JOINT ENTERPRISE, the
“purposive” dimension, and SHARED REPERTOIRE the “instrumental” dimension. The
presence of these three dimensions in a group is a necessary and sufficient condition for
the existence of a CoP, which is why their empirical detection will be a key concern of
the Research Strategy. Moreover, assuming a CoP exists, two other previously
mentioned elements are necessarily implied: a COMMUNITY and, as the end result,
LEARNING/IDENTITY ACQUISITION. Together these five elements form a set of
observable properties or traits that identify a group as a functioning CoP, as illustrated
in Figure 2.2. Because this research addresses the problem of detecting and positively
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29
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identifying Internet-based CoPs, it will place considerable emphasis on these
observable traits, which will be referred to as Wenger’s constructs.
MUTUAL ENGAGEMENT LEARNING/IDENTITY

ACQUISITION
SHARED REPERTOIRE Community

of Practice
JOINT ENTERPRISE COMMUNITY
FIGURE 2.2 – Observable Traits of a CoP
Some authors point out that Wenger (1998) does not propose a formal definition of
CoP (Barab, MaKinster and Scheckler, 2003; Schwen and Hara, 2003). The closest he
comes to it, is the following:
Being alive as human beings means that we are constantly engaged in the
pursuit of enterprises of all kinds, from ensuring our physical survival to
seeking the most lofty pleasures. As we define these enterprises and engage in
their pursuit together, we interact with each other and with the world, and we
tune our relations with each other and with the world accordingly. In other
words, we learn. Over time, this collective learning results in practices that
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30
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reflect both the pursuit of our enterprises and the attendant social relations.
These practices are thus the property of a kind of community created over time
by the pursuit of a shared enterprise. It makes sense, therefore, to call these
kinds of communities communities of practice (Wenger, 1998: 45).
Because this rather lengthy description does not easily lend itself to the building of a
model, this thesis will operationalise Wenger’s theory by focusing on the constructs;
hence, the following operational definition of a CoP, real or virtual:
Operational Definition of a Community of Practice: A Community of
Practice is a stable group exhibiting all of Wenger’s constructs, i.e. MUTUAL
ENGAGEMENT, SHARED REPERTOIRE, JOINT ENTERPRISE, COMMUNITY and
LEARNING/IDENTITY ACQUISITION.
The observable traits included in the definition will be referred to as the Essential
Traits, and play a key role in the construction of the model of Internet-based CoP
described in Chapter Four. Of course, the definition begs a discussion and operational
definition of each of Wenger’s constructs. This is addressed in the following sub-
sections.
2.3.1 – MUTUAL ENGAGEMENT
Wenger considers MUTUAL ENGAGEMENT nothing less than the root cause of a CoP:
Although the concept of engagement need not be defined in terms of
specifiable communities of practice, the two concepts are closely linked
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31
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since mutual engagement will give rise to communities of practice over time
(Wenger, 1998: 174).
Membership in a community of practice is therefore a matter of mutual
engagement. That is what defines the community (ibid: 73).
Thus MUTUAL ENGAGEMENT is arguably the most important among Wenger’s
constructs, to the extent that the aim of this research could be re-phrased as a search for
actual instances of sustained MUTUAL ENGAGEMENT taking place over the Internet,
followed by the analysis of the COMMUNITIES and SHARED REPERTOIRES produced by
this ENGAGEMENT.
Still, Wenger does not give a precise definition of MUTUAL ENGAGEMENT, only a broad
description. The ENGAGEMENT of members of a CoP involves doing things together,
talking, producing artifacts, and solving problems (Wenger, 2000b). In general, the
construct refers to the interactions members of a CoP have with each other. Potential
manifestations would be:
• collective problem-solving
• sharing practice-related information
• debating practice-related issues
Since a wide variety of interactions may qualify as valid instances of MUTUAL
ENGAGEMENT, the list above does not aim to be exhaustive, only representative. These
are specific and observable activities which indicate the presence of the ENGAGEMENT
construct. Some are fairly fundamental, such as collective problem-solving or

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32
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debating issues, because they presupose a specific discipline or domain of knowledge,
plus the ability (and the need) of members to effectively address the problems and
challenges of this domain in a collaborative effort. In particular, the task-oriented
nature of collective problem-solving clearly differentiates CoPs from other types of
communities, such as fan clubs, or friendship groups. Communities that merely talk
about a shared interest, or whose primary purpose is socialisation, are not CoPs. CoPs
get things done.
Wenger (1998) argues the scope of MUTUAL ENGAGEMENT is limited, as is the number of
members that can have direct ENGAGEMENT with each other, which places a limit on the
size of a CoP. While technological developments, such as the Internet, have the potential
to expand the limits of the scope of ENGAGEMENT, these developments involve trade-offs
in the complexity of ENGAGEMENT that can be supported (ibid).
In addition, MUTUAL ENGAGEMENT admits different levels of complexity and/or
intensity which results in multiple levels of community involvement and membership.
From this perspective, a community of practice is a node of mutual engagement
that becomes progressively looser at the periphery, with layers going from core
membership to extreme peripherality. The interactions of all these levels affords
multiple and diverse opportunities for learning. Different participants
contribute and benefit differently, depending on their relations to the enterprise
and the community (Wenger, 1998: 118).
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33
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2.3.2 – JOINT ENTERPRISE
Again Wenger (1998) does not offer an explicit definition; still, he often uses as
equivalent the concept of domain, particularly in practitioner-oriented articles. This
domain is defined as:
the area of knowledge that brings the community together, gives it its identity,
and defines the key issues that members need to address. A community of practice
is not just a personal network: it is about something. Its identity is defined not just
by a task, as it would be for a team, but by an "area" of knowledge that needs to
be explored and developed (Wenger, 2004b: 3).
Even though the two terms are equivalent, the earlier name has advantages. The term
“JOINT ENTERPRISE” highlights the fact that the topic of a CoP is something collectively
negotiated by its members and to which they hold each other accountable. In a very real
sense their ENTERPRISE is “created” by them and “belongs” to them, and it does not
necessarily coincide with a pre-existing topic or discipline in which the CoP itself
might be embedded. For instance, in his ethnography of claims processors, Wenger
(1998) notes that the JOINT ENTERPRISE of the unit he studied was not just to effectively
process claims, but also whatever it took to create an acceptable atmosphere to work in.
In fact, members held each other more stringently accountable to the latter goal than to
the former.
CoPs can be defined by disciplines, problems or by situations (Wenger, 2004b), but
their ENTERPRISE is as indigenous as their practice, i.e. it is always a collectively
negotiated response of a particular group of people to the conditions and challenges
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34
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they face. Furthermore, it is a dynamic response, as their understanding of what their
ENTERPRISE is about is continually negotiated. Defining a JOINT ENTERPRISE is thus an
ongoing process, not a static agreement. It is neither a charter nor a statement of
purpose, although these artifacts might exist and give clues as to what the JOINT
ENTERPRISE might be.
JOINT ENTERPRISE is visibly manifested by the community caring about an identifiable
domain of knowledge.
2.3.3 – SHARED REPERTOIRE
Over time, the ENGAGEMENT of members results in the development of a set of
communal resources that allow members to more effectively pursue their ENTERPRISE.
These resources include routines, tools, ways of doing things, stories, symbols, and
artifacts that the community has produced or adopted in the course of its existence, and
which have become part of its practice. They can be very heterogeneous: they gain their
coherence from the fact they belong to the practice of a COMMUNITY pursuing a
negotiated ENTERPRISE (Wenger, 1998).
Sometimes Wenger uses the terms SHARED REPERTOIRE and practice interchangeably,
particularly in practitioner-oriented writings (e.g. Wenger et al, 2002). More precisely,
though, SHARED REPERTOIRE is the instrumental dimension of the community’s
practice, whereas the practice itself is the holistic, emergent and indigenous response of
the community to the challenge of its ENTERPRISE (Wenger, 1998). The distinction is
important, because specific practices (as in “best practices”) can be part of a SHARED
REPERTOIRE. Representative manifestations of SHARED REPERTOIRE include:
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35
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• shared artifacts
• shared criteria
• shared practices
2.3.4 – COMMUNITY
Even though the COMMUNITY construct is the most immediately visible trait, it is not
conceptually the first. Wenger sees MUTUAL ENGAGEMENT as actually preceding the
formation of a CoP, which is why COMMUNITY is not a constitutive element on the
same level as the previous three. Prior to MUTUAL ENGAGEMENT there is just a group of
people, maybe even having similiar jobs or interests (e.g., an occupational community),
but who have not yet sustained sufficient interactions to develop an indigenous
practice.
Wenger (1998) emphasises the term COMMUNITY should not be romanticised. MUTUAL
ENGAGEMENT creates strong personal interrelationships, but these need not be
harmonious for a CoP to exist, particularly when people are compelled to interact
because of an outside mandate, as in the case of the claims processors. In voluntary
CoPs, participant “chemistry” plays a bigger role, but they are not immune to conflict
either, and may even find it beneficial (Wenger et al, 2002).
Visible manifestations of COMMUNITY include:
• members’ knowledge of each other
• shared sense of community
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36
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2.3.5 – LEARNING
Wenger’s complex notion of LEARNING was described in the previous section (see
Figure 2.1, p. 27). This construct is somewhat different from the others because it
happens in people’s heads and is not as visible as say MUTUAL ENGAGEMENT. Still,
suitable research instruments can be devised. People form CoPs to learn together about
topics that interest them. Thus members of a CoP should, if asked, report LEARNING as
a primary result of participating. Alternatively, LEARNING should also be in evidence if
members’ interactions are recorded and qualitatively analysed. Observable
manifestations of LEARNING include:
• acquiring new knowledge
• acquiring new skills
• acquiring/enacting a professional IDENTITY
This last manifestation connects with the remaining construct.
2.3.6 – IDENTITY ACQUISITION
The kind of personal investment required to belong to a CoP results in people’s
IDENTITIES being engaged, reaffirmed, and ultimately shaped by such belonging. It is
no exageration to say that a person chooses to join a CoP literally to be someone.
We identify with some communities strongly and not at all with others. We
define who we are by what is familiar and what is foreign, by what we need to
know and what we can safely ignore, […] by the communities we do not belong
to as well as by the ones we do (Wenger, 2000b: 239).

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37
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As noted earlier, Wenger considers IDENTITY ACQUISITION as another way of referring
to LEARNING, specifically, “learning as becoming”. Thus IDENTITY ACQUISITION is not
really an independent construct, but only a different manifestation of LEARNING. Yet,
because participants in the study may perceive identifying with a community as a
different matter from learning, the two will be addressed separately by the research
instruments. A visible manifestation of IDENTITY ACQUISITION is discussion of career
issues.
This concludes the discussion of Wenger’s (1998) CoP theory. The concept has been
used widely, yet most authors that cite Wenger use a condensed definition, with little or
no mention of the constructs (e.g. O’Dell and Grayson, 1998; Davenport and Prusak,
1998; Lesser and Everest, 2001; Cohen and Prusak, 2001; Brown and Duguid, 1998;
2001). There are also authors who have challenged Wenger’s view, or have introduced
different terminology. These are reviewed next.
2.4 – Challenges to Wenger’s theory of CoPs
Before addressing authors who challenge Wenger’s theory directly, it is interesting to
check whether the social phenomenon he describes has been previously studied under a
different guise. This would not be surprising, since Wenger (1999) notes CoPs are a
natural human phenomenon, pointing to prehistoric tribes and medieval guilds as
historic examples. Figure 2.3 provides a timeline of significant references about CoPs
and similar social structures.
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38
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Constant (1980)
1980
(communities of technological practitioners)
1981
1982
1983
van Maanen and Barley (1984) 1984
(occupational communities)
1985
1986
1987
1988
1989
Orr (1990) 1990
Lave and Wenger (1991); Brown and Duguid (1991) 1991
1992
Cook and Yanow (1993) Trice (1993)
1993
(organisational culture) (occupational subcultures)
1994
Boland and Tenkasi (1995) Brown and Gray (1995)
1995
(communities of knowledge)
Manville and Foote (1996); Orr (1996); Stewart (1996) 1996
1997
Wenger (1998); Brown (1998); Brown and Duguid (1998)
1998
Gherardi, Nicolini and Odella (1998)
Wenger (1999); McDermott (1999a) 1999
Wenger (2000a; 2000b) Brown and Duguid (2000a; 2000b)
2000
Wenger and Snyder (2000) (networks of practice)
Tsoukas and Vladimiriou (2001) Brown and Duguid (2001) 2001
Wenger, McDermott and Snyder (2002) 2002
2003
Wenger (2004a; 2004b) 2004
Figure 2.3 – Timeline of significant references in CoP theory development
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2.4.1 – Alternative terminology for alternative but related phenomena
Brown and Duguid (2001) credit Edward Constant with independently arriving at the
CoP concept before Lave and Wenger’s (1991) research. However, Constant’s (1980)
concept of communities of technological practitioners is actually closer to Brown and
Duguid’s own concept of Network of Practice (which is wholly defined by a shared
practice), than to Wenger’s concept of CoP (which is defined by direct ENGAGEMENT).
Constant’s aim is to build a Kuhnian model to explain a technological revolution,
specifically the advent of turbojets. Yet his communities are defined as people sharing
a narrow technical specialty, rather than people sustaining direct ENGAGEMENT.
Utilization of a community of practitioners as a primary unit of historical
analysis nevertheless does promise to generate basic insights for the history of
technology. A community of technological practitioners, moreover, may be
analyzed in turn as an aggregation of individuals or of firms, just as a
scientific specialty may be analyzed as an aggregation of individuals or of labs
and departments (Constant, 1980: 9, emphasis added).
Van Maanen and Barley’s (1984) notion of occupational community, designates
another similar phenomenon, defined as:
a group of people who consider themselves to be engaged in the same sort of
work; who identify (more or less positively) with their work; who share a set of
values, norms, and perspectives that apply to, but extend beyond work related
matters; and whose social relationships meld the realms of work and leisure
(1984: 295).
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Crucially absent from this definition is any mention of MUTUAL ENGAGEMENT, which
for Wenger (1998) is the only necessary condition for the existence of a CoP,
irrespective of members’ occupations. Van Maanen and Barley do not require members
of occupational communities to actually interact, only to have the same occupation.
The two concepts are clearly different: a CoP, whose members do not necessarily have
the same occupation, is not a special or “local” case of an occupational community.
The concept of occupational subculture is another that superficially bears some
resemblance to the concept of CoP. According to Trice (1993), occupational
subcultures comprise unique clusters of ideologies, beliefs, cultural forms, and
practices that arise from shared educational, personal and work experiences of
individuals who pursue the same profession within the overarching organisational
culture of a single workplace. However, Trice’s concept, like Constant’s and Van
Maanen and Barley’s, does not require or guarantee that members of these groups
actually ENGAGE with each other. Therefore, though they may share a profession, they
cannot cohere into a CoP without regular ENGAGEMENT, although they would qualify
for Brown and Duguid’s (2001) concept of Network of Practice, which is examined in
the next chapter.
Knorr Cetina’s (1999) concept of epistemic culture is described by Brown and Duguid
(2001) as equivalent to a Network of Practice. Like Wenger, Knorr Cetina does not
provide a definition, only a rich description. Brown and Duguid (2001: 205) point out
Knorr Cetina’s concept makes no distinction between groups of scientists working
closely together on a regular basis, and same-discipline scientists who rarely meet or
know each other. Hence, a local portion of an epistemic culture may qualify as a CoP,
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41
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but not the complete culture. As before, the crucial distinction is that a CoP is defined
by direct ENGAGEMENT, while both NoP and epistemic culture require only a common
practice, however specialised.
Finally, Brown and Duguid (2001) have proposed the similar concept of NoP to explain
the “leaky” and “sticky” properties of knowledge. However, because of its close
relationship to “virtual” CoPs, discussion of the concept of NoP will be deferred until
the next chapter (Section 3.3).
2.4.2 – Alternative terminology for the same phenomenon
Various researchers consider Orr’s (1990) ethnography of “tech reps” as the earliest
published study of a CoP (Raelin, 1997; Brown and Duguid, 2001; Teigland, 2003). Yet
Orr (1996) used the earlier concept of occupational community, which is inadequate
because it cannot distinguish the properties of the small, tight-knit community of tech
reps, who ENGAGE directly on a regular basis, from those of the larger technician force of
Xerox, who rarely if ever ENGAGE directly.
Cook and Yanow’s (1993) case study of three Boston workshops that produce some of the
world’s finest concert flutes has been cited by Stamps (1997) and Wenger et al. (2002) as
an example of CoP. The article presents a vivid description of activities at these workshops,
an account where all the constitutive elements of a CoP can be easily identified. Cook and
Yanow do not give a name to the group formed by flute craftsmen, and the intent of the
article was not to depict these workshops as CoPs. Rather, the authors were trying to
show how an organisation, as opposed to an individual, can be said to ‘learn’ by seeing
it as a system of shared meanings associated with and carried out through cultural
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42
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artifacts. They use the term organisational culture to refer to a quality that would allow
an organisation to ‘learn’ in a similar way a brain would allow an individual to learn. The
article has some limitations: it is based on a study of very small organisations with a
homogeneous culture of craftsmanship (even the owners of the workshops were
craftsmen, and held a position in the production line). The authors use the term
organisation indistinctly to refer both to these small workshops and to large corporations
such as IBM and Saab. Furthermore, they use the term organisational knowing to
indistinctly refer to the ability of a succesful basketball team to play the game, and the
ability of Saab to make a car, thus establishing a problematic equivalence between two
very different abilities. Cook and Yanow base their argument on the human ability to act
in groups and to share a culture. However, they do not address the complexities that scale
brings to such collective action. Thus their argument about group learning only seems
conclusive at the level of a homogeneous CoP, which in their research coincided, quite
exceptionally, with a full organisation. The generalisation to larger organisations
comprising a multiplicity of heterogeneous CoPs is not straightforward, nor is this issue
convincingly addressed in a later commentary by one of the authors (Yanow, 2000). In
fact, Brown and Duguid (1998: 98) argue that “organising knowledge across hybrid
communities [of practice] is the essential activity of organisational management”, an
activity that is far from trivial.
Boland and Tenkasi (1995) explicitly use the concept of CoP, adding nuances of their
own. They propose the term community of knowledge to describe communities of
specialised or expert knowledge workers in knowledge-intensive firms. They
acknowledge their concept is congruent with Lave and Wenger’s (1991) CoP even if
restricted to expert communities in knowledge-intensive firms. Also, they use the term
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43
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perspective where Wenger would use practice or SHARED REPERTOIRE. Their research is
about the requirements of communication systems that can adequately support
perspective-making and perspective-taking, what Wenger would designate MUTUAL
ENGAGEMENT, developing a SHARED REPERTOIRE and acquiring an IDENTITY. Thus
Boland and Tenkasi’s “community of knowledge” might be better designated a CoP of
experts, to avoid the unnecessary introduction of a new concept into the literature.
Some authors have differentiated themselves from Wenger by making absence of
management direction or support a necessary condition for a true CoP, and proposing
new names for groups that display all the properties of CoPs, yet develop with
management’s blessing.
For instance, Büchel and Raub (2002) introduced the concept of “knowledge networks”
which they argue extends beyond the traditional concept of CoP. The authors propose
four variants of this concept: “hobby” networks, “professional learning” network,
“business opportunity” network and “best practices” network. They argue only the first
two conform to the traditional concept of CoP, but it is the last two that can result in
organisational benefits. Their position is that once a CoP receives management support
it ceases to be “informal” and “voluntary”, and therefore ceases to be a CoP.
Similarly, Barret, Cappleman, Shoib and Walsham (2004: 1) establish a distinction
between communities “which are […] voluntary in terms of participation, and those
with a more managed membership”, with only the former being considered CoPs. They
use the umbrella term “knowledge communities” to cover voluntary and managed
communities, and they also include constellations of CoPs (Wenger, 1998).
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Stork and Hill (2000) also present informality as a necessary condition of a CoP. They
describe a community of Information Technology (IT) managers at Xerox, which
began with an initial roundtable 2-day meeting, decided to meet again in two-months,
and thereafter met every six weeks. They took the name Transition Alliance, and
agreed their domain was to orchestate a major transition from Xerox’s proprietary IT to
more open industry standards. Senior management fostered the launch of the Alliance,
and was supportive of it, but did not try to control it or request deliverables. For
instance, attendance to meetings was not mandatory. Still, Stork and Hill argue that
because the group was deliberately established by senior management, it did not qualify
as a CoP, but as a new organizational group they labelled a “strategic community”.
However, the large amount of freedom this group enjoyed from the start, the fact that
members all shared the same practice and were all stakeholders in the IT transition, and
the crucial fact that they interacted regularly both in and between meetings indicates
that, from Wenger’s perspective, the group did evolve into a true CoP.
These various authors’ insistence on informality as a defining condition of a true CoP is
contradicted by Wenger’s (1998) study of claims processors, which showed
ENGAGEMENT to be the essential condition, not informality. Any workgroup ENGAGED
in a specific domain of knowledge will over time evolve into a CoP; that is, it will
develop an indigenous practice that allows it to get the job done, even if the workgroup
is formally established by management. Still, because a CoP defines itself through
ENGAGEMENT, its boundaries will not necessarily match institutional boundaries,
because membership is not defined by institutional categories. It is in this sense, that
Wenger describes CoPs as essentially informal, but he explicitly rejects the view that
CoPs can never have a formal status (Wenger, 1998).
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Further evidence against informality as a defining condition of a CoP is provided by
several cases of strategically-important CoPs supported, and even started (in a socially
sensitive way) by management, such as the Eureka knowledge repository at Xerox
which evolved directly from Orr’s ethnography of service reps (Brown and Duguid,
2000b), and the PLL-design CoP at National Semiconductor described by Brown and
Grey (1995). Swan, Scarbrough and Robertson (2002) provide another example, a case
study of a successful CoP convened by administrators of a health organisation as a
vehicle for a radical innovation in the treatment of prostate cancer known as
brachytherapy. These managers envisioned their role as facilitating the construction of
a new multidisciplinary community engaged around brachytherapy practice. They
explicitly addressed constitutive dimensions of CoPs such as a well-defined domain of
knowledge, identity enhancement, networking, and knowledge brokering. Thus, even
though managers were relatively powerless before established medical professionals,
they were able through indirect means to effect important changes.
These studies support Wenger’s position that CoPs can assume “knowledge stewarding”
responsibilities in organisations if management is socially sensitive, and is careful not to
stiffle their self-organising drive (Wenger, 1999; 2000a). Intra-organisational CoPs are
ubiquitous, a consequence of ENGAGEMENT being their root cause (Wenger, 1998). The
problem is that not all CoPs are equally relevant to managers; most are only important to
members, helping them to cope with a particular class of problems at work. Much more
exceptional are CoPs with the potential to have a strategic impact on the business, whose
main interest is aligned with managers’ concerns, and who are actually recognised and
supported. The KM agenda of detecting or “launching” such CoPs has spawned much
writing, which has often been more popularising than rigorous.
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2.4.3 – Critiques of Wenger’s (1998) theory
Gherardi, Nicolini and Odella (1998) reject the view of CoPs as a community with
defined boundaries, established behavioural rules and canons. They argue CoPs are just
one of the forms of organising, specifically, organising for the execution and
perpetuation of a practice. Hence, they intentionally emphasise the term ‘practice’ over
‘community’.
In other words, referring to a community of practice is not a way to postulate
the existence of a new informal grouping or social system within the
organization, but is a way to emphasise that every practice is dependent on
social processes through which it is sustained and perpetuated, and that
learning takes place through the engagement in that practice (1998: 279).
It is possible that Gherardi et al (1998) are taking exception not with Wenger directly but
with popularising authors who emphasise the traditionally harmonious connotation of the
term community. In any case, Wenger’s (1998) position is that a stable group really does
exist, which is held together by sustained ENGAGEMENT, and does not require or produce
harmonious personal relationships. As to the name of this stable group, Lave and Wenger
(1991) picked the term community, but Brown and Duguid (2001) remark they could
have chosen cadre or commune just as well.
Contu and Willmott (2000; 2003) have critiqued Wenger for what they see as a shift
from an emancipatory discourse in his seminal 1991 book with Lave, to a discourse of
performance in his 1998 ethnography of claims processors and later publications.
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Similarly, Fox (2000) and Marshall and Rollinson (2004) critique the cursory treatment
of power issues in Wenger (1998).
In point of fact, Wenger argues CoPs cannot be “managed” in the usual sense of the
word; they can be manipulated or coerced into submission, but “managing” the practice
of a CoP, in the narrow sense of exercising control over it, is not possible:
[T]he power –benevolent or malevolent– that institutions, prescriptions or
individuals have over the practice of a community is always mediated by the
community’s production of its practice. External forces have no direct power
over this production, because in the last analysis (i.e., in the doing through
mutual engagement in practice), it is the community that negotiates its
enterprise (Wenger, 1998: 80).
The issue has been empirically addressed by Thompson (2005), who used participant
observation and interviews to study a co-located CoP at a large IT hardware and services
firm. The 40-member group was formally established as a creative Web-design agency,
exempt from the commercial and procedural restrictions of the parent organisation. It
enjoyed heavy corporate sponsorship of IT infrastructure and culturally symbolic artifacts
(pool tables, video games, bean bags, etc.) conducive to a relaxed, informal and creative
work environment. The author reports strong group identification and epistemic
interaction, relying on Wenger’s (1998) framework to assess the emergent tight-knit
group as a CoP. However, the organisation tried to capitalise on the group’s success with
the addition of 140 new in-training participants, which required formal documentation of
procedures (hitherto unnecessary because of the group’s small size), and other
prescriptive measures such as controls on billable vs non-billable activities. This brought
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about the demise of the original CoP, as members quickly withdrew identification and
commitment from the new, more formalised structure. These findings confirm Wenger’s
(1998) position that CoPs can be supported or “nurtured” but not controlled.
Wenger’s treatment of power issues is, in fact, consistent with his broader theoretical
framework. He sees CoPs as wielding power because it is they that socially-define
competence and identities (Wenger, 2000b). Thus, a person decides whether he or she
wants to belong to a particular community (i.e. learn its practice), but has a limited
capacity as an outsider (or even as full member) to change the practice of the
community. On the other hand, a CoP is powerless before an individual who does not
recognise its authority:
In other words, being recognized as competent only matters to the extent that
one identifies with the communities that can confer legitimacy to learning
(Wenger, 2004a: 12).
It ought to be noted that this competence-defining role of CoPs is also the source of
their greatest weakness: the danger of becoming insular (Wenger, 2000b), and losing
touch with the broader organisation and market environment (Thompson, 2005).
Finally, a recent critique by Lindkvist (2005) misreads Wenger by attributing to him
the position that practices produce CoPs:
The recent, elaborate work of Wenger (1998), one of the two inventors of the
term, should constitute an authoritative source to focus on. A first observation
is then that [CoPs] refer to practices that give rise to mutual engagement,
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joint enterprise and a shared repertoire (Wenger, 1998, pp. 73ff.). If this
happens we may speak about the kind of practices that deserve the additional
‘community’ designation. This raises the question of what connotations
previous usage of the term community brings to the [CoP] notion and to what
extent these are still informative. Moreover, how do we distinguish between
empirical practices that are likely to produce such community and those that
are not? (Lindkvist, 2005: 1192).
For Wenger (1998), though, practice is the indigenous ad-hoc response of a CoP to the
challenges of its ENTERPRISE, and it is produced collectively by the members of the
community through MUTUAL ENGAGEMENT. Thus, practices do not produce CoPs, it is
CoPs that produce practices, which is why Wenger views all practice as social practice
(and, cannot, therefore, conceive an “empirical practice” that is not the product of one
or more pre-existing CoPs).
Wenger’s (1998) theory thus seems to give coherent replies to the various critiques it has
received. Moreover, there is no competing theory: no other author has developed a
complete and detailed theoretical framework to explain the readily acknowledged social
phenomenon of CoPs. This section reviewed distinctly-named similar phenomena, and
alternative designations for the same phenomenon. The literature affords no compelling
reasons for using a different concept, or adopting the perspective of a different author.
Therefore Wenger’s (1998) theory of CoPs is selected as the foundation of this research.
The next chapter will examine the issues involved in extending the theory to the social
areas of the Internet.
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2.5 – Summary
The aims of this chapter were to formally introduce the concept of CoP, critically review
existing theories, and propose an operational definition for use in this thesis. The chapter
opened with a historical overview, followed by a description of Wenger’s social theory of
learning, of which CoPs are but one element. The chapter then focused on Wenger’s
(1998) theory of CoPs, with a strong emphasis on their constitutive elements. The last
section reviewed extant challenges to Wenger’s theory, and showed they are coherently
addressed by his theoretical framework.
As a consequence of the preceding discussion, Wenger’s (1998) theory of CoPs has
been identified as the most detailed and consistent currently available. No other
author matches the rich description Wenger offers of the constitutive elements of
CoPs: MUTUAL ENGAGEMENT, SHARED REPERTOIRE, JOINT ENTERPRISE, COMMUNITY,
and LEARNING/ IDENTITY ACQUISITION. Hence, the decision to adopt Wenger’s model
in this research. Furthermore, an operational definition of CoP was proposed, using
Wenger’s constructs as the elements that determine whether a particular group, real or
virtual, can be assessed as a CoP. Each of Wenger’s constructs was discussed and
visible manifestations were specified in order to build operational definitions. These
results will contribute to the model of Internet-based CoP that will be proposed in
Chapter Four. First, though, Chapter Three will critically examine the popular notion
of a “virtual” CoP.
One last observation about CoP literature: it was found to be roughly aligned along two
distinct groups, which might be labelled the “Organisational approach” and the “KM
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approach”. The former emphasises theory development by describing pre-existing,
informal organisational CoPs; the latter emphasises the business value of CoPs, and
aims to identify, support, and launch organisational CoPs for KM purposes. The two
approaches are displayed in Figure 2.4 which contrasts their different positions on key
CoP issues through several representative references.
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“Organisational” Approach “KM” Approach
These references view CoPs as emergent, self- These references view CoPs as hidden
organising, informal groups who set their own resources that should be identified and
learning agenda, and operate mostly beyond supported by management, and charged with
management control. Hence, the positions they pursuing knowledge initiatives that have
emphasise are: strategic value for the organisation. Hence,
the positions they emphasise are:
CoPs as organisational emergent structures. CoPs as organisational knowledge assets.
Brown and Duguid (1991); Brown (1998); Brown and Gray (1995); Stewart (1997);
Wenger (1998); Gherardi and Nicolini (2000) Hanley (1998); McDermott (1999b);
Wenger (1999; 2000a); Wenger et al (2002)
All competencies of the organisation reside in Core competencies of the organisation
CoPs. reside in CoPs.
Brown and Duguid (1991); Wenger (1998; Brown and Gray (1995); Manville and
2000a); Tsoukas and Vladimirou (2001) Foote (1996); Wenger (1999);
Saint-Onge and Wallace (2002)
CoPs cannot be managed conventionally. CoPs, as assets, should be managed.
Brown and Duguid (1991); Wenger (1998); Stewart (1997); Stork and Hill (2000);
Wenger and Snyder (2000); Thompson (2005) Barrow (2001); Büchel and Raub (2002);
Swan, Scarbrough and Robertson (2002)
A focus on “mundane” or “ordinary” CoPs. A focus on “strategically important” CoPs.
Orr (1990); Wenger (1998); Gherardi and Brown and Gray (1995); Stewart (1997);
Nicolini (2000); Tsoukas and Vladimirou (2001) Wenger (1999; 2004b); Büchel and
Raub (2002); Stork and Hill (2000); Swan et
al (2002); Saint-Onge and Wallace (2002)
A focus on description. A focus on design.
Orr (1990); Wenger (1998); Gherardi and McDermott (1999b; 2000); Wenger et al
Nicolini (2000; 2002) (2002); Saint-Onge and Wallace (2002)
A critical emancipatory perspective. A managerial results-oriented perspective.
Gherardi, Nicolini and Odella (1998); Hanley (1998); McDermott (1999a);

