Communities of Practice: Critical Perspectives

by Jason Hughes (Editor), Nick Jewson (Editor), Lorna Unwin (Editor)

Overview

This benchmark text provides an accessible yet critical introduction to the theory and application of communities of practice and their use in a diverse range of managerial and professional contexts, from education to human resource development.

This book charts the development of the idea of communities of practice and explores the key relationship between learning and identity among:

• newcomers and ‘old timers’
• male and female workers
• the low skilled and the high skilled
• professionals and managers
• adults and adolescents.

Drawing on international empirical studies and adopting a multi-disciplinary approach, this book is useful reading for all students, researchers, practitioners and policy makers with an interest in work, employment, labour markets, learning, training or education.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780415364737
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	10/04/2007
Pages:	194
Product dimensions:	6.88(w) x 9.69(h) x (d)

About the Author

Jason Hughes is a Senior Lecturer at Brunel University, London. His current research interests include emotional reflexivity in the ‘new’ workplace; emotional and aesthetic labour, and new managerial discourses. His recent book Learning to Smoke: Tobacco Use in the West (2003) was the winner of the 2006 international Norbert Elias Amalfi Prize.

Nick Jewson is a Senior Research Fellow in the School of Social Sciences at Cardiff University. He has published widely on equal opportunities, non-standard forms of employment, spatial transformations in patterns of work and employment, and learning in the workplace.

Lorna Unwin is Professor of Vocational Education at the Institute of Education, University of London. Her interests include the changing meaning and role of skill and vocational knowledge. Her most recent book, Improving Workplace Learning, was published by Routledge in 2006.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: Communities of Practice - A Contested Concept in Flux? 2. Critiquing Theories of Learning and Communities of Practice 3. Lost in Translation: Communities of Practice: The Journey from Academic Model to Practitioner Tool 4. From Communities of Practice to Mycorrhizae 5. Including the Missing Subject: Placing the Personal Within the Community 6. Cultivating Network Analysis: Rethinking ‘Community’ within Communities of Practice 7. Sport as a Community of Practice: The Coach-Athlete Relationship in British Professional Basketball 8. Becoming Adults via Communities of Practice: The Transition from Work to Adulthood 9. Apprenticeship From Past to Present: The Challenges and Consequences of Rampant ‘Community’ Diversity 10. Sexuality, Gender and Legitimate Peripheral Participation: An Ethnographic Study of a Call Centre 11. The Learning Trajectories of Old-Timers: Academic Identities and Communities of Practice in Higher Education 12. Unemployment as a Community of Practice: Tales of Survival in the New Germany 13. Putting Virtual Communities of Practice in their Place: Changes in the Spatial Location of Work 14. Conclusion: Further Developments and Unresolved Issues