Communities of Practice Doing Practitioner-research to Enable Knowledge Acquisition

摘要

It is argued by Gomez (2005) that both constructivist and constructionist perspectives are necessary for participative learning and the construction of knowledge within communities of practice (CoPs). A primary concern of the paper is that of knowledge acquisition-and-generation in contrast to the notion of knowledge transfer/transmission that primarily involves coded and explicit information. Based on the particular experience of participant observation amongst a group of construction industry practitioners, it is suggested that the full potential of knowledge acquisition-and-generation in the specific situated context of benchmarking can be realized by means of conceputalising the benchmarking process as a participative learning process based on the concept of a community of practice involved in practitioner-research The concept of communities of practice (CoPs) is used as a tool for anlaysing learning, specifically the acquisition of knowledge in terms of 'knowing from within' based on 'joint action' experienced through the action of shared communicative understanding The paper argues for a constructionist orientation for enga ging in relational benchmarking that can provide the consistent basis for conceptualizing knowledge sharing, acquisition and generation when undertaken as practitioner-research.