Contu and Willmot (2000; 2003); Fox (2000) Wenger (1999; 2004b); Stork and Hill (2000);
Lesser and Storck (2001); Barrow (2001);
Wenger et al (2002)
Social Learning. Managing Knowledge.
Lave and Wenger (1991); Raelin (1997); Stewart (1997); McDermott (1999a);
Gherardi, Nicolini and Odella (1998); Wenger (1999; 2004b); Barrow (2001);
Wenger (1998; 2000b; 2004a); Brown and Saint-Onge and Wallace (2002);
Duguid (2001); Tsoukas and Vladimirou (2001) Wenger et al (2002)
Figure 2.4 – Contrasting “Organisational” and “KM” CoP references
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CHAPTER THREE
Virtual Communities of Practice
The previous chapter reviewed theories of conventional co-located CoPs. This chapter
will examine the theoretical possibility of “virtual” CoPs, and review previous studies
that directly or indirectly address the topic. The review aims to establish both the
research need and the originality of this study. In addition, extant research provides
relevant lessons that will be applied to the construction of the model of virtual CoP that
will provide guidance and focus to this thesis.
The chapter is organised into four sections. The First examines the notion of “virtual”
in connection to CoPs by using three variables of network design and utilisation to
classify the different varieties of “virtual” found in the literature. Section Two
reviews previous articles about “virtual” CoPs to determine whether Wenger’s
theoretical constructs are explicitly or implicitly reported, and thereby establishes the
lack of studies that fully apply Wenger’s theory. Section Three examines theoretical
and empirical critiques of the notion of virtual CoP, most particularly Brown and
Duguid’s concept of Network of Practice (NoP). The final section is a chapter
summary.
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3.1 – Reviewing the varieties of “virtual” in the literature
Given the exploding popularity of the CoP concept, it soon followed that theorists,
practitioners and business writers began to explore the notion of a “virtual” CoP, i.e. a
community whose interaction was carried out through electronic networks, particularly
the Internet. “Virtual” CoPs are currently a popular topic. This can be seen in the graph
displayed in Figure 3.1, which plots the number of articles published yearly in the (non-
overlapping) Proquest and IEEExplore databases, which include in the body of the
article the search strings “virtual communities of practice” OR “online communities of
practice” OR “electronic communities of practice”.
50
43
39
40
30 28
20
10
10
5 5
2 1
0
1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005
Figure 3.1 – Articles about “virtual” CoPs published in Proquest + IEEE databases
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The increase in publications partly reflects the interest among KM practitioners who
nowadays consider CoP support and/or development an important element of
organisational KM programmes. For instance, professional KM conferences usually
include a seminar or workshop on launching and supporting “virtual” CoPs.
There are two problems with this current enthusiasm. The first lies in the ambiguity
of the over-used term “virtual”. For instance, Kimble, Hildreth and Wright (2001),
Baym (2000), and Saint-Onge and Wallace (2002) provide three different accounts of
succesful “virtual” CoPs. Yet, the first applies the term “virtual” to the work unit
formed by two co-located workgroups of the same company, one in the US, the other
in the UK, who communicate using phone, e-mail and video link; the second applies
the term to a stable, persistent, extra-organisational Usenet community; the third calls
“virtual” a CoP based on a proprietary intranet, designed to enable field interaction of
insurance agents from a Canadian company. The only common denominator is that
day-to-day interactions take place without co-location using electronic media.
However, as the example shows, the media used to support these virtual groups are
highly diverse. This suggests developing at least an elementary typology –the task of
this section– to classify previous studies about “virtual” CoPs, and clearly identify the
type this research will examine.
The second problem is an intuitive use of the concept of community of practice,
which suggests few of the “virtual” CoPs described in the literature are true CoPs as
defined and described by Wenger. As the previous chapter made clear, Wenger
emphasises that regular MUTUAL ENGAGEMENT between members is the key
requirement for the coalescing and continued existence of a CoP, and his theoretical
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framework is the result of detailed examination of ENGAGEMENT in co-located CoPs
(Lave and Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998). Yet, “virtual” implies interaction without
co-location, which raises a theoretical issue few studies address. Specifically, the
literature review found few studies that make MUTUAL ENGAGEMENT an important or
necessary condition for the continued existence of the community. Of 20 “virtual”
CoP studies included in this review, only three (Saint-Onge and Wallace, 2002;
DeSanctis et al, 2003; Teigland and Wasko, 2004) recognised the role of
ENGAGEMENT. This renders problematic the intuitive characterisation as CoPs of
some virtual groups in the literature, an issue which is more closely examined in the
next section.
Within the “virtual” CoP literature, there are substantial differences in the
characteristics of described electronic networks and in the circumstances of the groups
using them. These differences led to the identification of three contingent factors of
network design and/or utilisation: Network access, Media richness and Participatory
character; these are discussed next.
3.1.1 – Network access
With respect to access, electronic networks are basically of three kinds. The most
restricted networks are proprietary information systems, developed and managed by
corporations to support information-sharing among employees in a secure environment.
Second are subscription-based services, such as private discussion forums set up by
various professional societies, which can be accessed though the Internet but require a
login and password. Finally there are fully open networks such as the Internet and
Usenet. Proprietary networks are more reliable and secure, but connect fewer people.
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Public networks can reach a much greater number of more diverse people, but pose
greater privacy and security risks and have lower signal-to-noise ratios (Kollock and
Smith, 1996; Hahn, 2000). The advantage of networks that reach a larger number of
more heterogeneous people is that they are more likely to contain natural “organisers”
who are capable of mobilising other network participants to achieve collective action
(Oliver and Marwell, 1988).
Network access is important because unrestricted access can make topical-focus more
difficult for network-based communities. Usenet-based communities, for instance,
oftentimes must invest a considerable amount of time and energy to preserve the focus
of the discussion in the face of such Usenet threats as trolls and spam (Kollock and
Smith, 1996; Kling and Courtright, 2003). Moderated newsgroups offer an interesting
variant in terms of network access; though discussions are still conducted in the open,
posting to the newsgroup must be done through a moderator who filters messages
whose topic or tone are inappropriate to the charter of the newsgroup.
3.1.2 – Media richness
The communication capabilities of various kinds of networks offer a range that can go
from plain text messages to videoconferencing. According to media richness theory
(Daft and Lengel, 1986), higher medium bandwith can support interactions requiring
more complex communication. This theory would predict that videoconferencing is a
better medium than plain text messages for supporting complex distributed
ENGAGEMENT. However, recent studies have not supported the central proposition of
media richness theory, which is that performance improves when media richness is
matched to task equivocality (Dennis and Kinney, 1998; Kock, 2001).
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Carlson and Zmud (1999) have proposed the alternative channel expansion theory, which
suggests certain experiences positively influence how an individual develops richness
perceptions for a given channel. Specifically, experience with the channel, experience
with the messaging topic, experience with the organisational context and experience
with communication co-participants. In two studies including a cross-sectional and a
multi-wave survey they found empirical support for the communication channel and
communication partner experiences.
Burke et al (2001) performed two longitudinal studies to measure cohesiveness and
process satisfaction among groups supported by media of various richness. The studies
included a total of 238 participants organised in 62 groups, which interacted once a
week over a four-week period to perform a complex collaborative task. Results in both
studies confirmed Daft and Lengel’s (1986) prediction that richer media would initially
result in greater cohesion and process satisfaction. However, both cohesion and
satisfaction exhibited constant increases over time for all media, rich and lean. Thus,
even the leanest media, which in these studies was asynchronous computer-mediated
communication (similar to newsgroups), allowed steady increases in cohesion and
process satisfaction over time, confirming an earlier suggestion by Walther (1992) that
contextual richness will develop in lean environments, perhaps more slowly than in rich
environments, but will develop nonetheless.
Lee (1994) argues from an interpretive perspective that richness is not an invariant
property of a communication medium (his study focused on e-mail) but an emergent
property of the interaction between the medium and its organisational context. This
idea is applied by Robertson, Sørensen and Swan (2001), who present a case study of a
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fast-paced consultancy where e-mail played a crucial role in project work. Specifically,
e-mail was used by project leaders preparing client proposals to seek particular in-house
knowledge, while consultants used it to sell their particular expertise, and to record the
transaction when “hired”. Thus, in the shared context of this organisation, simple yet
timely e-mail messages were innovatively used to convey unusually rich meaning.
Finally, there is anecdotal evidence that the ubiquitous Internet, despite its relatively
narrow bandwith, can support MUTUAL ENGAGEMENT in highly complex practices.
For instance, teams of pathologists use a robotic microscope connected to an Internet
server to view and discuss histologic samples in real time for cancer diagnosis (Sacile
et al, 1999). Chin, Myers and Hoyt (2002) describe the Virtual Nuclear Magnetic
Resonance Facility, an Internet-based collaboratory with a suite of tools for
computer-supported collaborative work that allow geographically distributed
scientists to precisely set the controls of remote nuclear magnetic resonance
spectrometers, conduct experiments, analyse results and communicate with other
researchers, all without leaving their homes or offices.
3.1.3 – Participatory character
The usage of electronic networks for documenting valuable knowledge is mandatory at
some workplaces, encouraged at others, and entirely voluntary for individuals outside
of the workplace. This results in different degrees of interest and commitment on the
part of participants.
Whether participation is mandatory or voluntary can affect the quality of ENGAGEMENT.
A mandatory network can compel some MUTUAL ENGAGEMENT and therefore, over
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time, a CoP. However, it may turn out to be a rather unmotivated CoP. McDermott
(1999a) gives the example of a large consumer products company where employees
were directed by management to document key work processes in an electronic
database. It took a year to populate the database, but then it was little used. Most people
found it too generic to be useful, and it became an expensive “information junkyard”.
Stewart (2001) provides an interesting counter-example. He notes that at Price
Waterhouse Coopers, consultants widely regard the “Kraken”, a simple Lotus Notes
mailing list, as a superior source of knowledge compared to KnowledgeCurve, the
official state-of-the-art intranet. Yet, the “Kraken” is entirely dependent on the
goodwill of volunteer participants to read and provide answers to questions. This
echoes the experience of many Internet-based communities where high-quality
knowledge-sharing has been observed, even though (or perhaps, because) they are
based entirely on volunteers.
By using these three contingent factors to classify relevant references on virtual
learning communities, a more precise characterisation is achieved and the particular
focus of this thesis becomes clearer. The classification is performed next.
3.2 – Traces of Wenger’s constructs in previous studies of “virtual” CoPs
Studies of “virtual” CoPs comprise a large and heterogeneous collection of articles.
Furthermore, the literature review found several studies that are not about “virtual”
CoPs, and yet shed light on the problem. Therefore, this section will address several
purposes:
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• To assemble a selection of previous studies that have made contributions
to the problem of “virtual” CoPs.
• To use the network typology of the previous section to classify selected
studies.
• To critically review each study, placing special emphasis on the definition
of CoP used, on the evidence (anecdotal or rigorous) of Wenger’s
constructs, and on the type of interactions achieved by the community.
• To build a theoretical case, using previous references, regarding the
feasibility of “virtual” CoPs that exhibit all of Wenger’s constructs.
• To identify gaps and highlight unaddressed issues in the “virtual” CoP
literature.
The first step is to build a comprehensive list of previous empirical studies that have
made contributions to the topic of “virtual” CoPs. As Figure 3.1 showed, the number of
published articles about “virtual” CoPs is large and growing fast, but these articles are
not equally useful or relevant. Thus, the list of included references is the result of
several selection criteria applied to a larger universe of examined studies (by mid-2004,
nearly all papers with the keywords “virtual” and “communities of practice” had been
examined, at least once). Specifically, studies deemed relevant for this research met the
following criteria:
• The study describes a successful learning group whose day-to-day
interaction is carried out through electronic networks.
• Described groups have a professional orientation (i.e. they are not about
hobbies or socialising).
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• Described groups have stable membership and exhibit persistence over
time, thus qualifying as “communities”.
The first criterion needs little comment. The second one does: Wenger et al (2002)
argue that a CoP is more than a community of interest –people who like French movies,
for instance– because members of a CoP get actual work done together, they are
practitioners who, as they engage with each other, create a SHARED REPERTOIRE of
community resources. Thus the numerous studies of virtual communities focused on
hobbies or socialising (e.g. Watson, 1997; Erickson, 1997) were discarded. An
exception was Baym’s (2000) online ethnography of soap opera fans, because it was a
quality piece of research and specifically characterised its community as a Usenet-
based CoP, the same objective as this thesis.
The third criterion led to the exclusion of numerous studies about virtual teams convened
on a temporary basis to accomplish specific projects (e.g. Jarvenpaa and Leidner, 1999;
Rogers, 2000; Chalk, 2001; Smeds and Alvesalo, 2003; Davenport, 2004). The compulsory
nature, professional or academic, of many such projects resulted in impressive online
collaboration, but for a limited time. The disbandment of the team at the end of the project
clearly distinguishes them from persistent communities.
An explicit focus on the topic of “virtual” CoPs was not part of the selection criteria,
because, as previously mentioned, several useful papers were found describing persistent
online communities with various CoP-like traits, and yet not characterised as CoPs. On
the other hand, a few papers that explicitly address the topic of “virtual” CoPs were
discarded because of their intuitive and uncritical use of the concept. For instance,
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Herrmann (1998) states “on-line community” and “on-line community of practice” are
equivalent “as it is assumed that one cannot study a community without focusing on the
practices that constitute it” (1998: 16). Johnson (2001) offers a survey of current articles
about online CoPs, but he uncritically accepts the claims of reviewed studies, about this
or that online community being a CoP. Moreover, by omitting a definition of CoP, the
article mixes real-world with virtual communities, and persistent communities with
temporary classroom teams. By contrast, Dubé, Bourhis and Jacob (2005) offer a robust
survey of 18 intentionally launched virtual CoPs at 14 organisations. Arguing CoPs are
structurally very diverse, they propose a typology of 21 “basic” or “structuring”
characteristics which they use to typify the CoPs in their survey. However, though citing
Wenger et al’s (2002) definition, they do not apply Wenger’s constructs, and thereby
render questionable the CoP-characterisation of some of their groups, particularly the
larger ones (several hundred members) where direct ENGAGEMENT becomes impossible.
The results of the study-selection process are displayed in Table 3.1, which also shows
the classification of each community according to the three-factor typology of network
utilisation proposed in the previous section.
The next step is to review each article, using Wenger’s constructs as the unifying
theoretical lens for examining this heterogeneous collection. Explicit –though rare–
mentions of Wenger’s constructs will be recorded in Table 3.2. So will more indirect
evidence reported in the articles, such as community descriptions revealing aspects that
can be interpreted as the presence of a Wenger construct. In addition, Table 3.2 will
record whether each paper explicitly describes its community as a CoP, explicitly
discards it as a CoP or makes no mention either way.
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Table 3.1 – Selected studies about “virtual” Communities of Practice
Article authors Article title Network access Medium richness Participation
Thomsen (1996) At work in cyberspace: exploring practitioner use of the PRForum. subscription forum low (listserv) voluntary
Murray (1996) Nurses’ computer-mediated communications on NURSENET: a case public forum low (listserv) voluntary
study.
Bowers (1997) Constructing international professional identity: what psychiatric nurses public forum low (listserv) voluntary
talk about on the Internet.
Millen and Dray (2000) Information sharing in an online community of journalists. public forum low (listserv) voluntary
Robey et al (2000) Situated learning in cross-functional virtual teams. private various media low to high mandatory
Lueg (2000) Where is the action in virtual communities of practice? public forum low (newsgroup) voluntary
Baym (2000) Tune in, log on: soaps, fandom and online community. public forum low (newsgroup) voluntary
Wasko and Faraj (2000) It is what one does: why people participate and help others in electronic public forum low (newsgroup) voluntary
communities of practice.
Teigland (2000) Communities of practice in a high-growth Internet consultancy: Netovation public forum low (newsgroup) voluntary
vs.on-time performance.
Kimble et al (2001) Communities of practice: going virtual private various media low to high mandatory
Wasko and Teigland (2002) The provision of online public goods: examining social structure in a private low (listserv) voluntary
Network of Practice
Hara and Kling (2002) IT support for communities of practice: an empirically-based framework. private low (listserv) voluntary
Wenger et al (2002) Cultivating communities of practice: a guide to managing knowledge. private high (teleconference) mandatory
Saint-Onge and Wallace (2002) Leveraging communities of practice for strategic advantage. proprietary network mid (proprietary intranet) voluntary
Schlager et al (2002) Evolution of an on-line education community of practice. subscription forum mid (staffed MUD) voluntary
Pan and Leidner (2003) Bridging communities of practice with information technology in pursuit of subscription forum low (bulletin board) voluntary
global knowledge sharing.
Ardichvili et al (2003) Motivation and barriers to participation in virtual knowledge-sharing proprietary network mid (proprietary intranet) voluntary
communities of practice.
DeSanctis et al (2003) Learning in online forums. public forum low (Yahoo group) voluntary
Lee and Cole (2003) From a firm-based to a community-based model of knowledge creation: public forum low (listserv) voluntary
the case of the Linux kernel development
Teigland and Wasko (2004) Extending richness with reach: participation and knowledge exchange in public forum low (newsgroup) voluntary
electronic networks of practice.
Table 3.2 – Evidence of Wenger’s constructs in selected studies about “virtual” CoPs
Article MUTUAL SHARED JOINT COMMUNITY LEARNING / Characterised
ENGAGEMENT REPERTOIRE ENTERPRISE IDENTITY ACQ. as a CoP
Thomsen (1996) a a a a no mention
Murray (1996) a a a a no mention
Bowers (1997) a a a a no mention
Millen and Dray (2000) a a a a no mention
Robey et al (2000) a a a a a yes
Lueg (2000) a a a no
Baym (2000) a a a yes
Wasko and Faraj (2000) a a a a a yes
Teigland (2000) a a a no
Kimble et al (2001) a a a a a yes
Wasko and Teigland (2002) a a a no
Hara and Kling (2002) a a a a yes
Wenger et al (2002) a a a yes
Saint-Onge and Wallace (2002) a a a a a yes
Schlager et al (2002) a a a a yes
Pan and Leidner (2003) a a yes
Ardichvili et al (2003) a a yes
DeSanctis et al (2003) a a a a a yes
Lee and Cole (2003) a a a a a yes
Teigland and Wasko (2004) a a a no
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A solid article, though not directly addressing the “virtual” CoP issue, is Thomsen’s
(1996) description of the PRForum, a listserv addressed to public relations
practitioners. A content analysis of two-weeks of postings found most messages were
information exchanges (56%), with debate the second most frequent category (31%).
This was followed up with a short survey of participants, which revealed three primary
purposes of the forum: to facilitate the exchange of information and advice, to debate
issues affecting the profession, and to cultivate and foster a sense of self-validation and
enhanced efficacy, both at a personal and professional level. The community is not
characterised as a CoP, yet the reported purposes of the forum provide evidence of
Wenger’s constructs of MUTUAL ENGAGEMENT, JOINT ENTERPRISE and
LEARNING/IDENTITY. In addition, the cited responses from the survey mentioned as
typical members’ appreciation for their professional virtual community, providing
evidence of the COMMUNITY construct as well.
Murray (1996) performed a discourse analysis of a sample of messages from
NURSENET, an unmoderated mailing list devoted to nursing. In addition, semistructured
e-mail interviews were conducted with a small number of subscribers. The focus of the
study is examining communicative practices of this on-line group, such as politeness and
turn-taking. Still, the primary reason for participating, is “to keep myself in touch with the
current state of the nursing profession, and to keep myself up to date with new and
possibly more appropriate techniques than the ones I currently employ in my nursing
practice” (1996: 230). This was interpreted as evidence of LEARNING and JOINT
ENTERPRISE. Furthermore, the discourse analysis revealed a frequent discussion topic was
to challenge prevailing ideas within nursing and to discuss ways in which practice or
education might be improved, or new theory generated. This suggests debating issues,
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hence MUTUAL ENGAGEMENT. Finally, evidence of COMMUNITY comes from the report
that a “sense of community” is evident in the list, because participants feel safe and
confident in being able to present themselves to others.
Bowers (1997) describes his experience as manager of an umoderated mailing list
devoted to psychiatric nursing. He performs a content analysis of the topics, as measured
by thread heads, to determine topics that are universally appealing to psychiatric nurses.
The author argues the list can contribute to the formation of an international professional
IDENTITY for psychiatric nurses, thus citing one of Wenger’s constructs. Furthermore, the
content analysis revealed the list provided a forum for sharing knowledge, information,
ideas and expertise (hence MUTUAL ENGAGEMENT and LEARNING), and for giving and
receiving help and support (hence COMMUNITY). Finally, the list’s narrow focus on a
specialised professional topic was interpreted as evidence of JOINT ENTERPRISE.
Millen and Dray (2000) study the creation of shared collective goods in a community
of journalists based on a mailing list. A content analysis of community archives found
most postings are technical answers to problems (51%). The group exhibits a distinct
professional culture, although the authors do not follow up on this, nor use the CoP
