Communities of practice and knowledge management: An exploratory and descriptive study (Spanish text).

摘要

Literature and research in knowledge management in organizations reveals that, mostly, those projects include technological and strategic dimensions, but not human and sociocultural considerations. The formation of communities of practice in organizations represents an alternative to solve this problem, because its development includes the integration of three factors already mentioned. However, some authors states that technology remains as sole basis for sharing knowledge within some communities of practice, which brings the same implantation problems as those in knowledge management projects. For this reason, this research will explore what constitutes, as organizational phenomenon, communities of practice, and how them differs on a structural and epistemological basis from knowledge management notion. The purpose of this exploratory and descriptive study is to compare the fields of knowledge management and communities of practice, through identification, description and analysis of academic and popular articles published within those notions. This is a qualitative research, based on two bibliometric techniques: life cycle analysis, to determine any discursive change patterns in literature on knowledge management and communities of practice fields; breadth and activity analysis, to study philosophical and social knowledge bases which support communities of practice notion. This is a quantitative research, too, based on statistical analysis, which serves to compare the theoretical content of published articles with the fields under study, publication period, and publication type. This investigation demonstrates that published articles related with communities of practice, although mostly of psychosocial and academic nature, integrates all aspects of organizational knowledge: technological, managerial and psychosocial. Thus, they are different from knowledge management articles, which emphasize technological and popular orientation. Finally, since adequate management of knowledge bases in organizations is essential, communities of practice formation should be motivated as most efficient strategy to manage all pertinent aspects of such effort.