CODA 1: Knowing in Practice

Communities of practice should not be reduced to purely instrumental purposes. They are about knowing, but also about being together, living meaningfully, developing a satisfying identity, and altogether being human. (134)

practice = the capacity to have an experience of meaning

meaning = arises out of a process of negotiation that combines both participation andreification (135)

negotiation of participation and reification = an identity of participation

Competent membership (in a community of practice) includes:

• mutuality of agreement: the ability to engage with other members and respond in kind to their actions, and thus the ability to establish relationships in which this mutuality is the basis for an identity of participation
• accountability to the enterprise: the ability to understand the enterprise of a community of practice deeply enough to take some responsibility for it and contribute to its pursuit and to its ongoing negotiation by the community.
• negotiability of the repertoire: the ability to make use of the repertoire of the practice to engage in it. This requires enough participation (personal or vicarious) in the history of practice to recognize it in the elements of its repertoire. Then it requires the ability--both the capability and the legitimacy--to make this history newly meaningful.

...it is by its very practice--not by other criteria--that a community establishes what it is to be a competent participant, an outsider, or somewhere in between. (137)

To become even a peripheral member of a community of practice, one must do some learning along the three dimensions of competence in practice just listed. (137)