label. They do identify knowledge-sharing as the group’s raison d’etre, thus providing
evidence of MUTUAL ENGAGEMENT and LEARNING. The narrow professional focus of
the discussion suggests a JOINT ENTERPRISE. The authors characterise the group as an
online professional community, and were struck by strong member commitment to help
each other, which suggests COMMUNITY. Finally, the article emphasises the value of the
discussion archives as a searchable knowledge resource, and the most valuable
collective good of the community, thus yielding evidence of SHARED REPERTOIRE.
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Robey, Khoo and Powers (2000) interviewed 22 workers and managers in three cross-
functional regionally-distributed teams in a large U.S. company. They assessed the teams
as virtual CoPs because they conducted much of their day-to-day interaction through
phone, e-mail, voice-mail or videoconferencing, and their LEARNING was situated in the
indigenous practices team-members developed to function effectively in this context.
Wenger’s (1998) constructs are not named explicitly but the numerous quotations
reproduced from the interviews reveal the presence of ENGAGEMENT (because team
members worked collaboratively with remote colleagues using electronic media),
LEARNING (evinced by the induction of new team members to the practices of this work
mode), SHARED REPERTOIRE (e.g. a common practice of producing spreadsheets from a
shared mainframe database, and using them as e-mail attachments), JOINT ENTERPRISE
(the shared disposition to make the virtual team arrangement work) and COMMUNITY
(evinced by the effort team members make to build relationships when they meet with
remote colleagues face-to-face, for instance going out to dinner).
In a conceptual article, Lueg (2000) questions the transferability of the concept of
CoPs, “deeply rooted in the lived-in world”, to the online world. He analyses
newsgroup de.rec.bodyart, a German-language group focused on bodyart (tatoos, ear
and nose piercings, etc.). He notes there is true knowledge-sharing and problem-
solving, but concludes the experience and shared practice (tattooing, body piercing)
take place in the real world, thus discounting the group as a true “virtual” CoP. While it
is true that the online medium cannot capture the nuances of some “embodied”
practices (Cook and Yanow’s famous flute-making example comes to mind), there do
exist text-based professions, such as law, mathematics or computer programming,
whose specialised discourses can be accurately captured in the plain-text messages of
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Usenet. The article yields evidence of ENGAGEMENT and LEARNING (knowledge-
sharing and problem-solving are explicitly mentioned), as well as JOINT ENTERPRISE
(because of the very narrow topic of the newsgroup).
Baym (1995) studied rec.arts.tv.soaps, a newsgroup of soap-opera fans. She describes
online IDENTITY construction, as fans identify with this character or reject another, with
a great deal of self-disclosure involved. In a later book-length ethnography (Baym,
2000), she describes the newsgroup’s social customs and norms (such as netiquette),
the in-depth topic knowledge of regular members, and the interpersonal relationships
between members which sometimes led to personal online friendships. Baym argues
this community is constantly recreated in “habitual and recurrent ways of acting or
practices” (emphasis in the original), and labels it a community of practice. However,
Wenger (1998; 2000a) argues a CoP is more than a community of interest: a CoP is
task-oriented; members go beyond talk to get actual work performed collaboratively.
Having said this, Baym’s ethnography yields evidence of COMMUNITY (the tightly-knit
group of fans), JOINT ENTERPRISE (their narrow topical focus on specific soap operas)
and LEARNING (in the form of IDENTITY ACQUISITION). Lacking a practice though, there
is no evidence of real ENGAGEMENT or REPERTOIRE.
Baym’s research highlights an important issue: whether fan discussion of books, movies
or TV programmes can be considered MUTUAL ENGAGEMENT. According to Wenger et al
(2002) it cannot, for fans do not actually work with the books, movies or personalities
they enjoy talking about. However, it could be a different situation for a group of literary
or movie critics, whose professional method-based discussion of technical and artistic
merits could qualify as ENGAGEMENT. Thus it can be difficult to distinguish a practice-
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forming domain from a serious hobby. Hence, this research will conservatively focus on
professional domains, while acknowledging that even the term “professional” admits
some ambiguity. For instance, the topic of the U.S. Civil War can constitute a
professional practice for a historian, while just a hobby for someone who likes History.
Wasko and Faraj (2000) conducted an e-mail survey of participants in three computer-
related newsgroups (comp.lang.c++, comp.objects and comp.database) which they
referred to as “virtual communities of practice”. Using open ended questions, they
asked identified posters why they participate in the newsgroup and help others.
Respondents mentioned past help they had received from the newsgroup and a desire to
reciprocate; the pleasure of helping someone at negligible cost to themselves; the
challenge of solving tricky computational problems and the learning and reputation-
enhancement they derived from this. Although Wenger’s constructs are not explicitly
named, respondent comments cited in the article yield evidence of MUTUAL
ENGAGEMENT (in the form of problem-solving), LEARNING (respondents report “gaining
knowledge” by participating in the newsgroups), SHARED REPERTOIRE (in the form of
jargon and symbolic language), JOINT ENTERPRISE (in the form of specialised domains
in each newsgroup) and COMMUNITY (respondents value the newsgroups as a
community of like-minded peers). One problem with this study’s very interesting
results is that the authors made no attempt to differentiate the replies of stable members
of the communities from ephemeral visitors, who are much more numerous (Smith,
1999). Thus, responses from this latter group were probably over-represented.
Teigland (2000) presents an analysis of patterns of individual-level knowledge flows at
an Internet consultancy and their impact on individual performance. Data collection
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comprised 30 in-depth interviews with employees from all areas, later complemented
by a survey of all 242 employees. The author found a face-to-face CoP formed by
programmers who met after work to discuss problems and innovative solutions. In
addition, these programmers belonged (some for many years) to Internet-based
professional communities who discussed similar technical issues. In fact, the
programmers consulted their online communities more often than co-located
colleagues, because their knowledge base was broader and more easily consulted than
local colleagues. Teigland notes these electronic communities exhibit many of the
properties of traditional CoPs. Respondents reported MUTUAL ENGAGEMENT (through
online problem-solving), LEARNING (because people explicitly sought and received
knowledge from Internet communities), IDENTITY ACQUISITION (because belonging to
certain Internet communities conferred prestige) and COMMUNITY (because members of
Internet communities had formed stable friendships). Since specific Internet
communities are not identified in the article, evidence of specific JOINT ENTERPRISE or
SHARED REPERTOIRE is not mentioned. Although clearly impressed by these online
communities, Teigland argues against using the CoP label because explicit text-based
messages are not a conduit for sharing tacit knowledge as CoPs are known to do
through close interaction.
Kimble et al (2001) rhethorically ask if a CoP can be virtual, equating “virtual” with
“geographically distributed”. They describe a distributed CoP in a company, charged
with IT-support work, and formed by four co-located members in the UK, five in the
US and a lone member in Japan. Daily communication is held via e-media (e-mail,
voice mail, video link, telephone conferencing and Microsoft NetMeeting), and every
six months the entire group holds a face-to-face meeting. Though not exclusively
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Internet-based, the article provides a detailed case study of a geographically distributed
CoP which conducts a substantial part of its day-to-day work through electronic
networks. The group is described as having a sense of common purpose (hence JOINT
ENTERPRISE), a strong feeling of identity (hence IDENTITY) and its own specialised
language (hence SHARED REPERTOIRE). In addition, the case study description of
member interactions yields direct evidence of MUTUAL ENGAGEMENT, and emphasises
the importance members give to strong personal relationships, as they aided smooth
group functioning during the six-month periods without face-to-face contact. This was
taken as evidence of COMMUNITY.
Wasko and Teigland (2002) apply theories of public goods and collective action to
explain the knowledge collectively created by members of Electronic Networks of
Practice (ENoPs) in the form of a publicly available discussion archive. In this
empirical study they used Social Network Analysis to determine whether a successful
extra-organisational ENoP was sustained by a critical mass of participants, and
whether heterogeneity of resources and interests among participants contributed to
the success of the group’s collective action. The studied ENoP was a subscription
electronic service of a U.S. professional legal association, which used bulletin-board
technology similar to newsgroups. Using a two-month message sample, Social
Network Analysis was performed on 2460 messages posted by 526 individuals.
Results showed the network had a star shape with a critical mass of 23 participants
contributing most messages. The authors also sent an e-mail survey to participants to
determine individual resources and interests. Results showed network tenure,
individual expertise, a desire for reputation enhancement, and a lack of local peers
with whom to discuss professional issues were all significantly related to responding
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to questions posted by others. The article provides evidence of SHARED REPERTOIRE
(i.e. online discussion archive, the technical language of the legal profession),
LEARNING (because participants asked for and received help) and JOINT ENTERPRISE
(because of the narrow focus of the list). Still, online exchanges are not described in
sufficient detail to yield evidence of MUTUAL ENGAGEMENT, nor is any evidence of
COMMUNITY reported.
Hara and Kling (2002) describe an online CoP based on a closed mailing list for licensed
state public defenders. The forum exhibited heavy traffic (average 107 weekly messages)
and about 250 suscribed members. Interviews with participants revealed they used the
mailing list for basic information sharing, more complex “brainstorming” and problem-
solving (hence MUTUAL ENGAGEMENT and LEARNING) and for learning about and
discussing current legal issues (hence JOINT ENTERPRISE). Evidence for SHARED
REPERTOIRE can be reasonably inferred from the technical language used by the legal
profession. No evidence of COMMUNITY was mentioned in the paper. The article reports
also some perceived drawbacks of the community: some attorneys attempted to “free-
ride” on the efforts of others by posting legal questions which they had not researched at
all, hoping to get quick and free answers. This led some experienced lawyers to describe
the mailing list as containing a “lot of junk”.
Wenger et al (2002) describe a “global community” of geologists involved in deep-
sea petroleum exploration at Shell. The community was intentionally designed and
supported, with the vision “to bring the world’s leading expertise, no matter where it
was located, to bear on problems and issues, no matter where they occurred” (2002:
114). This community eventually spanned 18 time zones, 20 independent Shell
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companies, and over 1500 members. At the centre of this global community is a
network of local community coordinators, who see their role as brokering local and
global relationships, rather than knowledge. Although the authors (including Wenger)
describe this as a virtual or distributed CoP, it is more similar to a constellation of
communities (Wenger, 1998), or to a Network of Practice (Brown and Duguid, 2001).
The impossibility of direct ENGAGEMENT limits the size of particular communities,
and though ENGAGEMENT between geographically distributed members is entirely
possible, calling the entire global community a CoP stretches the original concept
beyond recognition (Roberts, 2006). Because of this, the study only yields evidence
of LEARNING (in the form of acquiring new knowledge), SHARED REPERTOIRE (in the
form of jargon and shared practices) and JOINT ENTERPRISE (in the form of a narrow
technical specialty).
Saint-Onge and Wallace (2002) provide a detailed description of the design and
successful launch of a web-based CoP for insurance agents at Clarica, a Canadian life
insurance company. The project was designed to support the company’s 3000
independent agents, most of whom work alone from various points of Canada’s huge
territory, conducting day-to-day business with Clarica through their laptops. The Agent
Network is an extension of Clarica’s proprietary intranet technology. It is a fairly
conventional KM project, but it exhibited unusual sensitivity to people issues, probably
due to the project designers attending a CoP workshop conducted by Etienne Wenger.
For instance, the completed technological infrastructure was populated by making a
voluntary invitation to 150 agents, who were expected to take ownership for the
community and become permanent hosts. This call had a 95% acceptance rate, where
developers expected no more than 50%, indicating high agent interest in electronically
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meeting and sharing knowledge with other agents facing their same business
circumstances. The description of the community provides evidence of MUTUAL
ENGAGEMENT (in the form of problem-solving), COMMUNITY (the study notes that
almost from its launch the Agent Network developed a distinctive sense of
community), SHARED REPERTOIRE (in the form of online tools and knowledge
repositories), JOINT ENTERPRISE (because the agents shared the same professional
practice) and LEARNING (described as support for novice agents and continuous
renewal for experienced agents).
Schlager et al (2002) describe an online CoP aimed at K-12 teachers called TAPPED-IN.
Using MUD’s, they created virtual rooms which allow both public and private
discussion, with whiteboards and sharing of documents. They invited several education
organisations to participate as tenants, and provide professional development content.
The article reports three years of usage statistics, and several snippets of interactions
between teachers. From these, and from community descriptions, evidence for most of
Wenger’s constructs can be inferred. Specifically, there is evidence of MUTUAL
ENGAGEMENT (in the form of teachers working collaboratively), JOINT ENTERPRISE
(because the forum focuses on teacher professional development), SHARED REPERTOIRE
(in the form of online tools and practices) and LEARNING (in the form of knowledge
sharing). Schlager et al (2002) characterise TAPPED-IN as a successful online CoP, but
warn online facilitation and continuous support are essential to maintain the CoP.
Therefore, they see unaided Internet media such as listservs or newsgroups as insufficient
to “support the ebb and flow of discourse and collaboration that is characteristic of
professional practice” (2002: 152); concluding that a listserv or newsgroup, no matter
how well-trafficked, is not a CoP, a conclusion challenged in the next section.
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Pan and Leidner (2003) present a case study of a firm’s global knowledge-sharing
efforts using a subscription-based networks (Compuserve). They argue their study
provides empirical evidence of KMS used to successfully provide bridges between
local CoPs. Still, their definition of CoP does not include co-location or even guarantee
MUTUAL ENGAGEMENT actually takes place in a sustained manner. Thus, the weaker
concept of NoP is more consistent with the authors’ operational definition. This is
further indicated by the description of interactions they provide, which do not seem
frequent or intensive enough to justify calling the aggregate a CoP, although there is
some evidence of LEARNING (because requests to the network for information or
knowledge did not go unattended) and REPERTOIRE (in the form of online tools and
knowledge repositories).
Ardichvili, Page and Wentling (2003) report a qualitative study of “communities of
knowledge-sharing” at Caterpillar Inc. These communities interact through the
Knowledge Network, an intranet-based system designed to provide an infrastructure for
community functioning supported by a group of KM technology experts as well as
members of Caterpillar’s corporate university. Qualitative interviews with 30 members
of three distinct communities were performed. The aim of the study was to determine
motivations and barriers to employee participation in these communities. As in the Pan
and Leidner (2003) study, local CoPs are much more in evidence than virtual ones.
Tellingly, participants in some interviews argued the Knowledge Network should be
designed to support local CoPs rather than absorb them. The article yielded evidence of
MUTUAL ENGAGEMENT and LEARNING (employees used the communities for problem-
solving) as well as SHARED REPERTOIRE (in the form of network access to Best
Practices and a Lessons Learned database).
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DeSanctis et al (2003) conducted an ambitious and original study in which they make an
explicit comparison of learning outcomes across various kinds of electronic communities.
Specifically, they investigated virtual learning networks supported by three different e-
based venues: video-conferenced MBA classrooms, team electronic discussion spaces,
and Internet-based communities. In addition, every group was assessed on three different
types of group learning: declarative and procedural information exchange, transactive
learning and sense-making. These reflect increasingly sophisticated forms of electronic
interaction. The authors expected sense-making to be more difficult to achieve in Internet
communities, and their results generally confirmed this. Specifically, they studied a
sample of 40 Internet communities, which they classified into three main categories:
information kiosks, associations and communities of practice. The authors provide a case
description of one such community of practice, whose activity they studied between
December 1999 (when it first started) to April 2001. This community was launched with
an explicit message by its founder and coordinator inviting interested parties to discuss
and learn about the specific topic of public sector Knowledge Management. Over the first
months, discussions, though lively, stayed at the level of declarative and procedural
information exchange. However, after ten months, discussions became more complex
and reflective and the community achieved all three forms of learning, while a stable 20-
member core formed. DeSanctis et al, assessed this community as a CoP because it
achieved sense-making, which they define as the process of developing shared mental
models, and which they believe contributes to the formation of a CoP. The case
description provides evidence of MUTUAL ENGAGEMENT and LEARNING (in the form of
sense-making knowledge exchange through deep and reflective discussions), a JOINT
ENTERPRISE (the public sector KM domain), SHARED REPERTOIRE (jargon, group charter),
and COMMUNITY (exchange of personal information; a core group with longer tenure).
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Thus, the article makes a strong case for the existence of a successful virtual CoP, only
limited by its non-reliance on Wenger’s theoretical framework.
Lee and Cole (2003) performed a case study of the online Linux community, which
many consider an Internet-based CoP (e.g. Markus, Manville and Agres, 2000; Kogut
and Metiu, 2001; Snyder, 2005). Their aim was to develop an extra-organisational
community-based model of knowledge creation as opposed to a firm-based model.
Their data sources were the Linux kernel mailing list from 1995-2000, a survey of list
members, and the artifacts produced by the community, notably the Linux kernel
source code. The authors report the community is self-organised into a 122-member
core and a much larger periphery of over 4 thousand. The periphery performs the dual
tasks of writing code patches and reporting problems, while core members specialise in
the various subsystems (132 in all) making up the kernel, and focus on selecting the
best submitted patches for inclusion in the official release. The article provides explicit
evidence of JOINT ENTERPRISE (the Linux Operating System), SHARED REPERTOIRE
(community artifacts such as the source code and archived discussions), MUTUAL
ENGAGEMENT (in the form of collaborative code development, testing and critique),
COMMUNITY (because frequent exchanges and shared responsibilities make at least core
members known to each other), and LEARNING (through the process of continually
improving the product). In sum, Lee and Cole (2003) provide an excellent description
of the Linux kernel community which they characterise as an extra-organisational CoP.
Even though they do not use Wenger’s full theoretical framework, sufficient evidence
of the constructs is provided to make this a plausible assessment for the core; yet it is
unlikely the entire 4,000-strong community can be assessed as a CoP because of the
limits imposed by the criterion of direct ENGAGEMENT.
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Teigland and Wasko (2004) studied intra-organisational knowledge-sharing networks
at a division of Cap Gemini, a large European consultancy. They report the results of a
survey of participants in a listserv-based ENoP focused on the application of Microsoft
products at a consultancy. Results of this survey showed a positive association between
participation activity and tenure in the ENoP with acquiring knowledge from the
network as well as contributing to others. Additionally, knowledge acquisition from the
network and knowledge contribution to the network are positively related to individual
performance. The study explicitly mentions Wenger’s construct of MUTUAL
ENGAGEMENT as the cause of the ENoP, although no evidence of it is actually provided
in community descriptions or participant responses. The article does provide evidence
of LEARNING (the reported principal reason of ENoP members for participating),
SHARED REPERTOIRE (the online discussion archive) and JOINT ENTERPRISE (in the form
of the specialised topic of the mailing list).
At this point, two broad sets of conclusions emerge from this admittedly heterogenous
collection of papers. First there are the lessons learned from the collection as a whole,
specifically, what virtual learning communities are capable of doing, and how this
contributes to the thesis. Second, there are the limitations and gaps detected in previous
studies of “virtual” CoPs, or what the thesis can contribute to the current state of
knowledge.
With respect to the capabilities of virtual learning communities, the articles show:
• They can achieve a professional orientation (e.g. Murray, 1996; Hara and
Kling, 2002)
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• They can maintain focused discussions (e.g. Thomsen, 1996; Millen and
Dray, 2000)
• They enable powerful collaboration between widely distributed members
(e.g. Robey et al, 2000; Kimble et al, 2001; Lee and Cole, 2003)
• They enable information sharing (e.g. Hara and Kling, 2002; Pan and
Leidner, 2003)
• They enable collective problem-solving (e.g. Wasko and Faraj, 2000; Hara
and Kling, 2002; Lee and Cole, 2003)
• They enable sharing of knowledge and best practices (e.g. Lueg, 2000;
Wenger et al, 2002; Saint-Onge and Wallace, 2002)
• They can develop knowledge repositories and online tools (e.g. Schlager et
al, 2002; Ardichvili et al, 2003; Pan and Leidner, 2003)
• They enable formation of stable and persistent virtual communities (e.g.
Thomsen, 1996; Baym, 2000)
• They enable building strong personal relationships between members who
have never met personally (e.g. Teigland, 2000; Baym, 2000)
• They are frequently led by an energetic core of members (e.g. Thomsen,
1996; DeSanctis et al, 2003; Lee and Cole, 2003)
• They are valued by participants as learning forums (e.g. Murray, 1996;
Teigland and Wasko, 2004)
• They are valued by participants as communities of like-minded peers (e.g.
Wasko and Teigland, 2002; Saint-Onge and Wallace, 2002)
• They provide a forum for enacting and validating desired professional
identities (e.g. Thomsen, 1996; Bowers, 1997; Teigland, 2000)
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Thus virtual learning communities exhibit an impressive range of capabilities which
taken together make a strong case for the feasibility of true virtual CoPs. To this should
be added the evidence summarised in Table 3.2 about the presence of Wenger’s
constructs in reviewed communities. The sheer number of occurrences, and the fact that
several communities reportedly displayed the full range of Wenger constructs,
