The Role of Communities of Practice in Shaping Modernisation: A Case Study of Change, Persistence, and Survival in the UK Cockle-Fishing Industry 2011-2018

Abstract

In this introductory chapter are all the essential elements necessary to set out the theoretical argument, the scholarly contribution, and the preliminary background information. The thesis is about occupational communities and Communities of Practice (CoP). This chapter helps to clarify the focus of the study and contextualise the research. Most important of all here are the research aims and objectives of the study. The objectives are made explicit regarding what each objective entails, how the researcher will achieve them, and how they relate to the research process and the aims of the thesis.

1.1 Background context

Given that work is such a fundamental part of most people’s lives it is not at all surprising that the study of human activity in the workplace has become a central concern for scholars. One tradition now seemingly popular with Management and Organisation scholars interested in the study of work is practice-based theory. Management and Organisation scholars who adopt a practice-based ontology study organising as a social process as opposed to the organisation as an entity.

In this way, the ontological object of inquiry becomes the interplay of social interaction and practical action in the workplace (Nicolini, 2012). Some early industrial sociologists used this approach to analyse the relationship between work and leisure. Hughes (1956) for example applied the term occupational communities to the systematic analysis of people engaged in social interaction in field studies of work and work group affiliations.

A more contemporary research stream in this tradition is the study of work associated with learning (Lave and Wenger 1991; Brown and Duguid, 1991; Orlikowski, 2002). In this regard, a propagated practice-oriented framework useful for accounting for such phenomenon in work contexts is communities of practice (CoP). CoP theory has been widely used to explain practitioner learning in different work contexts since the early 90’s. Initially CoP was utilised as an analytical tool, but by the early 2000’s Management and Organisation scholars were suggesting, as management consultants, that CoP could be used as a knowledge management tool for performative purposes (Roberts, 2006).

though scholarly interest in CoP subsequently waned in Management and Organisation studies, Wenger’s (1991) conceptualisation remains a dominant influential way to conceptualise the intricate relationship between work and learning in organisations (Lindkvist, 2005). The notion that these two elements are not disjointed but rather learning is part of work, and work is a source of learning is at the heart of Lave and Wenger’s (1991) original CoP treatise.

However, whereas much is already known about CoP theory and its utility as a conceptual framework, probably more scholarly time and effort has gone into researching communities within and between all types of organisations than the direct study of occupations (Anteby, Chan, and DiBenigno, 2016). This tendency towards organisation forms of CoP means that occupational communities are manifestly a rare find in the Management and Organisation literature.

Even where there is interest in occupational communities, scholars foreground issues of dissonance and social confrontation with the result that, occupational communities are only really understood in terms of organisational-occupational tension. Consequently, there is very little theoretical perspective on work activity and social interaction which plays out in what Salaman (1974) characterises as an occupational community without a parent organisation. This is borne out by Nicolini, Pyrko, Omidvar-Tehrani, and Spanellis (2022), who establish that Management and Organisation scholars have yet to establish a link between CoP and occupational communities.

If organisations were either the only or perhaps the most important settings for understanding work and worker practice this situation would not be at all remarkable. The fact is however that a CoP studied in an occupational setting, as a comparative frame of reference (Hughes, 1970), could reveal a conception about the nature of work and worker relationships which is characteristically different to a CoP within an organisation.