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Encyclopedia of Sustainable Management pp 1–10Cite as

Community of Practices

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Synonyms

Learning by interaction; Practitioner community; Professional community; Situated learning; Thinking together

Definition

“We all belong to communities of practice… in fact communities of practice are everywhere” (Wenger 1998, p. 6). A Community of Practice (CoP) is a group of people who share similar challenges, interact regularly, learn from and with each other, and improve their ability to address their challenges. The theory of CoP starts from the idea of situated learning and learning by interaction and studies how a CoP generates and diffuses knowledge among members and in the organization in which the CoP arises and grows. In this chapter, CoP is described, taking into consideration components, characteristics, relationships among members in the CoP and between the CoP and organizations, benefits and limitations in activating a CoP, and factors that enable or obstacle the success of a CoP. It emerges that CoP exist in many contexts and that the presence of...

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Management, Economics and Quantitative Methods, University of Bergamo, Bergamo, Italy

    Cristiana Cattaneo

Authors
  1. Cristiana Cattaneo
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Cristiana Cattaneo .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. London Metropolitan University, Guildhall Faculty of Business and Law London Metropolitan University, London, UK

    Samuel Idowu

  2. Cologne Business School, Ingolstadt, Germany

    René Schmidpeter

  3. College of Business, Loyola University New Orleans, New Orleans, LA, USA

    Nicholas Capaldi

  4. International Training Centre of the IL, International Labor Organization, Turin, Italy

    Liangrong Zu

  5. Department of Economics, Society and Politics, University of Urbino Carlo Bo, Urbino, Italy

    Mara Del Baldo

  6. Instituto Politécnico da Guarda, Guarda, Portugal

    Rute Abreu

Section Editor information

  1. No affiliation provided

    Kristijan Krač

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Cattaneo, C. (2020). Community of Practices. In: Idowu, S., Schmidpeter, R., Capaldi, N., Zu, L., Del Baldo, M., Abreu, R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Sustainable Management. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02006-4_921-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02006-4_921-1

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-02006-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-02006-4

  • eBook Packages: Springer Reference Business and ManagementReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Business, Economics and Social Sciences

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