Communities of Practice and Knowledge Management : A Descriptive Study

Research on knowledge management in organizations reveals that some projects fail because managers include technological and strategic dimensions in their design, 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 all three factors. This study will explore what constitutes, as organizational phenomenon, such communities of practice, and how they differ on a structural and epistemological basis from knowledge management notion. The purpose of this 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 from 1995-2004. Although most of psychosocial and academic articles integrate all aspects of organizational knowledge: technological, managerial and psychosocial. They are different from knowledge management articles, which emphasize technological and popular orientation