Modes of Belonging, Participation, and Identification (Wenger)

Key Terms:

1. Modes of Belonging
2. Identity


Modes of Belonging

[Our] identities as workers are affected by the picture [we] build of [our] position. (173)

Identity formation…

Wenger suggests that in order to make sense of identity formation, we must consider three distinct modes of belonging:

• Engagement: active involvement in mutual processes of negotiation of meaning
• Imagination: creating images of the world and seeing connections through time and space by extrapolating from our own experience.
• Alignment: coordinating our energy and activities in order to fit within broader structures and contribute to broader enterprises. (174)

Though engagement, imagination, and alignment are distinct modes of belonging, they are not mutually exclusive. A given community can be constituted by all three in various proportions. And the variety of these combinations results in communities with distinct qualities.

One mode of belonging may affect another (183)

…relations between engagement, imagination, and alignment are not fixed over time (183)

Because each mode involves trade-offs, it is not useful to think of one mode as better than the others in terms of potential for learning and identity. In fact, most of what we do involves a combination of engagement, imagination, and alignment, though more emphasis on one or the other gives a distinct quality to our actions and their meanings. One reason for distinguishing among engagement, imagination, and alignment is that they require different conditions and kinds of work. (183-84)

Because engagement, imagination, and alignment each have different but complementary strengths and weaknesses, they work best in combination. (187)

Engagement

Is it the most basic mode of belonging? Membership is based on mutual engagement in a community of practice.

“Being included in what matters” (74)

Through engagement, participants do not necessarily understand the world, each other’s experiences, or their shared enterprise more accurately. Mutual engagement merely creates a shared reality in which to act and construct an identity. Imagination is another process for creating such a reality (177)

He claims that engagement, as a mode of belonging, has a “bounded character”—meaning, I think, that there are limits to ones ability to engage (?)

Engagement “affords the power to negotiate our enterprises and thus to shape the context in which we can construct and experience an identity of competence. (175)

Engagement can be narrow. The understanding inherent in shared practice is not necessarily one that gives members broad access to the histories of relations with other practices that shape their own practice. Through engagement, competence can become so transparent, locally ingrained, and socially efficacious that it becomes insular: nothing else, no other viewpoint, can even register, let alone create a disturbance or a discontinuity that would spur the history of practice onward. (175)

The Work of Engagement

[engagement] requires the ability to take part in meaningful activities and interactions, in the production of sharable artifacts, in community-building conversations, and in the negoation of new situations. It implies a sustained intensity and relations of mutuality. (184)

In terms of participation, engagement requires access to and interaction with other participants in the course of their own engagement. (184)

Engagement also requires the ability and the legitimacy to make contributions to the pursuit of an enterprise, to the negotiation of meaning, and to the development of a shared practice. (184)

In terms of reification, engagement requires access to the full reificative paraphernalia of practice in the course of its use: symbols, tools, language, documents, and the like. (184-185)

Imagination

My use of the concept of imagination refers to a process of expanding our self by transcending our time and space and creating new images of the world and ourselves. (176)

Imagination is an important component of our experience of the world and our sense of place in it. It can make a big difference for our experience of identity and the potential for learning inherent in our activities. (176)

This brings to mind the story of about the two stonecutters who are asked what they are doing. One responds: “I am cutting this stone in a perfectly square shape.” The other responds, “I am building a cathedral.” Both answers are correct and meaningful, but they reflect different relations to the world. The difference between these answers does not imply that one is a better stonecutter than the other, as far as holding the chisel is concerned. At the level of engagement, they may well be doing exactly the same thing. But it does suggest that their experiences of what they are doing and their sense of self in doing it are rather different. This difference is a function of imagination. (176)

My use of the concept of imagination refers to a process of expanding our self by transcending our time and space and creating new images of the world and ourselves. Imagination in this sense is looking at an apple seed and seeing a tree. It is playing scales on a piano, and envisioning a concert hall. It is entering a temple and knowing that the ritual you are performing is performed and has been performed by millions throughout the world. (176).

The term imagination is sometimes used to connote personal fantasies, withdrawal from reality, or mistaken as opposed to factual conclusions. My use of the term, however, emphasizes the creative process of producing new “images” and of generating new relations through time and space that become constitutive of the self….imagination involves a different kind of work of the self – one that concerns the production of images of the self and images of the world that transcend engagement. (177)

[imagination] can project our experience beyond the sounding board of mutual engagement.

The creative character of imagination is anchored in social interactions and communal experiences. Imagination in this sense is not just the production of personal fantasies. Far from an individual withdrawal from reality, it is a mode of belonging that always involves the social world to expand the scope of reality and identity. (178)

Through imagination, we can locate ourselves in the world and in history, and include in our identities other meanings, other possibilities, other perspectives. It is through imagination that we recognize our own experience as reflecting broader patterns, connections, and configurations. It is through imagination that we see our own practices as continuing histories that reach far into the past, and it is through imagination that we conceive of new developments, explore alternatives, and envision possible futures…imagination can make us consider our own position with new eyes…it can recast the present and show it as holding unsuspecting possibilities. (178)

Imagination does not necessarily result in a coordination of action. One can imagine what it was like to be a knight, but one does not necessarily adopt the code of chivalry for oneself. (179)

The Work of Imagination

Imagination requires the ability to disengage – to move back and look at our engagement through the eyes of an ousider. It requires the ability to explore, take risks, and create unlikely connections. It demands some degree of playfulness. (185)

Imagination requires the ability to dislocate participation and reification in order to reinvent ourselves, our enterprises, our practices, and our communities. (185)

Alignment

Like imagination, alignment is a mode of belonging that is not confined to mutual engagement. (178)

