COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE: IMPROVING KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT IN BUSINESS

The formation of communities of practice in business represents, possibly, the best way to manage knowledge bases in organizations since they integrate the most important dimensions in knowledge management: the technological dimension, the strategic dimension and the cultural or behavioral dimension. This paper explains what communities of practice are and why they serve as an efficient tool in knowledge management. Since this is a recently developed field, our study is exploratory, and is intended to identify trends and conceptual aspects associated with this topic. Our research will be based on the application of two bibliometric techniques, life cycle analysis and citation breadth analysis, to total articles related to communities of practice and published in academic and popular journals from 1998 to 2009. This paper demonstrates that the conceptual and practical framework revealed through the articles published during period under study prove that these communities integrates the technological, managerial and behavioral relevant factors. For this reason, writings on communities of practice are conceptually more solid than theoretical bases associated with knowledge management projects, which emphasize the technology-oriented and popular approaches.