A constructive critique of communities of practice: moving beyond Lave and Wenger

In this paper, the authors argue that although Lave and Wenger’s (1991) seminal work on learning remains key to an understanding of learning, there is a need to rework and extend it, to address some of the major challenges faced by the workplace learning literature and some gaps and weaknesses in the original work that have not, in their view, been dealt with in Wenger’s subsequent work. In presenting what they hope is a constructive critique, the authors focus on the concept of communities of practice and briefly examine ‘legitimate peripheral participation’, which had greater...  [+] Show more

In this paper, the authors argue that although Lave and Wenger’s (1991) seminal work on learning remains key to an understanding of learning, there is a need to rework and extend it, to address some of the major challenges faced by the workplace learning literature and some gaps and weaknesses in the original work that have not, in their view, been dealt with in Wenger’s subsequent work. In presenting what they hope is a constructive critique, the authors focus on the concept of communities of practice and briefly examine ‘legitimate peripheral participation’, which had greater prominence in the original work. Six challenges to workplace learning literature are addressed using Lave and Wenger’s original work as a starting framework: (1) to incorporate wider issues of social and economic inequalities beyond the actual site of learning, fully into the analysis of learning; (2) to blend what is known about the impact of power differentials in relation to access to learning into our understanding of social learning processes; (3) to integrate individual learners into social theorising about learning; (4) to replace and move beyond the common but mistaken assumption that informal and formal learning are distinctly different types of learning, where the former is often assumed to be inherently superior to the latter; (5) to adequately address the fact that workplace learning processes can be very effective in promoting poor or unethical practice; and (6) to examine off-the-job learning/training from a social/participatory perspective.