Organizational Learning and Communities-of-Practice: Toward a Unified View of Working, Learning, and Innovation

Recent ethnographic studies of workplace practices indicate that the ways people actually work usually differ fundamentally from the ways organizations describe that work in manuals, training programs, organizational charts, and job descriptions. Organizations tend to rely on the latter in their attempts to understand and improve work practice. We relate the conclusions of one study of work practices to compatible investigations of learning and innovation to argue that conventional descriptions of jobs mask not only the ways people work, but also the learning and innovation generated in the informal communities-of-practice in which they work. By reassessing the apparently conflicting triad of work, learning, and innovation in the context of actual communities and actual practices, we suggest that the synergistic connections between these three become apparent. With a unified view of working, learning, and innovating, it should be possible to reconceive of and redesign organizations to improve all three.