3. Theoretical Background

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.