Innovation, Learning, Communities, and Actor-Networks of Practice

Abstract

This chapter addresses the question: Is there a virtuous circle between situated learning within communities of practice and the corporate pursuit of innovation in large companies? The authors trace a succession of ways in which it has been formulated, reframed, and addressed across a range and sequence of qualitative studies. Overall, they argue for more ethnographic studies of organizational learning and innovation and recommend further use of actor-network theory, which has potential to add considerably to communities of practice theory. The authors illustrate this argument in the chapter through a discussion of Carlile's (2002) important paper and cite a number of other studies that use actor-network theory in combination with communities of practice theory.