strengthens the theoretical case for the existence of virtual CoPs.
Turning now to the gaps and limitations of the reviewed references, it should be noted
first that for most studies, the feasibility of “virtual” CoPs was unproblematically
assumed. Only three studies –Baym (2000), Kimble et al (2001) and DeSanctis et al
(2003)– include a critical discussion of the issue, but without using Wenger’s full theory.
A second observation, not necessarily a limitation, concerns a divide Schwen and Hara
(2003) have noted in CoP literature (the reviewed articles are no exception) between
studies whose intent is design, i.e. that provide a prescription for the design and launch
of a virtual CoP (e.g. Schlager et al, 2002; Saint Onge and Wallace, 2002; Dubé et al,
2005) and studies whose intent is description, i.e. to examine a pre-existing group and
looks for traits known to be associated with CoPs (e.g. Baym, 2000; Hara and Kling,
2002). Schwen and Hara further argue Wenger’s (1998) book is a rich theoretical
description of a fully mature and constructive co-located CoP, but not a prescription for
designing a successful CoP, co-located or virtual. That this thesis does not focus on
design is by now fairly obvious. But neither is description its immediate objective.
Rather it starts with a broad discovery stage, where it will attempt to develop empirical
Internet-based indicators of CoP activity and maturity, and will then set out to locate
mature Internet-based CoPs.
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Thirdly, the 20 reviewed articles exhibit an important gap. Of the 16 that explicitly
address “virtual” CoPs, 15 define CoPs by citing Wenger (only Baym doesn’t).
However, none applies Wenger’s complete theoretical framework, specifically the
complete set of constructs (although COMMUNITY and LEARNING were mentioned by
all). For instance, no study attempted to document MUTUAL ENGAGEMENT taking place
over the network, or looked for evidence of a SHARED REPERTOIRE developed and based
on the network. This non-reliance on Wenger’s theory makes it difficult to assess to
what extent the virtual communities described in these studies are CoPs as defined and
described by Wenger (1998). The thesis will address this gap by using the complete set
of constructs as guidelines for the development of the virtual CoP model and the
Research Questions. The identification of a gap in the “virtual” CoP literature is the key
result of this section. Therefore:
The identified research need is to determine whether CoPs, rigorously
defined according to Wenger’s theoretical framework, can be fully
“virtual” or Internet-based.
3.3 – Challenges to the concept of “virtual” Communities of practice
Wenger’s (1998) theory does not make member co-location a requirement for a CoP,
only regular ENGAGEMENT. The theory is thus open to the possibility of virtual CoPs, as
long as the electronic networks over which ENGAGEMENT takes place can adequately
support it, with “adequacy” defined not a priori but solely by CoP members.
Nevertheless, some researchers reject the possibility of true CoPs forming over
electronic networks, particularly the Internet. This section will discuss their critiques.
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Jones (1997) argues that for an online collective to qualify as a virtual community
requires the presence of affective bonds between members, not just a high level of
interaction or a continuity of participation. Similarly, Kling and Courtright (2003)
believe not just the notion of “virtual CoP” is problematic, but more generally the
casual use of the term “community” to characterise groups that participate in electronic
forums. They critique the “aspirational” definition of virtual community proposed by
Rheingold (1993: 5):
Virtual communities are social aggregations that emerge from the Net when
enough people carry on those public discussions long enough, with sufficient
human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace.
Kling and Courtright argue the definition does not distinguish among various kinds of
social organisation that can use the Internet for interaction, such as “hangouts”, fan
clubs, associations, and communities. More generally, they take issue with published
descriptions of online groups which characterise the forum in question as a virtual
community only by virtue of the fact that its members interact online. This and Jones’
(1997) earlier point are valid concerns, and would discourage the usage of the term
“community” for the online collectives selected mostly through quantitative methods in
Stage III of the Research Strategy. However, succeeding Stages will guarantee that
selected collectives are characterised by much more than high volumes of participant
interaction.
Based on three years of research designing and supporting an Internet-based CoP for
teachers, Schlager et al (2002: 152) have concluded that unaided Internet media such as
listservs or newsgroups are insufficient to “support the ebb and flow of discourse and
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collaboration that is characteristic of professional practice [therefore] a listserv or
newsgroup, no matter how well-trafficked, is not a community of practice”. The
argument seems to suggest that the main obstacle lies in media richness. Yet, as
previously noted, the research of Lee (1994), Carlson and Zmud (1999), and Burke et
al (2001) supports the notion that a lean medium is not an insurmountable obstacle.
Thus even if the success of Schlager et al’s designed virtual CoP is heavily dependent
on online facilitation and continuous support, it does not follow that a newsgroup or
listserv cannot succeed as a CoP on its own.
Brown and Duguid’s construct of NoP is a more sophisticated challenge to the
possibility of “virtual” CoPs. They quite agree that Internet-based groups can
interact and share a practice, but they propose the weaker concept of NoP for these,
and reserve the strong concept of CoP only for co-located groups (Brown and
Duguid, 2000b).
Networks of practice are made up of people that engage in the same or very
similar practice, but unlike in a community of practice, these people don’t
necessarily work together [yet] such a network shares a great deal of common
practice. Consequently, its members share a great deal of insight and implicit
understanding. And in these conditions, new ideas can circulate. These do not
circulate as in a community of practice, through collaborative, coordinated
practice and direct communication. Instead, they circulate on the back of
similar practice (people doing similar things but independently) and indirect
communications (professional newsletters, listservs, journals, and conferences,
for example) (Brown and Duguid, 2000a: 28).
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An example they give is the 24,000-member cadre of Xerox photocopier repair
technicians (Brown and Duguid, 2001). They are geographically dispersed and too
numerous to know and engage with each other, so they cannot be a CoP, but they share
a common practice and are thus capable of sharing a great deal of knowledge. Another
example of NoPs are professions, “where again similar practitioners, by virtue of their
practice, are able to share professional knowledge through conferences, workshops,
newsletters, listservs, Web pages and the like” (Brown and Duguid, 2001: 206).
Brown and Duguid (2001) think of NoPs as equivalent to Strauss’ (1978) social worlds,
and Knorr Cetina’s (1999) epistemic cultures. In fact, they acknowledge their concept is
close to van Maanen and Barley’s (1984) occupational community, using at one time the
metaphor of a “virtual guild” (Brown and Duguid, 2000a: 29), but they wish to re-direct
attention from the “community” aspect of such groups to the shared practice of these
networks (ibid). They see NoPs as extended epistemic networks where practice provides
a common substrate which makes them capable of effectively sharing a great deal of
knowledge, even if most of their members “will never know, know of, or come across
one another” (2001: 205). They do not limit the definition or size of a NoP to members
who know each other, or have actually exchanged some knowledge. Two hematologists
who have never met would be part of the same NoP because of the highly specialised
practice they both belong to (Brown and Duguid, 2000a). Hence, the membership
criterion is not actual but only potential knowledge-sharing. Herein lies the key
difference with Wenger’s CoP, where the criterion is direct and sustained ENGAGEMENT.
Using the fact that shared practice is a common denominator of CoPs and NoPs,
Brown and Duguid propose a theoretical framework that explains why knowledge is
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sometimes “sticky” while at other times it is “leaky” (Brown and Duguid, 2000a,
2001). They draw upon well-known examples from the literature about instances
where knowledge could not flow within the organization (such as the GUI
breakthrough at Xerox), but could easily leak between different organizations
(specifically from Xerox to Apple). Brown and Duguid argue that knowledge cannot
easily flow between different CoPs, i.e. between people who have different practices.
By contrast, knowledge can easily flow between people who share a practice, be they
within the same CoP at a single organization, or within similar CoPs at different
organizations. They are like-minded professionals, among whom there exist such
weak ties as attending the same professional conferences, reading trade magazines, or
contributing to the same online newsgroups or listservs. These weak ties give rise to
an extensive NoP which connects the different CoPs, and provides conduits for
knowledge to leak from one organisation to another (even if the actual leakage is a
contingency; as was the famous visit of Steve Jobs to Xerox’s PARC). By contrast,
CoPs with different practices will have trouble sharing knowledge with each other,
even if they both belong to the same organisation, thus accounting for the stickiness
of knowledge.
Within this framework, CoPs are local high-density sections of larger NoPs. Members
of CoPs work together face-to-face and thus develop much stronger ties than those
prevalent over the NoP (Brown and Duguid, 2000b). This suggests that a viable
search strategy for CoPs (either virtual or co-located), is to examine the social
network structure of a known NoP for areas of high-density, a lesson that will be used
during the construction of the model of Internet-based CoP.
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Brown and Duguid proposed the concept of NoP with embedded CoPs in order to build
a single unified theory to explain the sticky and leaky properties of knowledge. Yet,
their use of the CoP concept is different from Wenger’s. First, they assert members of a
CoP work together whereas members of a NoP don’t (Brown and Duguid, 2000b).
However, in Wenger’s definition of CoP, “working together” both in the sense of
belonging to the same workgroup (as did Orr’s service reps, even though they normally
worked on their own), or in the sense of having a common employer or a shared
physical workplace (as did Wenger’s claims processors), is not a requirement for a CoP
to exist (Wenger, 1998, 2000a). What is absolutely necessary is that members interact
on a regular basis so that they can have the MUTUAL ENGAGEMENT that will build up
both the community and its indigenous practice. With regular interaction as a premise,
members of CoPs need not work together every day, nor do they need to be co-located.
Second, Brown and Duguid (2000b) see CoPs as face-to-face intra-organisational
groups, and thus discount the possibility of extra-organisational or Internet-based CoPs.
However, restricting the CoP concept only to co-located intra-organisational groups is
not really necessary to their theoretical argument about knowledge leaking or sticking.
It rather looks as an added restriction to make a stronger contrast between NoPs (which
can be virtual) and CoPs (which allegedly can’t).
Brown and Duguid’s work on NoPs has not gone beyond the theorising stage. By
contrast, Wasko and Teigland have applied this construct on several empirical studies,
which were reviewed in the previous section as virtual learning communities. The
examined communities scored well on the presence of Wenger’s constructs, as shown
previously in Table 3.2. Nevertheless, it is Wasko and Teigland’s reasoned position that
virtual communities based on electronic networks can at most achieve the status of
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NoPs, but not true CoPs (Wasko and Teigland, 2004). Hence, they pose a strong
theoretical challenge to the position of this thesis, which warrants a careful review of
their work.
After several years of empirical studies of NoPs, including their respective doctoral
dissertations, Wasko and Teigland (2004) recently turned to formal theorising, and
proposed a model for electronic NoPs or ENoPs, for which they provide a four-part
definition:
[W]e define an electronic network of practice as a self-organising, open activity
system, focused on a shared practice that exists through computer-mediated
communication (2004: 27).
First, ENoPs are self-organising because participation is voluntary and without
assigned deliverables, thus setting these structures appart from virtual project teams.
Second, ENoPs are open because they conduct discussions in public electronic spaces
where anyone can read them, or contribute messages. This sets them appart from
collectives that limit membership.
Third, members share a common practice and interact with each other to solve practice-
related problems, in effect conducting online MUTUAL ENGAGEMENT.
Fourth, ENoPs only exist over the network, they have no physical presence. This means
the knowledge exchanged through the network is codified as text messages, and is
publicly preserved online. It also means they can have any number of participants who
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need not know each other, or coordinate in any way. This sets them appart from
collectives where people know each other and good behaviour is enforceable through
social sanctions.
In order to explain the success of these online collectives, a success based on active
participation and seemingly selfless knowledge contribution, Wasko and Teigland
(2004) apply theories of public goods, social dilemmas and collective action.
Specifically, they consider the archive of the ENoP (typically a newsgroup) as a public
good collectively created by the community, echoing an earlier suggestion by Millen
(2000). This raises the issue of free-riding by lurkers, who have access to discussions
but do not post any messages. Wasko and Teigland see this as as a social dilemma,
because if all participants attempt to free-ride, the public good is not produced. They
suggest several factors can make participants overcome self-interested behaviour and
actively participate; among them:
a) the more heterogeneous the network is, the more likely that a critical mass of
dedicated and competent “organisers”, able to create the collective good on their
own, will be achieved (Oliver, Marwell and Teixeira, 1985).
b) individuals who have higher levels of professional expertise and
organizational tenure are more likely to participate (Constant, Sproull and
Kiesler, 1996).
c) individuals who lack access to local discussion alternatives, such as co-
workers or colleagues are more likely to participate (Wasko and Teigland, 2002).
d) affective factors, such as moral obligation from previously receiving help from
the network (Wasko and Faraj, 2000) or a sense of identification with the
network and its goals (Lakhani and von Hippel, 2000).
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In a previous study, the authors found empirical support for propositions b) and c)
above (Wasko and Teigland, 2002).
The ENoP model has two important coincidences with Wenger’s CoP model: the use of
the MUTUAL ENGAGEMENT construct, and the emphasis on a critical mass, which is not
a property of NoPs, but is common in CoPs which through their intensive ENGAGEMENT
develop core-periphery structures. However, Wasko and Teigland are trying to explain
all CoP-like online behaviour through the alternative NoP concept, because they share
Brown and Duguid’s position about CoPs being restricted to face-to-face groups. Still,
if some CoP-like behaviour in the Internet is caused by virtual CoPs (the position of
this research), then Wenger’s theory can provide an alternative explanation to the one
offered by the ENoP model.
Specifically, the lurker, or free-rider issue, can be explained by recalling Wenger makes
LEARNING a function of MUTUAL ENGAGEMENT. Therefore, the knowledge acquired by
a participant who actively ENGAGES in discussion, problem-solving and responding to
questions (even without any assurance of reciprocity), will not in general be the same
as the knowledge acquired by a lurker who merely reads through the exchange.
Through their ENGAGEMENT, active participants acquire some knowledge which is not
explicitly written on the textual messages. This is because, by hypothesis, participants
already share a practice (whether the group is a CoP or only a NoP) and thus share a
great deal of knowledge they do not need to make explicit in their textual exchange.
This tacit knowledge is put to work through ENGAGEMENT, using the exchanged
messages partially as a medium, partially as a catalyst or affordance (Cook and Brown,
1999). In other words, participants involved in MUTUAL ENGAGEMENT get more
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meaning from their textual exchange than they can possibly put into words; a variant of
Polanyi’s famous argument that “we can know more than we can tell” (Polanyi, 1966).
Hence, the aim of active participation is the LEARNING that each participant derives
from ENGAGEMENT, rather than the creation of the public archive, which would be more
of an instrumental aid (hence, part of SHARED REPERTOIRE). Therefore, the problem of
“free-riding on the efforts of others” is a mirage, because not all knowledge created
through ENGAGEMENT is captured in the public archive. The ENGAGEMENT of active
participants results in greater “private” LEARNING for them, which is undisturbed by the
existence of lurkers. Even the answering of questions without receiving anything back
is rewarded through LEARNING. For instance, it was found during this research that
newsgroups CPLUS and TAXES explicitly encourage questions from novices (see
Chapter Nine), because the regulars believe many of the best discussions have started
from seemingly innocent novice questions.
Having said this, the NoP concept is still the strongest theoretical challenge to virtual
CoPs in current literature. Both Brown-Duguid and Wasko-Teigland consider true
CoPs to be small tight-knit groups of members who know each other, work together
and communicate face-to-face. Both consider practice-sharing Internet-based groups
can at most reach the status of NoPs, but not true CoPs. Thus they alternatively make
members’ knowledge of each other, or their working together, or their interactions
being face-to-face, requirements for the existence of true CoPs. Wenger, on the other
hand, makes sustained MUTUAL ENGAGEMENT, by whatever means, the sole
requirement. This thesis will follow Wenger’s more developed theory, hypothesise
virtual CoPs are feasible, and seek actual working examples in the Internet. Of course,
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even if it succeeds, the thesis drew important lessons and insights from previous
research by Brown-Duguid and Wasko-Teigland, specifically:
• NoP theory gives no real argument that restricts CoPs to co-located groups.
• Professionally-focused newsgroups are the Internet-based portions of wider
NoPs.
• NoPs contain embedded CoPs, which are areas of direct and intensive
interaction, resulting in higher network density.
3.4 – Summary
This chapter has reviewed the theoretical arguments regarding the feasibility of
“virtual” CoPs and examined various kinds of “virtual” CoPs described in previous
studies. On balance, the literature tends to be fairly optimistic about the possibility and
advantages of virtual CoPs. However, in most cases this optimism is grounded on an
intuitive grasp of the CoP concept, and in no case were Wenger’s theoretical constructs
of MUTUAL ENGAGEMENT, COMMUNITY, SHARED REPERTOIRE, JOINT ENTERPRISE, and
LEARNING/IDENTITY ACQUISITION applied to rigorously assess whether a particular
online group functions as a CoP. This is the principal gap and research need the thesis
will concentrate on.
Previous articles about virtual learning communities yielded considerable evidence
about the viability of the Wenger constructs in online environments, which makes
virtual CoPs at least plausible. In addition, some of the capabilities revealed by these
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communities will be used in the construction of the model of Internet-based CoP,
forthcoming in Chapter Four.
Finally, theory and empirical studies about NoPs were reviewed, because they formally
challenge the notion of a “virtual” CoP. They were found not to provide solid
arguments against the possibility of virtual CoPs. Yet they yielded the useful insight of
studying professionally-oriented newsgroups, which are an example of NoP, as a
promising place to search for virtual CoPs, revealed as high-density areas within the
network. The Research Strategy, also forthcoming, will capitalise on this fact.
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Part Two
Research Strategy: Design
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CHAPTER FOUR
Research Design
Previous chapters reviewed theories of CoPs and virtual CoPs. The time has come to
build a theory-informed model of Internet-based CoP to provide direction to this
research. This is the key task of Chapter Four.
The chapter is organised in seven sections. The First develops and discusses a model of
Exemplary Internet-based CoPs that will provide the guidelines for the research design,
including the formulation of the Research Questions and Research Strategy. Section
Two then formally presents the aims and specific objectives of this research. Section
Three formulates the Research Questions that provide direction and focus to this study.
Section Four then makes an important decision by narrowing the scope of the thesis to
the Usenet discussion network. The rationale for this decision is discussed, and
previous research on Usenet-based communities, reviewed. Section Five addresses
thesis philosophy, including ontological and epistemological assumptions, as well as
the rationale for using triangulation of methods. Finally, Section Six uses the proposed
model as a blueprint for the development of an original Research Strategy, which is
structured around the stated Objectives, and carefully targets the Research Questions.
The last section is a chapter summary.
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4.1 – The model of “virtual” Community of Practice used in this research
This section proposes a theory-grounded model of Internet-based CoP that describes the
hypothesised target this study will search for. The model is conjectural, since the
existence of Internet-based CoPs is yet to be established. Still, by describing a specific
target, the model narrows and brings into focus the requirements the research design must
fulfil, and provides a detailed blueprint for the formulation of the Research Strategy.
4.1.1 – Model specification
The model intentionally specifies a particular type of community, referred to as an
“exemplary” virtual CoP. It includes two separate sets of visible attributes or traits.
First and foremost, labelled as Essential Traits, are Wenger’s constructs. According to
the operational definition of CoP proposed in Chapter Two, the presence of the
constructs is a necessary and sufficient condition for characterising a group as a CoP.
Second, the model includes an additional set, labelled Exemplary Traits. These include
contingent attributes that are frequently observed in CoPs and other communities, and
render a community more focused, productive and energetic.
Each set plays a different role. The role of the Essential Traits is to rigorously identify a
group as a CoP. However, assessing the presence of the Essential Traits requires
qualitative analysis of member interactions, which is time-consuming. Hence, the
Essential Traits are not suitable for conducting extensive searches. That is the role of
the Exemplary Traits. These cannot uniquely identify CoPs, because they appear in all
kinds of virtual communities. Yet, they are highly visible, and some can be quantified,
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making empirical detection easier. Thus, they are well-suited for extensive searches,
and for detecting productive, focused and energetic online communities, “exemplary”
communities, as it were. Although the two sets of Traits play different roles, they are
not independent entities. Rather, the Essential Traits are intensified or enriched by the
Exemplary Traits, as explained presently.
The rationale behind the model is that if a suitable number of virtual communities are
located that display all Exemplary Traits, there is a very good probability that some will
also display all Essential Traits, hence qualifying as “exemplary” Internet-based CoPs.
The virtual CoP or VCoP model, as it will be called, comprises the twelve visible Traits
displayed in Figure 4.1, and subsequently discussed.
A Model of “Exemplary” Internet-based CoP
Exemplary Traits Essential Traits
Mid-sized stable group MUTUAL ENGAGEMENT