Through alignment, we become part of something big because we do what it takes to play our part. What alignment brings into the picture is a scope of action writ large, of coordinated enterprises on a large scale, not inherent in engagement or in imagination. (179)

Of claims processors, Wenger writes, “Claims processors can easily imagine that a large number of people do similar work under similar conditions, but they do not translate this understanding into action. They are not unionized and express no interest in being so; their professional identity does not congeal into any kind of global or political activism beyond their local engagement in work. (179)

Neither engagement in shared practice nor imagination entails alignment and, in turn, alignment does not entail mutual engagement or imagination. (179)

…imagination can change both our understanding of alignment and our ability to control it—because imagination helps build a picture of how our part fits—but this is different from viewing alignment and imagination as equivalent, or as implying or subsuming each other. (180)

Because alignment concerns directing and controlling energy, it likewise concerns power: the power over one’s own energy to exercise alignment and the power to inspire and demand alignment. (180).

Alignment “expands the scope of our effects on the world.”
Alignment can “amplify our power and our sense of the possible.” (180)

…how alignment is secured (183)

The Work of Alignment

Alignment requires the ability to coordinate perspectives and actions in order to direct energies to a common purpose. (186)

…alignment requires the ability to communicate purpose, needs, methods, and criteria. (186)

Identification

Identification: “The process through which modes of belonging become constitutive of our identities by creating bonds or distinctions in which we become invested” (191)

Identification has the following characteristics:

• It is both participative and reificative – reificactive in the sense that we are identified “as” something or someone – a category, a description, a role (paramedic) and participative in the sense that we identify “with” something or someone (191).
• It is both something we do to ourselves and something we do to each other. We identify with a community and, conversely, are recognized as a member of a community. We think of ourselves in terms of labels – I am a grown-up, an introvert, an opera lover – and, conversely, we are labeled by others as a good or bad pupil, a terrific or terrible teacher, a popular student or a weirdo.
• Identification can be both positive and negative in the sense that it includes relations that shape what we are and what we are not. It includes what we enjoy being and what we dread. It engenders identities of both participation and non-participation. (191)

Identification is not merely a relation between people, but between participants and the constituents of their social existence, which includes other participants, social configurations, categories, enterprises, actions, artifacts, and so forth. (192)

Identification through engagement

In the context of engagement, identification takes place in the doing; hence, the development of competence, the negotiation of a trajectory, and the work of reconciliation across boundaries are not necessarily self-conscious. (193)

The process of identity formation can remain largely transparent because our identities can develop by being engaged in action without being themselves the focus of attention. (193)

Identification through imagination

Imagination is thus an important source of identification, one that takes the process beyond engagement in a variety of ways. Indeed, beyond engagement, identification depends on the kind of picture of the world and of ourselves we can build. It depends on the connections we can envision across history and across the social landscape. Through these connections, identification expands through time and space, and our identities take on new dimensions. (194)

Imagination can yield a sense of affinity, and thus an identity of participation, but it can also result in a reaction of dissociation and a consequent identity of non-participation. (195)

Identity of Participation

Participation: "a complex process that combines doing, talking, thinking, feeling, and belonging. It involves our whole person, including our bodies, minds, emotions, and social relations." (56)

What I take to characterize participation is the possibility of mutual recognition. (56)

In this experience of mutuality, participation is a source of identity. (56)

a defining characteristic of participation is the possibility of developing an "identity of participation," that is, an identity constituted through relations of participation. (56)

Combining Modes of Belonging

Engagement and Imagination

The combination of engagement and imagination results in a reflective practice. Such a practice combines the ability both to engage and to distance -- to identify with an enterprise as well as to view it in context, with the eyes of an outsider. Imagination enables us to adopt other perspectives across boundaries and time, to visit "otherness" and let it speak its own language. It also allows us to include history in our sense of the present and to explore possible futures. (217)

...engagement provides a place for imagination to land, to be negotiated in practice and realized into identities of participation. This process requires an opening of participation that allows imagination to have effects beyond itself so we may learn from it by bringing it back into a form of engagement. (217)

Imagination and Alignment

The combination of imagination and alignment produces the ability to act with respect to a broad and rich picture of the world. We align our activities and we understand why. We have a vision and it helps us situate what we are doing and make it effective. We have a big picture and we do something about it in concert with others. We can therefore embrace that big picture as part of our identity because it reflects the scope of our imagination as well as the scope of effects of our actions. (218)

Engagement and Alignment

The combination of engagement and alignment brings various perspectives together in the process of creating some coordination between them. (218)

Boundaries

Moving from one community of practice to another can demand quite a transformation (103).

the range of related communities of practice (103)

Communities of Practice

Communities of practice cannot be considered in isolation from the rest of the world, or understood independently of other practices. (103)

Joining a community of practice involves entering not only its internal configuration but also its relations with the rest of the world. (103)

We can participate in multiple communities of practice at once. (105)

Participation and Non-Participation

Multimembership

I have argued that multimembership is a critical source of learning because it forces an alignment of perspectives in the negotiation of an engaged identity. (218)

Reification

The process by which "aspects of human experience and practice are congealed into fixed forms and given the status of an object" (59).

Trajectories

Identity

Who we are lies in the way we live day to day, not just in what we think or say about ourselves, though that is of course part (but only part) of the way we live. (151)

identity is "produced as a lived experience of participation in specific communities" (151).

An identity, then, is a layering of events of participation and reification by which our experience and its social interpretation inform each other. As we encounter our effects on the world, and develop our relations with others, these layers build upon each other to produce our identity as a very complex interweaving of participative experience and reificative projections. (151)

In the same way that meaning exists in its negotiation, identity exists -- not as an object in and of itself --but in the constant work of negotiating the self. (151)