Cooperation within Bureaucracies: Are Communities of Practice an Answer?

Abstract

Communities of practice have been presented as the panacea of organizational learning. Building up on three case studies in different organizations characterized by different internal contexts, this article pushes the logic one step further by arguing that communities of practice can also be unique collaboration spaces within bureaucracies. Their main property is the ambiguity of their relationship with organizational control mechanisms and structures. Communities play with the rules, they can be adaptable and as such can build resilience within the organization. But this ambiguity, being the foundation of their capacity to introduce cooperation within organizations, is also difficult to maintain. Cultivating communities of practice thus becomes a delicate task for managers who must be able to adopt complex and contradictory behaviours. Five roles that can be fulfilled by management are analysed: stimulation, facilitation, support, control and recognition. Far from the generic recommendations that can be found in the literature to date, the findings indicate that the degree of intervention from management is highly dependent on the internal organizational context. This article thus provides a contingent framework to the cultivation of communities of practice.