High-volume of participant interaction SHARED REPERTOIRE
Core-periphery structure JOINT ENTERPRISE
Highly focused discussions COMMUNITY
Topic is identifiable profession LEARNING / IDENTITY ACQUISITION
High-quality institutional documents
Non-conflictive
Figure 4.1 – The VCoP Model
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4.1.2 – Exemplary Traits
4.1.2.1 – Mid-sized stable group
The model first requires an identifiable online group of people. This Exemplary Trait is
related to the Essential trait of COMMUNITY, and restricts it to “mid-sized”. An exemplary
CoP is not so small that it fails to achieve a critical mass that supports energetic
ENGAGEMENT (Oliver and Marwell, 1988), nor so large that direct ENGAGEMENT becomes
impossible (Wenger, 1998). Wenger et al, (2002) note conventional CoPs are groups of
between 15 and 50 stable participants, possibly with a larger periphery of onlookers and
visitors, who are not active participants. These numbers will be used as guidelines for the
search, making an implicit assumption that successful Internet-based CoPs are about the
same size as conventional CoPs.
4.1.2.2 – High-volume of participant interaction
The stronger ENGAGEMENT is within a group the more it will develop an indigenous
practice and function as a CoP (Wenger, 1998). Therefore, an exemplary Internet-based
CoP exhibits energetic participants who exchange a high-volume of messages, thus
building strong online ties between them. This Exemplary Trait is linked to the Essential
Trait of ENGAGEMENT, which it intensifies, rendering the community more visible.
4.1.2.3 – Core-periphery structure
An exemplary CoP exhibits a core-periphery structure, with core members contributing
most messages, thus setting the tone and direction of discussion (Wenger, 2000a).
Everett and Borgatti (1999: 397) define such a structure as follows:
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A network has a core-periphery structure if the network can be partitioned into
two sets: a core whose members are densely tied to each other, and a periphery
whose members have more ties to core members than to each other.
This Exemplary Trait “enriches” the Essential Trait of MUTUAL ENGAGEMENT. A core-
periphery structure reflects various degrees of ENGAGEMENT, which opens the
possibility of active participation to people other than core members (Wenger, 1998).
This increased membership makes for a more energetic and diverse community.
4.1.2.4 – Highly-focused discussions
This Exemplary Trait is linked to the Essential Traits of JOINT ENTERPRISE and
MUTUAL ENGAGEMENT, requiring that the latter remain centred on the former. In
essence, it requires that the community is successful in preserving its topical focus.
This is generally a significant indicator of quality in Internet-based communities, which
by being public and open must deal with off-topic messages from non-members and
commercial advertisers (Kollock and Smith, 1996; Smith, 1999).
4.1.2.5 – Topic is an identifiable profession
An exemplary CoP is defined as centred on a profession. Of all the Exemplary Traits,
this is the one most closely associated to a practice, because all professions are
practices (Brown and Duguid, 2001). Hence, this Trait probably exerts the greatest
influence on the “CoP-potential” of a virtual community. All other Exemplary Traits
can be present, and to a high degree, in a hobby community (e.g. alt.fan.harry-potter);
the profession Trait, by definition, cannot.
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This Exemplary Trait is linked to JOINT ENTERPRISE, whose theoretical purview it
narrows. Theory does not limit CoPs to professions; Lave and Wenger (1991)
examine the case of rehabilitated alcoholics. However, Wenger et al (2002: 30)
argue it is easier for a CoP to define its ENTERPRISE “when there is already an
established discourse, as is the case with a professional discipline.” Furthermore,
professionally-focused CoPs dominate the literature (e.g. Orr, 1990; Brown and
Gray, 1995; Gherardi et al, 1998; Wenger, 1998), suggesting these are more
relevant, and indeed more “exemplary”, to organisational studies, than CoPs pursuing
other interests.
4.1.2.6 – High-Quality institutional documents
Mature Internet communities develop permanent documents that fulfil a practical
function, such as a charter to tell visitors what the community is about, or a FAQ to
avoid endless repetition of routine questions (Hahn, 2000). These will be referred to as
institutional documents, and are a good indicator of the capacity for collective action of
an online community and of the commitment of its members. This Exemplary Trait
increases the quality of SHARED REPERTOIRE.
4.1.2.7 – Non-conflictive
In an exemplary CoP members enjoy working collectively on domain-related problems,
which presuposes a measure of mutual respect. Wenger (1998) mentions interpersonal
conflict as a day-to-day reality of some CoPs, even as part of the practice. However, in
the Internet social environment it is easy for argument and conflict to escalate, and
some newsgroups have actually been destroyed by “flame wars”. Thus an Exemplary
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virtual CoP will display little conflict, as manifested by Subject headers and message
tone. This Exemplary Trait intensifies the Essential Trait of COMMUNITY.
4.1.3 – Essential Traits
The Essential Traits of the model are Wenger’s constructs, discussed in Chapter Two.
Here, they are operationally defined in terms of several representative and visible
manifestations.
4.1.3.1 – MUTUAL ENGAGEMENT
Wenger (1998) emphasises sustained ENGAGEMENT is the root cause that makes a CoP
cohere and become a COMMUNITY. The combined Exemplary Traits of high-volume of
participant interaction and focus on a profession will practically guarantee the existence
of MUTUAL ENGAGEMENT, but actual confirmation requires qualitative analysis of
interactions. Real CoPs get real work done, they are not just communities of shared
interests (Wenger et al, 2002). Thus, member interactions should reflect collaborative
work (i.e. not just talk) that sustains and advances the practice. Typical manifestations
would be collaborative problem-solving, debating professional issues or sharing useful
information.
4.1.3.2 – SHARED REPERTOIRE
The presence of high-quality institutional documents is an indicator of SHARED
REPERTOIRE, but again it is not conclusive. To establish the existence of a REPERTOIRE,
the instrumental dimension of practice, it is necessary to qualitatively analyse the
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products of, and the tools deployed in, on-line interactions. Typical instances of a
SHARED REPERTOIRE include shared artifacts, shared criteria and shared practices.
4.1.3.3 – JOINT ENTERPRISE
The Exemplary Trait of professional topic goes a long way toward establishing a JOINT
ENTERPRISE, but again is insufficient by itself. In fact, JOINT ENTERPRISE is a more
elusive construct, because even though members of a CoP collectively negotiate the
ENTERPRISE and hold each other accountable, they do not need an explicit exchange or
a very frequent one to do it (Wenger, 1998). Again, the judgement of its presence is
qualitative, and a typical manifestation is that the group cares about an identifiable
domain of knowledge.
4.1.3.4 – COMMUNITY
The combined Exemplary Traits of a mid-sized stable cohesive and non-conflictual
group provide a foundation for the existence of COMMUNITY, but this requires further
qualitative assessment of interactions. Manifestations of COMMUNITY include
members’ knowledge of each other and a shared sense of community.
4.1.3.5 – LEARNING/IDENTITY ACQUISITION
Wenger’s (1998) construct of LEARNING has no antecedent in the Exemplary Trait set;
it has to be fully ascertained by participant-provided information or by examining the
content of interactions. Typical manifestations of LEARNING include new knowledge or
new skills acquired from participation in the community. Although these cannot be
directly observed, members can be expected to express satisfaction when they learn
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something, or to report LEARNING when expressly asked. IDENTITY ACQUISITION is an
even more elusive construct, as member messages addressing issues of IDENTITY are
probably not very common. Discussion of career issues will be used as a visible
manifestation of IDENTITY ACQUISITION.
4.1.4 – Model discussion
The VCoP model is intentionally designed to address the distinct problems of search
and assessment. The Exemplary Traits address the search problem, mainly through
extensive methods. The Essential Traits address the assessment problem, mainly
through intensive methods.
The model derives its theoretical validity from being transparently linked to Wenger’s
theory through the inclusion of the Essential Traits. Although the theoretical range of the
concept of CoP is narrowed by the inclusion of the Exemplary Traits, validity is not
compromised, because Exemplary Traits do not change the nature of the Essential Traits,
they only render them more pronounced and visible. For instance, the Exemplary Trait of
High-volume of participant interactions will be present if a CoP displays strong MUTUAL
ENGAGEMENT. Likewise, the Exemplary Trait of High-quality institutional documents is a
logical outcome of a well-developed REPERTOIRE.
Imposing on the model the additional requirements of the Exemplary Traits implies a
tradeoff, since they do restrict the greater theoretical range of CoPs defined solely by
Wenger’s constructs. Thus, an acknowledged limitation of the VCoP model is that it
may well discard “un-exemplary” and yet entirely valid Internet-based CoPs, simply
because they lack one or more of the Exemplary Traits. In exchange, by demanding
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highly-visible traits that simplify empirical detection, the model enables efficient
search and selection of communities with better-than-average CoP-potential. In
addition, by enabling extensive Internet searches, the model opens the door to a huge
search range, allowing the size and diversity of Internet to directly contribute to this
study’s success. Finally, the Exemplary Traits allow a clearer characterisation of
virtual CoPs detected by the model, because they will be more focused and energetic,
“exemplary” as it were.
The VCoP model can search and assess all kinds of Internet-based collectives. It is not
limited to a particular area of the Internet or a particular communication technology.
The only assumption is that the technology allows participants to sustain online
interactions. Neither is the model tied to particular research methods; in selecting these,
both theory and technological considerations should be weighed to make an informed
choice. In Section 4.4, the study becomes focused on a specific Internet area, but this is
a pragmatic choice, rather than a model limitation.
4.2 – Research aim and objectives
The development of the VCoP model is an important milestone since, together with the
Research Objectives, it will guide the formulation of Research Questions and Research
Strategy. This section will revisit and discuss the aims and Research Objectives initially
outlined in the Introduction; the next section will focus on the formulation of the
Research Questions. Beginning then with the aim:
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The aim of this research is to extend Wenger’s theory of CoPs to the social
areas of the Internet by undertaking a systematic search for, and a rigorous
assessment of, working exemplars of “virtual” or Internet-based CoPs.
This general aim was introduced in Chapter One, but explaining why it is a worthwhile
and relevant endeavour corresponded to Chapters Two and Three. The importance of
CoPs to business organisations and the increasing turbulence in the workplace make the
study of distributed CoPs a priority. Yet, there are few rigorous studies of virtual CoPs,
and even fewer that have fully applied Wenger’s (1998) theory.
The general aim can be broken down into six specific and cumulative Research
Objectives, which are formulated and discussed next.
In order to extend Wenger’s theory of CoPs to the Internet, the first step is the
development of a theory-informed model that describes in full detail how an Internet-
based CoP should be like. Such a model must provide a hypothetical, and yet, very
concrete target for the subsequent development of an effective Research Strategy.
Hence:
Research Objective One: To build a model of Internet-based CoP that is
consistent with Wenger’s theory of CoPs, and includes theory-informed criteria
that enable selection of virtual communities with high “CoP-potential”.
This Objective has been achieved already through the development of the VCoP model,
in Section 4.1.
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The second step is to use the model to devise a Research Strategy comprising the two
major tasks that structure this study: to search the Internet for virtual communities
exhibiting certain characteristics, and to theoretically assess CoP attributes of detected
communities. Therefore:
Research Objective Two: To design, under the guidance of the model, a
Research Strategy that will, first, enable detection of Internet-based
communities exhibiting high CoP-potential, and second, enable theory-
grounded analysis of selected communities to rigorously assess whether or not
they truly are CoPs.
The next Objective is the first to address the field research proper. This begins with a
broad search of the Internet aimed at locating the virtual communities that will
participate in this study on the basis of their strong affinity to the VCoP model. The
Objective can be framed thus:
Research Objective Three: To conduct a highly comprehensive search of the
Internet, and to locate the virtual communities that display the strongest affinity
to the model of Internet-based CoP.
Affinity to the model gives high CoP-potential to selected communities, but
considerably more evidence is required to make a valid CoP assessment. Therefore,
two independent and triangulating methods will be deployed to obtain quantitative and
qualitative evidence of the presence or absence of the Essential Traits in each
community. The corresponding Objectives are:
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Research Objective Four: To question regular participants of selected
communities about the presence or absence of visible manifestations of
Wenger’s constructs.
Research Objective Five: To directly examine online interactions of regular
participants in selected communities to determine the presence or absence of
visible manifestations of Wenger’s constructs.
The final Research Objective calls for integrating all available evidence to make an
assessment of which, if any, of selected communities can be characterised as an
Internet-based CoP lacking none of the attributes identified in Wenger’s CoP theory.
Research Objective Six: To assess the presence or absence of Wenger’s constructs
in each community, using concurring evidence from two independent methods, and
thereby establish whether any among selected virtual communities display all
theoretical properties of CoPs, and can therefore be characterised as such.
The Research Objectives describe the specific tasks the study must accomplish. The
forthcoming Research Strategy will address the techniques and procedures for
achieving the Objectives. First, though, it is important to carefully think through the
Research Questions the study must answer to fully achieve the Research Objectives, so
that the Strategy can be designed accordingly.
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4.3 – Research Questions
The Research Questions of the thesis are derived directly from the VCoP model. The
various sets of questions mirror the logic of the model in that some questions address
issues of community pre-selection, while others address the ultimately decisive issues
of CoP-assessment. This section will formulate explicit research questions to cover
every aspect of the study, in order to make the research logic more transparent, and
render implicit assumptions visible.
The approach followed by proposing the VCoP model is to describe conjectural
Internet CoPs, devise instruments for detecting them, and assess them rigorously
according to Wenger’s theory. This is a postpositivistic approach, as discussed in
Section 4.5. Therefore, the Research Questions will be framed as testable statements,
even if they are not statistical hypothesis, in order to better reflect this research
approach and philosophy.
4.3.1 – Principal Research Question
The overarching Research Question this thesis addresses, which logically follows from
the previously stated aim, can be framed as follows:
Principal Research Question. There exist stable Internet-based groups that
function as Communities of Practice.
The scope of this central question is very broad because Wenger’s concept of CoP
is complex, comprising the interrelated constructs described in Chapter Two.
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Therefore, the Principal Question will be addressed indirectly, through a set of
subsidiary research questions centred on the Essential Traits of the VCoP model, as
described later in this section. First, though, some preliminary issues must be
addressed.
4.3.2 – Preliminary Research Questions
The Principal Question implies suitable groups must first be located in the Internet
before they can be examined to determine whether or not they function as CoPs.
Therefore, as a necessary antecedent, several methodological questions are
formulated addressing the feasibility of an Internet search for hypothesised virtual
CoPs. The intent of these questions is to make explicit the various assumptions
underlying this research, thus enabling critical discussion. Preliminary Research
Questions are framed thus:
Preliminary1. There exist large numbers of stable Internet-based groups, and
efficient techniques can be devised to locate them.
Preliminary2. Internet-based groups exhibit considerable variation along the
following dimensions:
a) the size of the group
b) the volume of participant interaction
c) the extent to which they adopt a core-periphery structure
d) their success in maintaining a focused discussion
e) the topics they focus on
f) the institutional documents they develop
g) the level of conflict in participant interactions
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Preliminary3. Techniques can be devised to assess the affinity of Internet-
based groups along each dimension to the corresponding Exemplary Trait of the
VCoP model.
Preliminary4. Internet-based groups exhibiting all Exemplary Traits to a high
degree are more likely to be CoPs.
The assumptions reflected in the Preliminary Questions are plausible, but they cannot
be proved before launching the research, because there is no ex-ante way of
determining the complete population or the character of stable Internet-based groups.
Hence, only the success of the study can provide an affirmative, though limited,
response to these questions. Until then, the study must take for granted these
assumptions, which are discussed next.
The existence of Internet-based communities is well-established (e.g. Roberts, 1998;
Wellman and Gulia, 1999), making plausible the premise of Preliminary1. It is up to the
Research Strategy to propose techniques that can efficiently locate these communities;
their success or failure in the field will provide the basis for addressing the question.
The second Preliminary question assumes large numbers of Internet communities will
be sufficiently heterogeneous to achieve considerable variation along seven observable
group characteristics which match the Exemplary Traits of the VCoP model. Again,
confirmation depends on field results.
Assuming Preliminary2 is in fact correct, Preliminary3 posits techniques can be developed
to rank groups along each dimension according to their greater or lesser affinity to the
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criteria specified by the Exemplary Traits. Again, it is up to the Strategy to propose such
techniques, and their success in the field will give grounds for answering the question.
Finally, Preliminary4 states the strongest assumption of all: that the subset of Internet
groups exhibiting greatest affinity to the Exemplary Traits of the VCoP model is more
likely to contain true CoPs. It is a strong assumption because if proven correct, then it
would mean CoPs are detectable over the Internet, at least to a certain extent. The
plausibility of this assumption rests on the following rationale: In general, the presence
of the Exemplary Traits will tend to make selected virtual communities more focused,
productive and energetic. More particularly, though, if the community is centred on a
profession, and a practice is thus assured, its very focus, productivity and energy will
give it better odds of achieving the status of CoP. This is why the Exemplary Trait of
professional topic was previously judged the one most responsible for the “CoP-
potential” of a virtual community. As before, though, confirmation of Preliminary4 will
have to await field results.
4.3.3 – Exemplary Trait Research Questions
Having explicitly addressed the feasibility of Internet searches, the next set of questions
addresses the criteria which should guide those searches in order to increase the
probability of eventual success. These criteria are none other than the Exemplary Traits
of the VCoP model, hence the name of this set of questions. They are:
Exemplary1. An Exemplary Internet-based CoP is mid-sized.
Exemplary2. An Exemplary Internet-based CoP exhibits a high volume of
participant interaction.
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Exemplary3. An Exemplary Internet-based CoP exhibits a core-periphery
structure.
Exemplary4. An Exemplary Internet-based CoP exhibits highly-focused
discussions.
Exemplary5. The topic of an Exemplary Internet-based CoP is an identifiable
profession.
Exemplary6. An Exemplary Internet-based CoP exhibits high-quality
institutional documents.
Exemplary7. An Exemplary Internet-based CoP is non-conflictive.
Discussion of these questions is omitted since it would parallel previous discussion of
the Exemplary Traits in Section 4.1.
4.3.4 – Essential Trait Research Questions
Assuming then that a number of Internet groups with high affinity to the Exemplary
Traits (and therefore high CoP-potential) can be found, the Principal Research Question
can be addressed. This is done by formulating an additional set of interrelated questions
focused on the Essential Traits, hence the name of the set. They are:
Essential1. There exist groups that sustain MUTUAL ENGAGEMENT through
Internet-based interaction.
Essential2. There exist groups that negotiate a JOINT ENTERPRISE through
Internet-based ENGAGEMENT.
Essential3. There exist groups that develop a SHARED REPERTOIRE through
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Essential4. There exist groups that cohere as a COMMUNITY through Internet-
based ENGAGEMENT.
Essential5. There exist groups whose members achieve LEARNING through
Essential6. There exist groups whose members ACQUIRE AN IDENTITY through
These questions can only be said to provide an affirmative answer to the Principal
Research Question when they are all answered affirmatively. This is because each of
them enquires after an essential element of a CoP, even if there is some degree of
overlap. It is simply a different way of stating that, as defined by this study, assessing a
group as a CoP requires the presence of all Wenger constructs.
4.4 – Focusing the study on the Usenet discussion network
Having arrived at a set of Research Questions that will provide direction and focus to this
study, and before designing the Research Strategy, a prior decision must be made: the
informed choice of Internet area this study will focus on. The Internet is a complex
network that encompasses many different communication technologies. Several have
been designed to support one-to-many communication, in order to facilitate online
discussion. It is in these “social areas” of the Internet that different types of virtual
communities exist (for typologies, see Kling and Courtright, 2003; Porter, 2004). The
most common technologies are:
• Name-brand discussion groups, such as Yahoo Groups (DeSanctis et al, 2003).
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• Private online discussion forums set up by professional associations
(Romano, 1998; Wasko and Teigland, 2002).
• Multi-user Dungeons, also known as MUD’s (Schlager et al, 2002;
Davenport, 2004).
• Blogs, which are personal journals published on the Web and commented on by
readers (Baker and Green, 2005). The name is a shortened form of “Web Log”.
• Chat rooms, which are spaces for synchronous (i.e. live) computer-mediated
conversation.
• Mailing lists, also known as listservs (Thomsen, 1996; Millen and Dray,
2000).
• Usenet newsgroups (Wasko and Faraj, 2000; Baym, 2000).
The communication dynamics characterising each of these technologies are quite
different: some are synchronous (e.g. chat rooms), most are asynchronous (e.g. listservs
and newsgroups); some are open to any participant (e.g. most newsgroups), while
others erect significant barriers to entry (e.g. private discussion groups). These
differences impact the quality and character of the social spaces that develop around the
technologies (Hahn, 2000). Moreover, despite their being all Internet-based
technologies, each poses different technical problems regarding the search for virtual
communities. Hence the need to tailor the Research Strategy to a particular area. The
informed choice was the Usenet discussion network, for several reasons.
First, Usenet can be efficiently searched using Smith’s (1999) newsgroup analysis tool,
Netscan. Several Traits of the Exemplary set can be measured with Netscan, and
analysed newsgroups can be sorted according to their affinity to them.
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Second, Social Network Analysis (SNA) can be applied to Usenet newsgroups to reveal
stable cohesive subgroups (Murillo, 2002). In particular, a core-periphery model can be
fit to individual newsgroups, thus measuring another Exemplary Trait.
Third, Usenet is big: it is the largest and oldest discussion network on Earth (Hahn, 2000).
Size makes the search more challenging, yet it is a resource as well, because large numbers
of heterogeneous participants improve the odds of achieving collective action. Oliver and
Marwell’s (1988) theory of the critical mass predicts that large networks are more likely to
succeed in collective action because they have a better chance of containing a number of
dedicated and competent “organisers” that can band together and mobilize others.
Fourth, the asynchronous character of Usenet communication may foster deeper analysis
and reflection of issues. Benbunan-Fich and Hiltz (1999) found student teams using
asynchronous discussion software to solve a case study problem produced better and longer
reports than teams solving the same case through face-to-face discussion.
Fifth, Usenet represents an interesting limit case given its low media-richness. If complex
MUTUAL ENGAGEMENT can be effectively achieved within the limitations of plain-text
messages, giving rise to true Usenet-based CoPs “in the wild”, then it should be easier to
achieve in the richer media provided by modern intra-organisational networks.
Finally, there is considerable previous research about Usenet virtual communities,
providing useful lessons for this thesis. Relevant studies are reviewed in this section,
immediately following some background about Usenet’s structure.
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Usenet is self-organised by discussion topic into thousands of distinct newsgroups,
providing a practical way for people with shared interests to find each other and talk. With
the number of newsgroups exceeding 100,000 (Smith, 2002), every topic of human interest
is discussed somewhere, from wildlife photography to medieval genealogies. Early in the
history of Usenet, a classification scheme was established to help people find the topics
they were interested in. A system of categories called hierarchies was launched between the
summer of 1986 and March of 1987, with seven initial categories (Hahn, 2000):
comp Computers
sci science and technology
news Usenet itself
rec recreation, hobbies, arts
soc social and cultural issues
talk debate, controversial topics
misc miscellaneous
Today, each hierarchy contains thousands of newsgroups focused on the specific
topic announced in their name. Newsgroup names consist of two or more parts,
separated by dots. The first part states the hierarchy, and the others describe with
increasing specificity the topic of the newsgroup. For example, the newsgroup
comp.lang.java discusses the JAVA computer language. As discussion becomes more
and more specialised, new groups are launched with increasingly specific names,
such as comp.lang.java.security. This hierarchical organisation, coupled with the
huge number of participants reached worldwide, has supported the formation of many
topically-focused communities. By conducting discussions in public, newsgroups
signal worldwide their topic, level of expertise and the often colourful personalities of
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members. Hence, they attract new participants, either as occasional question-askers or
as new stable members.
Previous studies about Usenet-based communities provide evidence of the presence of all
Essential Traits and some Exemplary Traits. Therefore, though not the intended aim of
the studies, they do provide indirect support for the thesis that Usenet CoPs are feasible.
Despite newsgroup posters’ supposed anonymity, which would arguably render
community impossible, Donath (1998) found identity cues in Usenet are closely
monitored by participants, who become attuned to nuances of e-mail addresses and
signature styles. In time, persistent contributors to newsgroups make a strong impression
on other members, and build up a fairly accurate reputation. Hence it is very difficult for
a regular participant to achieve perfect anonymity. Many simply opt for pseudonymity,
posting regularly under an assumed name that is untraceable to a real world person.
Having made this qualification, COMMUNITY is the Essential Trait most often reported in
Usenet research. North (1994), an early researcher of Usenet, performed an ethnography
of newsgroups, actively participating in several, and conducting some online interviews.
He reports a very social environment and a strong sense of online community, despite
what he calls Usenet’s “faceless textual interface”. Patterson (1996) examined newsgroup
alt.good.morning, and found a rich culture, local institutions, language play, and the firm
conviction of members of belonging to a virtual community. In addition, online surveys
conducted by several studies have found Usenet-based communication supports the
formation of true personal relationships (Parks and Floyd, 1996; Roberts, 1998;
McKenna, Green and Gleason, 2002), thus yielding evidence for the sub-construct of
‘Members’ knowledge of each other.’ More to the point, respondents report a “sense of
community” in specific newsgroups (Parks and Floyd, 1996; Roberts, 1998).
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Evidence of SHARED REPERTOIRE comes in the form of communities developing and
enforcing local rules and conventions, usually to protect discussion focus, an Exemplary
Trait. Kollock and Smith (1996) argue the difference between successful and
unsuccessful newsgroups lies on the former’s ability to enforce local norms and customs
aimed at solving social dilemmas such as posting off-topic messages. McLaughlin,
Osborne and Smith (1995) performed a discourse analysis of all messages posted to five
newsgroups during a three week period to detect conduct-correcting episodes. They
derived a taxonomy of Usenet offences, and concluded regular participants enforce
respect of local norms and idiosyncrasies to protect the identity and smooth functioning
of their virtual communities. Tepper (1997) describes how members of alt.urban.folklore,
who call themselves ‘Old Hats’, adhere to subtle but effective local customs to reinforce
the identity and subculture of the community and clearly mark its boundaries.
The strong topical focus displayed by some newsgroups can be interpreted as evidence of
JOINT ENTERPRISE. Sivadas, Grewal and Kellaris (1998) surveyed six newsgroups
focused on different types of music, and found posters to be highly involved with their
newsgroup, and with the type of music it espouses (e.g. buying recorded music, attending
concerts, etc.), but minimally so with respect to other music newsgroups. More in-depth
case studies of fan communities are provided by Watson (1997) and Baym (2000); the
first about a rock group, the second about soap operas. More evidence of JOINT
ENTERPRISE is afforded by support newsgroups, which not only discuss a topic, but
actively provide social and emotional support to their members. Winzelberg (1997)
applied content analysis to a sample of messages from a newsgroup oriented to
individuals with eating disorders and discovered strong emotional support of experienced
newsgroup participants toward newbies. Preece (1999) described how empathy was
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delivered in a group focusing on knee-injuries, where, unlike most other newsgroups,
elementary oft-repeated questions from newbies did not elicit reproachful or ironic replies
(flames). Newsgroup veterans were extremely patient and understanding with newbies,
striking a thoughtful balance in their provision of factual information and sympathy.
Evidence of MUTUAL ENGAGEMENT, and indirectly of LEARNING, is anecdotal but
comes from numerous studies. Usenet communities provide sophisticated technical
support to practitioners from diverse professional fields such as acounting (Alexander,
2000), computer programming (Wasko and Faraj, 2000), cellular biology (Hengen,
1997), taxes (Fuller, 1999), veterinary diagnosis (Lofflin, 2000), handcrafts (Lovelace,
1998), and law (Samborn, 1999; Ricci, 2000). As Wellman (1999: 15) aptly sums up:
Usenet “supports emotional, nuanced and complex interactions, belying early fears that
it would be useful only for simple, instrumental exchanges”.
Two studies provide evidence of IDENTITY ACQUISITION. Lakhani and von Hippel
(2000) conducted a survey of newsgroup comp.infosystems.www.servers.unix and
found strong identification of participants with their online community. Blanchard and
Markus (2004) performed participant observation and member interviews in a Usenet
community focused on triathlons, and found participants create through their posts an
online identity closely aligned to the goals of the community, and also display
recognition of the online identities constructed by other members.
Finally, evidence for the Exemplary Trait of core-periphery structure comes from several
studies that report a clear differentiation of participants with respect to their involvement
in the community. Some are stable and prolific participants, others post occasionally, and
some post only once. They use the term “core” to refer to the subset of stable and active
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participants, who dominate the discussion and heavily influence the identity, culture and
local customs of the community (McLaughlin et al, 1995; Thomsen, 1996; Tepper, 1997;
Smith, 1999; Millen and Dray, 2000; Blanchard and Markus, 2004). Previous research by
this author should also be mentioned, since it provides an important methodological
foundation for this thesis. Three SNA models of cohesive sub-group –cliques, k-plexes
and continuous core-periphery structure– were fitted to 30-week message samples from
five Usenet newsgroups: comp.lang.c++.moderated, humanities.philosophy.objectivism,
misc.invest.mutual-funds, misc.writing and sci.physics. The cohesive sub-groups were
tested for activity (the number of exchanged exchanged) and stability (by separately
testing for activity in each 10-week sub-sample). The study found stable and active
cliques and k-plexes in four out of five newsgroups, and stable and active core-periphery
structures, also in four out of five newsgroups (Murillo, 2002). The SNA methods used
there have been adapted for this doctoral research.
4.5 – Research philosophy
The researcher followed a particular research logic from the start; only later was the
approach reflectively identified as postpositivism or Critical Rationalism. Accepting
Wenger’s (1999) argument that CoPs have existed wherever and whenever human beings
congregate (ancient tribes and medieval guilds are given as examples); the researcher
hypothesised they would also spontaneously convene in the social spaces of Usenet;
hence the early focus on designing detection instruments. The attempt to apply a well-
established theory to a new domain, and the described hypothesis-testing logic,
correspond to what Blaikie (1993) calls a deductive research strategy. This fits the
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researcher’s realist ontology, and an epistemology that while acknowledging the theory-
ladenness of observation, and the approximative and perfectible condition of scientific
explanations (Artigas, 1992; 1999), is still committed to the notions of objectivity and
truth as the guiding ideals of the research enterprise (Phillips, 1990; Searle, 1993). As
Miles and Huberman (1994: 4) aptly sum up:
Human relationships and societies have peculiarities that make a realist approach
to understanding them more complex–but not impossible. Unlike researchers in
physics, we must contend with institutions, structures, practices, and conventions
that people reproduce and transform. Human meanings and intentions are worked
out within the framework of these social structures–structures that are invisible but
nonetheless real. In other words, social phenomena, such as language, decisions,
conflicts, and hierarchies, exist objectively in the world and exert strong influences
over human activities because people construe them in common ways. Things that
are believed become real and can be inquired into.
Although more frequently associated with quantitative methods, the deductive research
strategy also admits qualitative methods as well as combinations of quantitative and
qualitative methods, provided they are used with the same ontological assumptions
(Blaikie, 2000). In this case, the ontology is realist throughout, and the hypothesised virtual
CoPs are the assumed ‘objective’ target of the study. Therefore, a compatibilist, pragmatist
position will be adopted, allowing the researcher to mix and match design components to
achieve the best fit with the research problem and logic (Johnson and Onwuegbuzie, 2004).
Specifically, quantitative and qualitative methods will be combined to develop a more
reliable composite assessment of hypothesised virtual CoPs, and to build triangulation into
the study, thus increasing validity (Rocco, Bliss, Gallagher and Pérez-Prado 2003).
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The first problem the Research Strategy must address, previously referred to as the
search problem, is the detection of virtual communities in Usenet. Not all newsgroups
contain virtual communities, but those that do exhibit a dense and persistent cluster of
communication between a subset of stable participants, and suitable methods must be
devised to locate such clusters. The second problem, earlier referred to as the
assessment problem, involves in-depth examination of detected communities to
determine whether or not the Essential Traits of the VCoP model are present.
The search problem will be addressed by the combined deployment of two quantitative
tools that are particularly suited to the detection and measurement of dense clusters in
Usenet, the Netscan analyser and Social Network Analysis. The assessment problem
will be addressed through the combined use in selected communities of quantitative
and qualitative methods, in order to build robust triangulation into the study (Rocco et
al, 2003). The process is illustrated in Figure 4.2, which displays the social network of
a hypothetical virtual community exhibiting a core-periphery structure, as revealed by
strong ties between core members. The community will be assessed by two
independent instruments. A quantitative Survey will be applied to a sample of
community members, enquiring about visible manifestations of Wenger’s constructs,
i.e. the sub-constructs. This will be complemented by a qualitative Content Analysis of
the interactions between core-members, again targeting the sub-constructs. Both sets of
results will be triangulated into a single composite assessment regarding the presence in
the community of the Essential Traits. Specifically, the assessment will require that the
presence of each Essential Trait be corroborated by concurring results from both
instruments.
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Essential Trait assessment

