The Organizational Embeddedness of Communities of Practice

This dissertation explores the tension-ridden and paradoxical interrelation between informal and self-organized communities of practice (CoPs) with their managerial shaped, formal-hierarchical context. Based on qualitative data gathered from three different communities of practice within the German Federal Armed Forces, the dissertation provides a comprehensive, data-grounded theoretical model that explicates the embeddedness of CoPs as shaped through cultural and leadership processes. Taking both a practice lens and a complexity leadership theory perspective, the model theorizes the emergence and embeddedness of CoPs as a process of self-organized resourcing enabled through leadership. Notably, it uncovers that CoPs evolve as practitioners self-organize and begin to generate new resources as they sense adaptive pressures in practice. It further highlights how these practitioners simultaneously reproduce and adapt cultural elements from the broader cultural repertoire within their local social interactions, and in doing so, shape new hybrid community cultures. Finally, the model illustrates how these dynamics in communities of practice are enabled, energized, and transformed by enabling leadership that navigates the tension between the self-organized nature of CoPs and top-down managerial control. Altogether, this dissertation's findings highlight the tension-laden relation between CoPs and formal organizational context and how it can be engaged and managed for organizational adaptability.

In this chapter, I provide a thorough account of the debates within the communities of practice literature. I do so systematically by generating what I will refer to as the core collection of research about CoPs, comprising the most prominent and influential work in this academic field. Based on this core collection, I will develop an explanatory framework of CoP research that is organized around the central dimensions of the CoP construct. This framework helps me in reviewing and illustrating the ongoing debates and controversies within the extant literature.

In the previous section I conducted a thorough review of the CoP literature which revealed that we need to know more about how such self-organized communities emerge and embed within the context of formal organizational hierarchy. In traditional research, one would now expect a theoretical discussion from which arguments about the embeddedness would be honed. However, I choose to explore the research questions of this study using an interpretative research approach that develops theory from the ground up instead of deductively testing theorized relationships. In such a grounded theory approach the theory usually appears after qualitative data presentation (Nag, Corley, & Gioia, 2007; Suddaby, 2006). Yet, to give the reader a better understanding of how I look at the data spreading in front of me, and to advance the clarity of this manuscript, I will provide a theoretical overview first.

The overall purpose of this study is to explore the embeddedness of communities of practice within contexts of formal organizational hierarchy. More specifically, this study will inquire on how CoPs emerge, how they culturally interrelate with broader structures, and how formal leadership navigates this tension between emergent, self-organized CoPs and formal hierarchy. That is, the aim of this research involves theorizing about the cross-level dynamics and processes between the local context of a CoP and the broader trans-local context in which it evolves. To this end, I will employ inductive qualitative research methods to build data-grounded process theory on a CoP’s embeddedness.

Below, I will present the findings of this study in three main parts. The first unpacks how changes of environmental conditions shaped the context for the formation of communities of practice in the armed forces. Further, it presents how individuals across units and departments experience these external pressures and collectively start to resource new activities, knowledge, and professional connections.

In the previous sections, I provided a thick description of the emergence and embeddedness of communities of practice situated in the German armed forces using informants’ own experiences, available archival data, and impressions from observations. Although I gave a theoretical explanation after each of the three findings sections, I would like to provide a comprehensive theoretical account that explicates the embeddedness of CoPs within formal, hierarchical organizations based on the study’s findings.

I began this study with the aim to understand how self-organized and emergent communities of practice relate to their trans-local context of formal organization hierarchy. To theorize on embeddedness, I had to understand how communities of practice emerge in such contexts, how they culturally relate to it, and how leadership interacts with them. In order to do so, I utilized an interpretative research approach to build process theory based on the in-depth description of three communities of practice within the German Federal Armed Forces.

The issue of designing contemporary organizations for adaptability in today’s dynamic world is arguably one of the most significant challenges managers face nowadays because it requires formal systems focused on productivity as well as informal elements that organically explore and innovate. On that premise, the purpose of this study was to investigate how the tension between informal and self-organized communities of practice and formal organizational hierarchy can be managed. That is, my aim was to understand the dynamics of how CoPs emerge and become embedded within formal organizations to allow for local learning and adaptation, but also to ensure sufficient integration and dissemination of community-generated ideas, initiatives, and knowledge.