through concurring survey
MUTUAL and content analysis results
ENGAGEMENT
Essential Traits
manifested in
online interactions
Essential Traits
reported by survey
respondents
Virtual community with

core-periphery structure
Figure 4.2 – Triangulation of Survey and Content Analysis results
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Like the previous decision making Exemplary Traits part of the model, the requirement
that each construct be independently detected by two instruments involves a tradeoff.
Making the assessment more rigorous reduces the field of candidates, but increases
confidence in the validity of results. In addition, the use of two separate instruments
will provide a richer picture of the examined communities than either method could
achieve separately.
Yauch and Steudel (2003) used a similar mixed methods approach to assess the
organisational cultures of two small manufacturers. The authors first used qualitative
document review, participant observation and group interviews to identify organisational
values, assumptions and behavioural norms. They followed up with a quantitative survey,
the Organizational Culture Inventory (Cook and Lafferty, 1987), a validated instrument
which measures 12 sets of behavioural norms using 10-item scales. Robust triangulation
was achieved when both qualitative and quantitative methods corroborated the presence
of particular cultural factors in the studied firms. Specifically, both methods identified
Avoidance and Complancency behaviours at one of the firms. In addition, the use of
mixed methods resulted in deeper understanding of the organisation than either method
on its own could have accomplished (Yauch and Steudel, 2003).
The search and assessment problems are both addressed with extensive, rather than
intensive methods. An alternative strategy would be to perform an ethnography of one
or several potential CoPs, as done in most previous studies (Orr, 1990; Lave and
Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998). However, ethnography is extremely time-consuming;
examining more than two or three communities would exceed the scope of a doctoral
project. In addition, the problem would remain of how to first locate communities with
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high CoP-potential, so that the ethnography is well-targeted. Hence, extensive methods
were preferred, with an emphasis on discovery prior to in-depth analysis.
Having discussed the research philosophy, a more detailed description of the Research
Strategy follows, though methods are discussed separately, in Chapter Five.
4.6 – Research Strategy
The VCoP model will be the blueprint for developing the Research Strategy, a multi-stage
process structured around the Research Objectives, and targeting the Research Questions.
4.6.1 – Stage I: Model Specification
Stage I of the Strategy, corresponding to Objective One, is to build a theoretically-
grounded model of Internet-based CoP as a hypothetical but concrete target for the
Usenet search. Model specification is not only a major output of the Research Strategy
but also a key input, because by specifying a target for this research, the model
substantially determines ulterior methodological choices. For this reason, model
specification was actually addressed in Section 4.1, and has since guided the
formulation of Research Questions and Strategy.
4.6.2 – Stage II: Strategy Formulation
Each Stage of the Research Strategy is an operational response to a specific Research
Objective. Moreover, the Strategy follows the design and logic of the VCoP model.
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Therefore, it is a two-part process: a first part consisting of an extensive search for
suitable Usenet communities, conducted under the guidance of the Exemplary Traits,
and a second part consisting of intensive analyses of selected communities, under the
guidance of the Essential Traits. The methods and techniques deployed in each part
constitute the remaining Stages of the Strategy as described next.
4.6.3 – Stage III: Usenet Search
The Third Stage, which addresses Objective Three, involves the selection of
participating newsgroups, a critical task on which hinges the eventual success of the
entire research. It will rely on the Netscan newsgroup analyser to perform
comprehensive Usenet searches. Operational quantitative and qualitative selection
criteria will be derived from the Exemplary Traits. Among quantitative criteria are
Netscan statistics of posting activity and the poster-to-post ratio, which will aid in
identifying newsgroups with dense cores. Qualitative criteria include professional
topics and high-quality institutional documents. The criteria will be progressively
applied to, and a ranking performed of, the initial population of newsgroups,
beginning with extensive quantitative criteria, followed by more time-intensive
qualitative criteria, and finally, the core-periphery analysis, which being the most
time-intensive will be applied to a much reduced newsgroup subset. Given these
stringent selection criteria, and the large size of the initial sampling universe, finalist
communities will exhibit the highest available affinity to the Exemplary Traits of the
VCoP model, and therefore, highest possible CoP-potential. The results of this Stage
will provide elements to addresses both Preliminary and Exemplary Trait Research
Questions.
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4.6.1 – Stage IV: Participant Survey
Stage IV, corresponding to Objective Four, involves questioning regular participants of
selected communities about the presence or absence of the Essential Traits of the VCoP
model. In order to maximise convenience to respondents, and likely response rates, a
web-based Survey will be used, based on point-and-click Likert scales. The design of
scales will closely follow the Essential Trait Research Questions. Specifically, the
Survey will ask high-coreness community members about visible indicators of
Wenger’s constructs, such as collective problem-solving in the case of MUTUAL
ENGAGEMENT. The Survey will thus gather quantitative evidence about the Essential
Trait Research Questions.
4.6.5 – Stage V: Content Analysis of Discussions
Research Objective Five calls for direct examination of newsgroup discussions, under
the premise that if selected communities are CoPs, then online interactions should yield
evidence of Wenger’s constructs. This will be accomplished through a Content
Analysis of selected discussion threads. Because of the huge amount of textual
discussion each community contains, a theoretical sample of threads will be selected,
using theory-informed criteria from the VCoP model. Specifically, threads dominated
by core members and focused on professional topics will be selected. The coding
categories for the Content Analysis will be derived from the Essential Traits, using the
same indicators previously used to design the Survey. The Content Analysis will thus
gather qualitative evidence about the Essential Trait Research Questions.
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4.6.6 – Stage VI: CoP Assessment
The final stage in the Research Strategy is making a critical synthesis of the quantitative
and qualitative data obtained about each community, and assessing to what extent each of
them can be considered a true CoP. This is the agenda of Research Objective Six. Each
community will be tested for the presence of the complete set of Wenger constructs. To
maximise validity, the presence of each construct must be confirmed by concurring
results by both the Survey and the Content Analysis. Communities exhibiting all of
Wenger’s constructs, and therefore lacking none of the theoretical attributes of CoPs,
will be assessed as Exemplary Usenet-based CoPs.
4.6.7 – The Funnel Research Strategy
The Research Strategy outlined above can be visually represented, using the
conventional image of a Funnel, as displayed in Figure 4.3. The logic of the Funnel
Strategy involves taking in as large an input as possible of Usenet newsgroups, through
the upper opening of the Funnel, and making a first selection using quantitative criteria
from the Exemplary Traits that can be extensively applied through Netscan’s wide
scope. This results in a considerably reduced newsgroup subset which can then be
examined, through direct observation, for the qualitative criteria of the Exemplary
Traits; a more time-intensive method. This once again results in a substantial reduction
of elligible newsgroups, which can then be analysed through the computationally-
intensive core-periphery analysis. Virtual communities exhibiting the highest affinity to
the Exemplary Traits are then allowed to proceed to the next level of testing, where the
Essential Traits come into play. Two methods will independently test for the presence
or absence of Wenger’s constructs, the Survey of high-coreness participants, and the
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USENET
Quantitative Exemplary Traits

• High-volume participant interaction
• Mid-sized subgroup
• Highly focused discussions Stage III
Qualitative Exemplary Traits Netscan

• Topic a profession
• High-quality documents Qualitative
• Non-conflictive analysis
Core-periphery
• core-periphery structure analysis
Essential Traits
Stage IV – Survey
Wenger’s
constructs
Stage V – Content Analysis
Stage VI – Assessment and
identification of VCoPs
● ●
● ● Hypothesised VCoPs
Figure 4.3 – The Funnel Research Strategy
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Content Analysis of core-member discussions. The final Stage will critically assess
the quantitative and qualitative data obtained by all previous Stages, and identify
communities exhibiting all Essential Traits of the VCoP model. The planned outcome
of this study is for at least some virtual communities to successfully navigate the
multiple filters of the Funnel by demonstrated possession of all Essential and
Exemplary Traits of the VCoP model; thus qualifying as Exemplary Usenet-based
CoPs. Throughout, the logic of the Funnel design favours deployment of more
extensive methods near the top (notably, Netscan) and more intensive methods near
the bottom (notably, the Content Analysis). This makes it possible to conduct a very
extensive Usenet search, and still make it compatible with very time-intensive
assessment methods.
For illustrative purposes, the heavily process-oriented Funnel diagram of Figure 4.3 can
be complemented with Figure 4.4, which rather emphasises the correspondence
between Research Objectives and Strategy Stages, and the latter’s position within core
thesis chapters. This Figure was previously displayed, for summary purposes, at the end
of the Introductory chapter.
Finally, an approximate timeline of the execution of the Research Strategy is provided
in Appendix A. It should be noted that the PhD was undertaken on a part-time basis,
which is the reason the field research eventually spanned over two years.
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Research Objectives Research Strategy Thesis Chapter
Objective One Stage I
Build a theoretically-grounded Model Specification Chapter Four

model of Internet-based CoP
Objective Two Stage II
Develop an effective strategy for Strategy Formulation Chapter Four

locating and assessing Internet CoPs
Objective Three Stage III
Comprehensively search the Internet Usenet Search Chapter Five: design

and identify virtual communities with Chapter Six: results
the strongest affinity to the model
Objective Four Stage IV
Ask community participants about the Participant Survey Chapter Five: design
presence of Wenger constructs Chapter Seven: results
Objective Five Stage V
Directly examine participant interaction Content Analysis Chapter Five: design

for the presence of Wenger constructs Chapter Eight: results
Objective Six Stage VI
Assess the presence of Wenger CoP Assessment Chapter Nine

constructs, and identify communities
displaying all the properties of CoPs
Figure 4.4 – Research Objectives and Strategy Stages
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4.7 – Summary
This chapter has addressed the issues involved in the research design. It began by
using the theories presented in Chapters Two and Three to build a consistent model of
Internet-based CoP to act as a blueprint for the research design. In light of this model,
the aim and Research Objectives of the thesis were formulated and discussed.
Working from these goals, and making explicit the assumptions of the VCoP model,
the Research Questions were then formulated and discussed. The important decision
to focus the study on the Usenet network was explained, and previous studies on
Usenet-based communities were reviewed. The next section discussed the ontological
and epistemological assumptions underlying the study, which were most closely
identified with Critical Rationalism, and also discussed the use of mixed methods to
achieve triangulation. Finally, Section Six develops a Research Strategy uniquely
tailored to the search and assessment problems defined by the Research Objectives
and Research Questions. The Strategy can be represented by the image of a Funnel,
and will be so named.
The next chapter provides a detailed discussion of the methods deployed in each Stage
of the Strategy.
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CHAPTER FIVE
Methods
The previous chapter formulated the Research Objectives and Research Questions, and
tailored a Research Strategy to address them. Several methods are deployed within this
Strategy; the aim of Chapter Five is to discuss each. The methods are independent from
one another, and their collective coherence stems from their coordinated deployment
within the Funnel Strategy. The chapter is therefore organised into five sections
addressing respectively the Netscan newsgroup analyser, the Borgatti-Everett core-
periphery model, the web-based Survey, and the Content Analysis of threads, plus a
final summary section.
5.1 – The Netscan analyser
The original research problem posed a substantial challenge: to devise a procedure
capable of comprehensively searching the Usenet network, and capable of detecting
and ranking virtual communities according to their measured affinity to the VCoP
model. This section describes the Netscan newsgroup analyser, and how it will be
deployed to address these distinct search and assessment problems.
Netscan was developed by Smith (1999) to measure and record the flow of messages
posted to over 14 thousand newsgroups during a ten-week period from November 1996
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to mid-January 1997. His aim was to map activity patterns over the entire Usenet
hierarchy. He found that cross-posted messages establish dense ties between topically-
related newsgroups; he also noted many newsgroups adopted core-periphery patterns.
Smith proposed three measures of social interaction within a newsgroup. The poster-to-
post ratio (PPRatio) is the reciprocal of the average number of messages posted by each
participant, and ranges from zero to one. A poster-to-post ratio close to zero indicates a
small number of participants contribute a large proportion of the newsgroup’s messages.
The thread-to-post ratio (TPRatio) is a more direct measure of social interaction; it can be
interpreted as the proportion of undirected messages or thread-heads in the newsgroup. A
value close to zero indicates a greater proportion of directed messages, and therefore, of
social interaction between participants. Finally, the percentage of cross-posting (%Cross-
Post) refers to the proportion of messages posted to more than one newsgroup. Echoing an
earlier suggestion by McLaughlin et al (1995), Smith (1999) argues newsgroups with a low
percentage of cross-posting are more likely to contain clearly defined topical communities,
while newsgroups with a large percentage of cross-posting evince a lack of focus.
Nowadays, Netscan is publicly available at http://netscan.research.microsoft.com. It
can comprehensively scan complete Usenet hierarchies (e.g. comp.*) containing
thousands of newsgroups, and calculate Smith’s measures of interaction, which can be
used to operationalise the quantitative Exemplary Traits of the VCoP model. This is
best illustrated through a worked example: Table 5.1 displays the results of a limited
search: all newsgroups whose name includes the word “invest”, for the period
September 1-30, 2002, sorted by descending number of posts. Definitions of raw
Netscan results are provided in Figure 5.1.
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Table 5.1 – Netscan search for “invest” sorted by Posts (September 1-30, 2002)
UnR
No Newsgroups Ordered by Posts, descending Posts Posters PPRatio Returnees Replies Singles
MSGS
XPosts
1 misc.invest.stocks 7063 811 .11 274 5446 385 688 930
2 misc.invest.mutual-funds 1614 188 .12 63 1426 92 84 144
3 aus.invest 1087 266 .24 84 818 156 125 384
4 microsoft.public.investor.discussions 649 65 .10 15 518 31 68 63
5 alt.private.investigator 617 143 .23 27 385 76 144 157
6 misc.invest.futures 529 200 .38 71 315 122 136 147
7 misc.invest.financial-plan 496 84 .17 35 402 36 18 7
8 misc.invest.canada 423 161 .38 30 257 94 122 171
9 misc.invest.real-estate 420 208 .50 45 125 143 248 133
10 it.economia.investire 396 141 .36 29 257 76 87 25
11 misc.invest.technical 322 168 .52 47 136 108 134 146
12 alt.invest.real-estate 281 148 .53 29 76 100 170 74
13 misc.invest.misc 246 148 .60 30 81 116 136 120
14 alt.invest.penny-stocks 243 121 .50 20 115 83 102 79
15 misc.invest.options 223 111 .50 34 110 70 79 70
16 alt.invest 169 102 .60 21 49 67 102 77
17 misc.invest 142 98 .69 11 44 68 88 70
18 alt.invest.market.crash 137 59 .43 7 78 37 49 88
19 misc.invest.marketplace 115 80 .70 18 24 59 77 40
20 sg.invest.stocks 110 68 .62 13 35 45 61 80
21 dk.penge.investering 106 52 .49 18 72 32 17 6
22 alt.invest.penny-stock 69 41 .59 6 26 26 35 37
23 alt.invest.real-estate.methods 51 32 .63 4 0 21 50 7
24 alt.investors 43 34 .79 4 3 28 37 3
25 biz.marketplace.investors 39 28 .72 4 4 21 33 1
26 misc.invest.stocks.penny 33 27 .82 5 6 23 24 9
27 japan.finance.invest 29 17 .59 1 1 14 27 13
28 realtynet.invest 27 22 .81 4 1 19 25 2
29 acc.sbell.usa-today.invest 26 14 .54 2 0 9 26 1
30 alt.invest.technical-analysis.omega 26 20 .77 3 3 16 20 9
31 alt.invest.fsbo 24 18 .75 1 4 13 18 7
32 asu.investigates.info-highway 21 12 .57 2 0 7 21 3
33 uw.clubs.invest 21 14 .67 2 1 9 20 4
34 misc.invest.funds 15 8 .53 0 0 5 15 0
35 alt.invest.technical-analysis 15 11 .73 1 0 9 15 1
36 scnr.isp-investors 13 7 .54 1 8 6 1 0
37 misc.invest.stock 13 9 .69 0 1 7 10 2
38 misc.invest.precious-metals 6 6 1.00 1 0 6 6 1
39 jaring.invest 5 1 .20 1 0 0 5 5
40 microsoft.public.msinvester 5 4 .80 0 4 3 0 5
41 misc.invest.index-futures 5 5 1.00 0 0 5 5 1
42 alt.invest.market 5 5 1.00 0 1 5 4 2
43 alt.invest.penny 5 5 1.00 0 1 5 4 2
44 misc.invest.commodities 4 4 1.00 0 0 4 4 0
45 misc.invest.penny-stocks 3 2 .67 0 0 1 3 1
46 misc.invest.fixed-income 3 3 1.00 0 0 3 3 0
47 misc.invest.forex 3 3 1.00 0 0 3 3 0
48 usa-today.invest 3 3 1.00 1 0 3 3 1
49 demos.invest.russia 2 1 .50 0 0 0 2 1
50 misc.invest.asset-management 2 1 .50 1 0 0 2 0
51 news.misc.invest.stocks 2 2 1.00 0 0 2 2 2
52 alt.business.invest 2 2 1.00 0 0 2 2 2
53 alt.invest.canada 2 2 1.00 0 0 2 2 2
54 news.admin.invest.futures 2 2 1.00 0 0 2 2 2
55 misc.invest.stocks.ipo 2 2 1.00 0 0 2 2 0
56 news.groups.invest.real-estate 1 1 1.00 0 0 1 1 1
57 misc.invest.emerging 1 1 1.00 0 0 1 1 0
58 misc.invest.precious 1 1 1.00 0 0 1 1 1
59 gaia.fido.invest 1 1 1.00 0 0 1 1 0
60 microsoft.public.investor 1 1 1.00 0 0 1 1 0
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Post: An individual Usenet message.
Posters: This is the count of the number of people who contributed at least one
message to the newsgroup in the time period selected.
PPRatio: This is the ratio of posters to posts contributed to the newsgroup in the
time period selected. A P:P of 1 means that on average each poster contributed
one and only one message. A P:P of .1 means each poster contributed 10
messages.
Returnees: This is the count of the number of people who contributed at least
one message to the newsgroup in the time period selected, and who also
contributed a message in the previous time period; i.e. in the prior month.
Replies: This is the count of the number of message that were replies to
another message (in contrast to a message that is a thread head that starts a
new conversation).
Singles: This is the count of the number of people who contributed one and only
one message to the newsgroup in the time period selected. Sometimes referred
to as drive-by posters.
UnRMSGs: This is the count of the number of messages in the newsgroup that
did not receive a reply in the newsgroup in the time period selected.
XPosts: This is the count of the number of messages that were shared (cross-
posted) to at least one other newsgroup in the time period selected.
Source: Netscan Glossary of Terms (http://netscan.research.microsoft.com/help/glossary.asp
Figure 5.1 – Definitions of Netscan quantitative results
The results illustrate two important facts that will be turned to advantage during the
Usenet search. First, they confirm Smith’s (1999) observation that the majority of
Usenet newsgroups display little or no activity. Hence, over half of examined
newsgroups can be summarily discarded from the study since they exhibit less than one
post per day on average, thus failing to meet the Exemplary-Trait criterion of high-
volume of participant interaction. Second, a larger number of newsgroups (specifically
50) have high PPRatios, greater than 0.40, in this case. This is not consistent with a
core-periphery structure, another Exemplary-Trait criterion, because by definition, such
a structure implies that a small sub-set of participants (the core) contribute a
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disproportionately large number of posts, driving the PPRatio close to zero (operational
thresholds are set in Chapter Six). Therefore, the search for newsgroups displaying
potential affinity with the VCoP model quickly narrows to just 10 of the original 60
newsgroups, or really just 9, because one of the groups with low PPRatio, no. 39, had
already been discarded for low number of posts.
Raw Netscan results do not display the TPRatio or the %Cross-Post, but they are easily
derived. Specifically:
TPRatio = 1 – ( Replies / Posts )
%Cross-Post = XPosts / Posts
Continuing with the example, Table 5.2 is a modified version of Table 5.1, which
includes new columns for the TPRatio and %Cross-Post, omits discarded newsgroups,
and sorts survivors by ascending PPRatio (original identifying numbers were retained).
Compatibility with a core-periphery structure requires a low PPRatio. A low TPRatio,
indicating strong social interaction, is also required, to filter out newsgroups dedicated to
public announcements (e.g. job offers) which have extremely low PPRatios but little
interaction (Smith, 1999). Finally, a low %Cross-Post is more compatible with a focused
discussion, an Exempary-Trait criterion (McLaughlin et al, 1995; Smith, 1999). Only the
topmost four newsgroups of Table 5.2 exhibit low values for all three measures.
Therefore, only these four simultaneously meet the criteria of high-volume of participant
interaction, core-periphery structure and focused discussions; the remaining five can be
discarded. Hence, of 60 newsgroups analysed by Netscan, 56 are efficiently assessed as
displaying little affinity to the VCoP model, and thus discarded from the study.
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Table 5.2 – Newsgroups pre-selected from Table 5.1 sorted by PPRatio

%Cross UnR
No Newsgroups Posts Posters PPRatio TPRatio Returnees Replies Singles XPosts
Post MSGS
4 microsoft.public.investor.discussions 649 65 0.1 0.20 0.10 15 518 31 68 63
1 misc.invest.stocks 7063 811 0.11 0.23 0.13 274 5446 385 688 930
2 misc.invest.mutual-funds 1614 188 0.12 0.12 0.09 63 1426 92 84 144
7 misc.invest.financial-plan 496 84 0.17 0.19 0.01 35 402 36 18 7
5 alt.private.investigator 617 143 0.23 0.38 0.25 27 385 76 144 157
3 aus.invest 1087 266 0.24 0.25 0.35 84 818 156 125 384
10 it.economia.investire 396 141 0.36 0.35 0.06 29 257 76 87 25
6 misc.invest.futures 529 200 0.38 0.40 0.28 71 315 122 136 147
8 misc.invest.canada 423 161 0.38 0.39 0.40 30 257 94 122 171
5.2 – Social Network Analysis and the core-periphery model
Social Network Analysis (SNA) provides a method, or rather a family of methods,
ideally suited for analysing the differentiated patterns of interaction that are evident in
many newsgroups (Wasserman and Faust, 1994; Garton, Haythornthwaite and
Wellman, 1997; Scott, 2000). Most social research methods work with attributional
data. They measure the individual actor attributes (such as age, gender, socio-economic
status, etc.), then try to group together individuals possessing similar profiles of
attributes, and explain social behaviour as the result of these common attributes
(Wellman, 1988). By contrast, SNA works with relational data. It adopts as unit of
analysis the ties or relations between actors, and explains social behaviour as a result of
the patterns of strong and weak ties between actors and the resulting constraints to
social behaviour (ibid). As long as ties can be measured no assumption is necessary
regarding spatial position or indeed any other attribute of actors. Thus, SNA has been
used to study networks of distributed actors, such as ham radio operators (Faust and
Romney, 1985), scientists communicating through e-mail (Freeman, 1984), or countries
conducting foreign trade (Wasserman and Faust, 1994).

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Even though Usenet provides a rich field of social interaction, with readily available
data, the literature review found relatively few SNA studies. Mostly they have focused
on mapping the links between newsgroups by defining ties as the number of messages
cross-posted between them (Smith, 1999; Donath, Karahalios and Viégas, 1999; Sack,
2001; and Choi and Danowski, 2002).
A different approach, arguably closer to the original spirit of SNA, is to treat individual
participants as actors, and the messages they post to each other as ties (Wasserman and
Faust, 1994). Such an approach can easily identify persistent, stable and cohesive sub-
groups of participants. Persistent here refers to a sub-group that is resilient over time,
while stable refers to a sub-group whose membership exhibits little turnover. For the
purposes of this research, a persistent sub-group whose members remain the same over
time and engage in intensive discussions between them, will be considered a virtual or
Usenet-based community. Note that this definition does not apply to the entire
newsgroup, since the majority of participants are usually ephemeral question-askers.
Note also that at this point, nothing need be said about the topic of such a community,
only about the intensity of interaction and the cohesiveness between fixed members.
The appropriateness of SNA methods for a particular study depends on the theoretical
validity of the operational definitions of actors and of the social ties between them
(Wasserman and Faust, 1994). This research will define actors as Usenet participants
who actually interact by posting a message to a newsgroup. Defining ties, though,
requires further elaboration.
Apart from their topical focus, newsgroups have an organising scheme that allows
multiple simultaneous discussions within a single newsgroup; specifically, they are
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organized as threaded discussions. A thread is a set of messages which address the
question or discussion topic announced in the first message, called the thread head
(Hahn, 2000). Participants who wish to offer an answer or an opinion post follow-ups to
the initial message, that is, they send a message making explicit reference to the thread
head or to one of its subsequent follow-ups. At any given time, a newsgroup contains
dozens of ongoing threads or discussions, each with its own coherent set of messages.
Since every message posted to Usenet prominently displays the name (real or
pseudonimous) of its author, every follow-up message is in effect a directed message, from
a specific sender to a specific recipient. Since a directed message is intentionally (and
publicly) posted by one participant to another, it constitutes a personal communication.
Hence, this study defines a (directed) social tie between two Usenet actors as any directed
message posted from one to the other, within the threads of a given newsgroup.
Having thus defined actors and ties, the aim of the SNA runs will be to identify subsets
of actors exhibiting more frequent communication, since person-to-person
communication constitutes the basic building block of communities. To perform this
efficiently, the research will tap the technical information stored in message headers.
Specifically, header information will be imported into a database programme to allow
efficient handling of messages numbering in the tens of thousands. Headers identify the
author of each message, whether it is a thread head or a follow-up, and if the latter,
identifies the message (and therefore the author) it is a follow-up to. The database can
efficiently derive a listing of all directed poster-to-poster communications, which is in
effect the social network participants create through their interactions. This will then be
imported into SNA software and a core-periphery model fitted.
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At this point, a digression on the ethical handling of Usenet messages. Sudweeks and
Rafaeli (1996) consider the issue of informed consent does not apply to a quantitative
analysis in which only publicly available messages are studied (which is the case in
Usenet), as long as the names of message authors are kept confidential. Eysenbach and
Till (2001) consider the requirement of informed consent can be waived under certain
circumstances. They draw a parallel between passive analysis of messages on mailing
lists, and non-intrusive research in clinical studies based on retrospective use of
existing medical records, where informed consent can be waived if the material is
anonymised at the earliest posible stage, no inconvenience or hazard is caused to
subjects, and the institutional review board has approved the research protocol.
The researcher’s criterion, within the SNA phase of the research was to use relabelling
to anonimise participants’ names and e-mails. Informed consent for unobtrusive
analysis of newsgroup postings was not sought as participants know they are posting to
a public forum, and their messages, preserved in the Web, and accessible through the
Google search engine, are public domain. The forthcoming Content Analysis of
discussions will similarly respect poster anonimity, and disguise names when literal
messages are reproduced in the thesis.
The core-periphery structure targeted by Netscan searches is illustrated in Figure 5.2,
which plots on the z-axis the number of directed messages sent during 30 weeks (01-14-
2001 to 08-11-2001) by the 60 top posters in newsgroup soc.history.medieval sorted in
descending order by number of posts. The graph reveals a very active and cohesive
“core”, indicating top posters have frequent interaction, and thus strong social ties with
other top posters. Hence, the subset of participants close to the core can be characterised
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as a cohesive sub-group. The newsgroup not only exhibits the sought-for core-periphery
pattern, but also, as shown on Table 5.3, the expected low values for the three interaction
measures.
FIGURE 5.2 - Posting activity of top 60 posters in soc.history.medieval
Table 5.3 – Smith’s interaction measures for soc.history.medieval

Newsgroup Posts Posters PPRatio TPRatio %Cross-Post
soc.history.medieval 3889 292 0.08 0.04 0.18
Note: Data for March 1-31, 2001
Borgatti and Everett (1999) have proposed a mathematical model for empirically
detecting such patterns, the continuous core-periphery model. Their assumption is that
network data consist of continuous values representing strengths of relationships, which
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fits the study’s definition of ties as the number of directed messages exchanged between
actors. The algorithm, implemented in their own SNA software, Ucinet 6 for Windows
(Borgatti, Everett and Freeman, 2002), searches for a set of coreness scores which
maximise the correlation of the observed pattern with an ideal core-periphery pattern,
illustrated in Figure 5.3. The entries of the ideal-pattern matrix are assumed to be the
product of the coreness scores of each pair of actors, with coreness ranging from 0 to 1.
FIGURE 5.3 – Graph of ideal-pattern for core-periphery model
The usefulness of model for this research lies not just in the fact in the fact that CoPs
often exhibit a core-periphery pattern (Wenger, 2000a), but in the fact that by using
extended time-samples from the newsgroups (52 weeks), the persistence of detected
core-periphery structures and the stability of high-coreness members are assured.
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5.3 - The Survey questionnaire: objectives and design
The Survey is the first of two methods whose design follows the Essential-Trait
Research Questions. Furthermore, the design process closely follows the guidelines for
scale development proposed by DeVellis (2003); although Babbie (1990), Oppenheim
(1992) and DeVaus (2002) were also consulted. Since the former’s guidelines provide,
in addition to good practice, a clear and logical structure for organising this section,
they will be used as sub-section headings.
5.3.1 – What the Survey will measure
The instrument aims to detect the Essential Traits through valid and reliable scales. To
do this, the constructs must be broken down into more concrete sub-constructs or
indicators (DeVaus, 2002). Representative manifestations of each construct were
defined in Section 2.3; they will act as sub-constructs, and a scale will be developed for
each. These representative sub-constructs were derived through the item-generation
exercise described next.
5.3.2 – Generation of the item pool
The next step is to generate a large pool of items that at face value are related to the
construct, and are thus candidates for eventual inclusion into the scale (DeVellis, 2003).
As an aid for thinking up specific and relevant items, development began by deriving
broad, open, yet more specific questions from each of the Essential Trait Research
Questions, always working within the context of CoP theory. These broad questions were
later named thematic questions, and were concrete realisations of the Research
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Questions. In effect they were the kind of questions the researcher asked himself about
the virtual communities in the study. Yet, their concreteness, plus the restriction that
items must fit in a self-administered questionnaire with Likert-scales, were effective in
suggesting and discarding appropriate items. For instance, the thematic questions for
COMMUNITY were:
Is there evidence of stable relationships in the newsgroup?
Have members interacted with each other for some time?
Have members met personally off-line?
Are members comfortable to ask each other for help or advise?
Do members agree on who belongs?
Is there much turnover among regular members?
Is there evidence of leadership and community service?
These thematic questions in turn suggested specific closed items, such as:
I have had considerable interaction with the other members
I know well the views of the other members
I know well the expertise of the other members
I usually know beforehand how other members will react
My own views are well known by the other members
My own expertise is well known by the other members
The development of the item bank extended over several months (see Appendix A),
iterating between thematic questions and closed items. Eventually, as a result of continued
work and reflection, there came a point where thematic questions were put aside, and
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representative sub-constructs were introduced. These were concrete manifestations of
Wenger’s constructs, whose presence or absence a newsgroup participant can report if
clearly asked about (DeVaus, 2002). In all, 12 sub-constructs were chosen as representative
manifestations of the underlying constructs; they are as follows:
LEARNING / IDENTITY ACQUISITION
• Acquiring new knowledge
• Acquiring new skills
• Acquiring/enacting a professional identity
MUTUAL ENGAGEMENT
• Debating issues related to the profession
• Collective problem-solving
• Sharing useful information
SHARED REPERTOIRE
• Shared criteria
• Shared practices
• Shared artifacts
COMMUNITY
• Members’ knowledge of each other
• Shared sense of community
JOINT ENTERPRISE
• Caring for some domain of knowledge
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As noted before, this set of visible manifestations of Wenger’s constructs cannot be
exhaustive, only representative. Questionnaire size limitations preclude using more
than a few obvious manifestations of each construct, because five items were deemed
as the minimum acceptable size of the scale for each sub-construct. Although a search
was made for previously published scales and existing indicators (e.g. Rubin,
Palmgreen and Sypher, 1994), none appeared to fit the constructs and sub-constructs
listed above.
The constructs of LEARNING and IDENTITY ACQUISITION merit additional comment. In
Wenger’s (1998) framework, they are not independent constructs, since he views
LEARNING as the acquisition of a new IDENTITY. Therefore, though a separate scale is
built for IDENTITY ACQUISITION, it is considered a sub-construct of LEARNING.
The introduction of sub-constructs improved clarity and focus in the item-generation
exercise, and the item bank eventually grew to 214 items, of which the pilot
questionnaire included 66. Hence, one out of three items was selected for the
instrument, which follows the guideline suggested by DeVellis (ibid).
Items were worded in as clear and direct manner as possible; negative wording was
mostly avoided in the interests of clarity (Babbie, 1990). Hinkin (1995) reports authors
are not unanimous as to the adviseability of introducing negatively worded items in a
survey. Even though this practice reduces the potential for agreement bias, it can
introduce systematic error. DeVellis (2003) advises against, particularly when the
questionnaire is long, and this counsel was followed.
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Throughout the iterative process of item generation, the feedback and comment of the
thesis supervisor were periodically sought to refine problematic wording, suggest
additional items, and provide a theory-informed critique about the developing
questionnaire. Nine distinct questionnaire drafts were produced before reaching a
version deemed ready for piloting. A record of the process is displayed on Table 5.4.
Table 5.4 – A record of the item-generation process of the Survey instrument

Version Version Constructs Thematic Sub- Items Supervisor
Date questions constructs reviewed
Draft 1 20-05-03 7 28 none 72 yes
Draft 2 25-05-03 7 40 none 125 yes
Draft 3 12-06-03 7 41 none 182 no
Draft 4 18-06-03 7 41 none 214 no

Development
Draft 5 29-06-03 7 37 none 210 no
Draft 6 02-07-03 6 none 13 54 yes
Draft 7 13-07-03 5 none 14 55 no

yes:
Draft 8 20-07-03 5 none 12 66
pilot-ready
Draft 9 06-08-03 5 none 12 66 yes: pilot
launch
Pilot 1 19-08-03 5 none 12 66 yes,
Piloting
reliabiliy
Pilot 2 09-09-03 5 none 12 66 yes, main
launch
Deploy
Main 23-09-03 5 none 12 63 no

Survey
The piloted version contained five constructs, twelve sub-constructs, five-item scales
for each sub-construct, plus one open question and 5 socio-demographic questions at
the end, resulting in a 66-item Survey (provided in Appendix B). As a visual aid to
respondents, items were organised into four major thematic blocks labelled “Learning
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through participation in the newsgroup”, “Member interaction in the newsgroup”,
“Newsgroup-specific tools and standards”, and “Community traits in the newsgroup”.
Learning was used as the opening block because it addresses a familiar experience, and
helps to gradually introduce respondents to the main issues of the Survey (Babbie,
1990; Oppenheim, 1992). Within each block, scale items were randomised to test
whether Factor Analysis groups items under the hypothesised scales. Randomising the
entire 66-item Survey was deemed unwise, as it would convey a chaotic and disorganised
impression to respondents, making their task more difficult (Babbie, 1990).
5.3.3 - Design of the web-based instrument
Internet surveys rarely obtain good response rates (Witmer, Colman and Katzman,
1999). Therefore, to maximise convenience to respondents, an early decision was made
to use a Internet-based questionnaire, with point-and-click Likert scales that
participants could fill out quickly and accurately.
In addition, considerable care was invested into the web design of the Survey. For
instance, the choice of provider is critical. It must offer good layouts and aesthetics,
hinting at an interesting and inviting experience for the respondent (DeVaus, 2002). In
addition, the web page must display in a speedy and reliable manner, as a slow-loading
page will probably cause a respondent to become impatient and move on. Above all, the
provider’s home page must reassure respondents about privacy and security concerns
which are ever-present in Internet. Conscious of this, the researcher sought a provider
who by a professional-sounding name, and a highly-visible privacy policy, reassured
respondents about the legitimacy, security and ethical guarantees of the Survey.
Obviously, this could all be achieved by contracting one of several high-priced providers
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available, but financial restrictions led the researcher to leave this option as a last resort,
and to search the Internet for alternatives. Thus the review of web-based survey providers
(included as Appendix C) is biased toward economic or free services, although the size of
the questionnaire and the potential sample population automatically discarded several
smaller services (for a current review, see Wright (2005) ). It turned out some
professional providers offer a lower price, or even a free service, to academic projects.
To test the layouts and responsiveness of potential providers, the researcher registered
for several trial-accounts. The test assessed the clarity and aesthetics of the published
questionnaire, the convenience of the item/survey editor and the invitation mail engine.
Surveyworld.net, based in the Netherlands, was chosen as the main survey provider
because of its excellent layouts, its explicit privacy policy, and its generous support for
academic research projects. After reviewing the researcher’s credentials and research
project, the company agreed to provide free-of-charge a professional account including
all the features and options of their service. This support is gratefully acknowledged.
As already mentioned, the Survey was visibly organised into four thematic blocks, with
fifteen items in each, and socio-demographic items at the end. In addition, the Survey
displayed fully on a single page, with the Submit button at the end. This gave
respondents the opportunity to read over the entire Survey, skip forward, change
previous answers, and make a final review of responses before hitting the Submit
button. Actual web display of Pilot 1 is provided in Appendix B.
Invitations to take the Survey were sent by the e-mail engine of the provider. The text
of the invitation was slightly longer than usual, trying to convey an informative and
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professional look. It was important to differentiate the invitation from junk-mail,
universally hated in Internet. The invitation is provided in Appendix B.
5.3.4 - Qualified review of the item pool
The researcher tested evolving drafts of the questionnaire on his supervisor to refine
item wording and sharpen sub-construct focus. Hence, two knowledgeable researchers
vetted all items, before attempting a first pilot of the questionnaire.
5.3.5 – Possible inclusion of validation items
DeVellis (ibid) advises searching for and trying to include previously developed scales
as control variables or as constructs theory predicts to be related to the constructs under
study. Although this was attempted by a careful study of various scales published in
Rubin et al (1994), none appeared to be a good fit within the evolving questionnaire,
possibly because of its novel purpose –CoP assessment– and exploratory nature.
5.3.6 – Pilot runs of the instrument
Newsgroup comp.lang.ada was chosen for Pilot-1 of the questionnaire (newsgroup
selection is described in Chapter Six), and the invitation was sent on Tuesday 19
August, 2003 to 136 participants exhibiting coreness scores greater than or equal to
0.005. An automatic reminder was sent a week later to those who had not taken the
Survey nor expressly declined. The Survey closed ten days after that.
Since many participants use more than one e-mail address to post to the newsgroup, the
actual list of e-mail addresses contained 194 distinct addresses. The first visible result
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of the invitation was a large number of error messages returned to the sender caused by
false addresses. However, within the first hour, several participants completed the
Survey. In all, 31 newsgroup members took the Survey during those 19 days, and it was
encouraging to note that, despite its length, all submitted surveys were complete. Pilot
logistics are recorded on Table 5.5.
Table 5.5 – Response rates for the Survey pilots

Pilot Launch Reminder Close Invitations Repeated Distinct Invalid True Response Response
sent names names address sample rate
Pilot-1 19-08-03 26-08-03 06-09-03 194 58 136 10 126 31 24.6%
Pilot-2 09-09-03 16-09–03 20-09-03 281 46 235 29 206 40 19.4%
5.3.7 - Item evaluation
Raw results were downloaded as an Excel file from the Surveyworld server and
imported into SPSS where items were re-grouped back again into the five-item scales
of each sub-construct. Descriptive statistics and Cronbach alphas were calculated. As a
result of the reliability analysis, significant wording changes were made in 14 items and
minor changes in another 7. Coreness, an independent variable measured for each
participant was not found to significantly affect results, but individual expertise
apparently did. Therefore, three items were selected to build a new scale for Expertise.
The extent of changes to the questionnaire advised running a second pilot with the
revised version. In addition, since Pilot-1 had been applied to a computer-related
newsgroup, it was decided to apply Pilot-2 the second pilot on a non-computer group;
sci.physics.research was chosen. Pilot-2 was launched on Tuesday, 9 September, 2003,
with an automatic reminder a week after, and a total run of 12 days. This was a larger
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newsgroup than comp.lang.ada, as shown on Table 5.5, and a total of 40 completed
questionnaires were received.
The reliability analysis for the Pilot-2 revealed three items whose item-total correlation
was low, and whose alpha-if-item-deleted was substantially higher than current scale
alpha. When closely examined, two items were found to differ, at face value, from the
other items in the set, while the other was found to be too broad and unspecific.
Therefore, these three items were discarded. Other than this, though, the analysis
upheld the changes made to the previous questionnaire. In fact, the results from
sci.physics.research, omitting the three discarded items, were judged valid for merging
with the dataset from the main Survey. Given the positive results of Pilot-2, the Survey
instrument was deemed ready (the deployed instrument is available in Appendix D),
and the main Survey was launched on ten additional newsgroups starting on Tuesday
23 September, 2003.
The evaluation of the instrument cannot rest only on the reliability analysis. DeVellis
(ibid) strongly advises using Factor Analysis to refine and further validate scales. Thus,
an Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) was performed on the results of the main Survey,
which confirmed the validity of the instrument; results are described in Chapter Seven.
5.3.8 - Possible optimisation of scale length
The trade-off between size and reliability of scales for each sub-construct was an ever
present consideration because of the large number of sub-constructs (12). Five items
was deemed the minimum acceptable size for each scale, keeping in mind that some
items would be discarded during the reliability analysis. DeVellis (ibid) points out that
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optimisation of scale length is confined to situations where the researcher has
“reliability to spare”, obviously not the case here.
This concludes the discussion of questionnaire design. Survey deployment and results
are presented and discussed in Chapter Seven.
5.4 - The Content Analysis: objectives and design
Sharing the lower level of the Funnel with the Survey is a Content Analysis of
community discussions, which will be used in a deductive research strategy to test the
applicability of Wenger’s CoP theory (Blaikie, 2000). The working hypothesis is that
some or all participating communities are true CoPs. Hence, interactions between
members should manifest the Wenger constructs, i.e. the Essential Traits. Detecting the
text-based manifestation –or lack of it– of the Essential Traits, in the newsgroup
messages that record community interactions, is the objective of the Content Analysis.
There are two major aspects in the design of the Content Analysis, and this section will
be organised around them. The first is the selection of the sample from a textual corpus
too large to analyse exhaustively. The second is the development of the coding scheme.
5.4.1 – Rationale and criteria for purposive sample selection
The research design acknowledges that, with eleven newsgroups in the study, and a
one-year message sample from each, an exhaustive content analysis is not feasible.
Therefore, some sampling strategy is required.
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This study will adopt threads as the sampling units for the Content Analysis. The advantage
of threads over individual messages lies in the former representing a complete and coherent
discussion. Thus a full thread is easier to interpret and content analyse because the various
messages provide a context and oftentimes a critical review of each other.
However, the researcher felt from the beginning that arbitrarily picking threads that
exhibited the sought-for qualitative traits mentioned above would be falling into the
trap of anecdotalism (Silverman, 2000), thus undermining the credibility of this study.
Therefore, a decision was made to select threads according to previously-devised and
theoretically informed criteria, following Silverman’s (2000: 105) advice: “Sampling in
qualitative research is neither statistical nor purely personal: it is, or should be,
theoretically grounded.”
Threads are already captured into the database, and can be sorted and classified by
posters or number of messages. Given this capability to sort and classify threads, it is
an easy to see that for the purposes of this research, not every thread in a newsgroup is
equally useful. Threads are very diverse in size, topic, participants and duration. Just as
“exemplary” VCoPs were defined as the target of the study, “exemplary” threads will
be defined as the target of the Content Analysis sample, using once again the VCoP
model to derive three selection criteria. Specifically:
Criterion 1: An “exemplary” thread addresses a professional topic.
This proposition mirrors the Exemplary Trait requiring the newsgroup to have a
profession for its topic. Even in newsgroups narrowly focused on a profession, not all
talk is about the business of the newsgroup, particularly in unmoderated newsgroups.
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There is also, especially among regular members, a significant amount of what can be
described as relaxed chatting about current news, the weather, political issues, etc.
Wenger (1998) argues that such conversation among members of a CoP, even if it does
not directly concern work issues, helps to build the personal relationships that facilitate
MUTUAL ENGAGEMENT. However, mere conversation cannot clearly differentiate a
Usenet-based CoP from other virtual communities, whereas collective problem-solving
or debating professional issues, can.
Criterion 2: An “exemplary” thread is longer than average.
The logic of this criterion goes back to some of the Essential Traits which require some
discussion “space” to fully play out. Specifically, both collective problem-solving and
debating issues, which are manifestations of MUTUAL ENGAGEMENT, are more likely to
be found in long rather than in short threads.
Criterion 3: An “exemplary” thread involves mostly core members.
The logic of this criterion goes back to the set of Exemplary Traits of the VCoP model,
which implied that an exemplary Usenet-based CoP would be the cohesive sub-group
formed by the stable core members of a newsgroup. Therefore, given the ability to
choose among all discussions taking place in a newsgroup, it is clear that the discussions
that remain mostly within the core, where membership is strongest (by virtue of intensive
ENGAGEMENT), are more likely to yield the sought-for evidence. Since newsgroups are
open to participation, it will be a rare thread that only contains messages by core
members, but threads where discussion is dominated by these members are numerous.
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Using these criteria as filters will result in a very substantial reduction of the thread
population of each newsgroup, and improved odds of finding the Essential Traits on
those groups that are Usenet-based CoPs. From the reduced thread population, four
threads per newsgroup will be selected, one long and three middle-sized threads.
Furthermore, to take the decision out of the researcher’s hands, as it were, the selected
threads will be those that best match the previous three criteria, and non-selected
threads and the reasons for their exclusion will be provided in Appendix M.
5.4.2 – The coding scheme
In this study, content analysis is being used deductively, with a priori categories
derived from Wenger’s theory. Hence, codes here will be used to denote a fact,
specifically that a particular textual passage contains an assessed example or instance
of a sub-construct. Thus, codes will be used as representations of phenomena. This
coding approach is fundamentally different to the use of codes in CAQDAS software as
heuristic devices to mark passages in order to build theory or hypothesis with an
interpretivist inductive logic (Seidel and Kelle, 1995).
Though deductive, this Content Analysis is qualitative, because it will be concerned
with the presence or lack of it of the Essential Traits in specific textual passages rather
than how many times they manifest themselves. Nevertheless, a summary of code
counts will be provided, because it is a useful reference even in a qualitative context
(Miles and Huberman, 1994; Silverman, 2000).
Most studies performing a quantitative type of content analysis develop from relevant
theory a list of keywords, and report the number of times these appear in a sample of
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text (Neuendorf, 2002). It is easy to see that Wenger’s constructs, and even the more
specific sub-constructs, are not amenable to reduction to a list of keywords, even an
extensive one. Hill and Hughes (1997) report a similar problem in their content analysis
of political communication in Usenet newsgroups. Because political communication
includes such a range of topics, they discarded a keyword strategy. Rather, they used
threads as their primary unit of analysis, and relied on their professional interpretation
of message content to code for several pre-determined qualitative variables, such as:
ideology of the thread head (left, no dominant, right), overall ideological direction of
entire thread (left, no dominant, right), whether the thread is a debate, and whether the
thread is predominantly “antigovernment”.
Clearly, this use of “broad” coding categories and expert researcher judgement is an
appropriate strategy for capturing the complex social interactions that were the focus of
Hill and Hughes’ study. “Broad” coding categories to test theory or obtain evidence for
specific research questions have been used in other studies of Usenet newsgroups. For
instance, Preece (1999) and Preece and Ghozati (2001) used it to test for the presence or
absence of empathic communication in various kinds of communities, particularly those
whose aim was providing patient and emotional support. Other studies using broad
categories include Thomsen (1996), Winzelberg (1997) and Millen and Dray (2000).
In a similar vein, identifying and coding the complex and nuanced interactions that
make up Wenger’s constructs, will require the researcher’s professional interpretation
of CoP theory, as it manifests itself in discussion threads. Ideally, this thesis would
adopt a multi-researcher coding strategy, in which several competent researchers would
code randomly selected threads, thus minimising the potential for bias and improving
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overall coding consistency. This is not possible for a lone PhD candidate, but some
precautions were adopted nonetheless. Specifically, the candidate acted as the main
coder, and the thesis supervisor performed an independent review of the researcher’s
coding consistency in a substantial random sample of coded threads.
Most methods of qualitative textual analysis develop coding categories inductively,
very much in the spirit of grounded theory (Ryan and Bernard, 2000). Not many
qualitative methods adopt a deductive code development strategy (Mayring, 2000).
Since the aim of the Content Analysis is to test the applicability of Wenger’s theory,
coding categories will be deducted from Wenger’s constructs. More specifically, this
research will follow the code-creation procedure for a priori or pre-defined codes
suggested by Miles and Huberman (1994), which can be summarised as follows:
• Use relevant theory and the research questions to create a provisional “start
list” of codes. This initial coding scheme must have a clear theory-supported
structure, and each code similarly requires an initial theory-informed
definition, which will be refined as the research progresses.
• Apply the coding scheme to the textual corpus, possibly starting with a
reduced pilot.
• Revise codes:
o discard empty codes or absorb them into more successful ones.
o break down “bloated” codes into smaller subcodes.
o improve and further focus code definitions.
o where apropriate, create new codes that “emerge” from the textual corpus.
• In revising codes, always maintain clear links to the theoretical framework
and the research questions.

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• Along the way, perform some consistency and reliability checks of code
definition and application.
Theoretical codes will thus be initially defined as the 12 sub-constructs which,
following Wenger’s theory, were derived during the development of the Survey. A 13th
code will be labelled as “Other”. These starting codes are shown in Table 5.6, along
with working definitions that will provide guidelines for coding within NUDIST.
Table 5.6 – Initial theory-derived codes for the Content Analysis

Wenger’s Sub-constructs Working NUDIST definitions
constructs (coding categories)
Debating issues related to the Debating pros and cons of an issue related to
profession the profession
MUTUAL Collective problem-solving Collectively building the solution to a problem

ENGAGEMENT or case
Sharing useful information Providing (spontaneously or by request) useful

information related to the profession
Acquiring new knowledge New knowledge acquired from discussion
Acquiring new skills New skills acquired from discussion

LEARNING
Acquiring/enacting a Developing/enacting a professional identity
professional identity
Shared criteria Invoking an accepted professional criterion
SHARED Shared practices Invoking an accepted procedure within the

REPERTOIRE profession
Shared artifacts Invoking an accepted tool, real or virtual
Members’ knowledge of Evidence of newsgroup participant's knowing

each other each other
COMMUNITY
Shared sense of community Acknowledgement and positive regard for the
online collective
JOINT Caring for some domain of Expressed interest for/involvement in the

ENTERPRISE knowledge profession
OTHER Textual passages that do not fit under any code
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
161
Methods
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
The actual coding of textual passages will proceed in several stages. Before actually
tackling the coding of the main thread sample, one or two pilot coding exercises will be
conducted, in order to test the consistency and precision of the categories as defined
above. It is to be expected that the wording of these definitions will be refined first by
the pilots exercises, and then by the main coding exercise, without actually breaking
their connection to the theoretical concepts they represent. It should be remembered
that only 12 sub-constructs were defined because of the length restrictions of the
Survey instrument, not because those sub-constructs exhaust the range of possible
manifestations of the constructs. Since the categories of the Content Analysis are not
inherently restricted to the defined sub-constructs, but to Wenger’s broader constructs,
it is likely that new sub-constructs will emerge from the textual data, reducing the
number of textual units classified as “Other” and resulting, in effect, in a better
theoretical categorisation of the thread sample. In turn, this should provide clearer
evidence regarding the Essential Trait Research Questions, which is the ultimate aim of
the Content Analysis.
Further details of the Content Analysis Stage and results of the main coding exercise
are provided in Chapter Eight.
5.5 – Summary
The chapter described and discussed the research methods used in this thesis; an
heterogeneous collection whose coherence stems from their coordinated deployment at
various Stages of the Funnel Strategy.
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
162
Methods
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
The first two methods, the Netscan analyser and the core-periphery model, will be used
during the Usenet search, or Stage III of the Research Strategy, to select a sample of
communities exhibiting high CoP-potential. They will be guided by the Exemplary
Traits of the VCoP model, and will address both Preliminary and Exemplary Trait
Research Questions.
The last two methods, the Survey and the Content Analysis, will be applied to selected
communities, during Stages IV and V of the Research Strategy. Their aim is to
independently test for the presence or absence of Wenger’s constructs. They will be
guided by the Essential Traits of the VCoP model, and will address the Essential Trait
Research Questions.
This chapter concludes discussion of thesis methodology; description of field research
begins with Chapter Six.
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163

PHD Dissertation Murillo: Searching For Virtual Communities of Practice

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E. M.

SEARCHING FOR “VIRTUAL”

THE USENET DISCUSSION NETWORK

IN THE USENET DISCUSSION NETWORK

Combining quantitative and qualitative methods

to identify the constructs of Wenger's theory

submitted for the degree

SEARCHING FOR “VIRTUAL” COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE

IN THE USENET DISCUSSION NETWORK

Combining quantitative and qualitative methods

to identify the constructs of Wenger's theory

Abstract: Communities of Practice (CoPs) are informal organisational groups

A survey of community-members and a content analysis of discussions were

Establishing that extra-organisational CoPs spontaneously emerge in social

Keywords: communities of practice, virtual communities of practice, virtual

PART ONE – THEORETICAL BACKGROUND 1

L 2. Previous Research on Communities of Practice 19

U 3. Virtual Communities of Practice 54

PART THREE – RESEARCH STRATEGY: EXECUTION 164

6. Usenet Search and Community Selection 165

7. Survey of Community Members 191

11. Conclusions 388

Glossary of Internet Terms 442

PART ONE – THEORETICAL BACKGROUND 1

1.1 - Communities of practice 5

1.2 - Research aim, objectives and strategy 9

1.3 - Outline of Thesis 14

2 - Previous Research on Communities of Practice 19

2.1 - Initial formulation of the Community of Practice concept 20

2.2 - Wenger’s social theory of learning 24

2.3 - Wenger’s theory of Communities of Practice 28

2.3.1 - MUTUAL ENGAGEMENT 31

2.3.2 - JOINT ENTERPRISE 34

2.3.3 - SHARED REPERTOIRE 35

2.3.6 - IDENTITY ACQUISITION 37

2.4 - Challenges to Wenger’s theoretical framework 38

2.4.1 - Alternative terminology for alternative but related phenomena 40

2.4.2 - Alternative terminology for the same phenomenon 42

2.4.3 - Critiques of Wenger’s (1998) theory 47

3 - Virtual Communities of Practice 54

3.1 - Reviewing the varieties of “virtual” in the literature 55

3.1.1 - Network access 57

3.1.2 - Media richness 58

3.1.3 - Participatory character 60

3.2 - Traces of Wenger’s constructs in previous studies of “virtual” CoPs 61

3.3 - Challenges to the concept of “virtual” Communities of Practice 83

PART TWO – RESEARCH STRATEGY: DESIGN 95

4.1 - The model of “virtual” Community of Practice used in this thesis 97

4.1.1 - Model specification 97

4.1.2 - Exemplary Traits 99

4.1.2.1 - Mid-sized stable group 99

4.1.2.2 - High-volume of participant interaction 99

4.1.2.3 - Core-periphery structure 99

4.1.2.4 - Highly-focused discussions 100

4.1.2.5 - Topic is an identifiable profession 100

4.1.2.6 - High-Quality institutional documents 101

4.1.2.7 - Non-conflictive 101

4.1.3 - Essential Traits 102

4.1.3.1 - MUTUAL ENGAGEMENT 102

4.1.3.2 - SHARED REPERTOIRE 102

4.1.3.3 - JOINT ENTERPRISE 103

4.1.3.4 - COMMUNITY 103

4.1.3.5 - LEARNING/IDENTITY ACQUISITION 103