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Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
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TY - JOUR
T1 - Labours of division
T2 - Legitimacy, membership and the performance of business knowledge
AU - Knox, Hannah
AU - O'Doherty, Damian
AU - Vurdubakis, Theodore
AU - Westrup, Chris
PY - 2024/11/30
Y1 - 2024/11/30
N2 - The idea(l) of ‘legitimate peripheral participation’ remains at the heart of debates over the nature and potential of communities of practice. Yet the question of how the legitimacy or otherwise of participation is actually established is seldom addressed. In this article, we focus on ‘legitimacy’ as figure instead of ground. We attend to the ‘displays of competence’, and their associated ‘labours of division’, by means of which ‘practitioners’ claim recognition and are made recognisable to each other as members, or non-members, of an ‘us’. We seek to understand how members come to recognise particular ‘doings’ and forms of knowledge as belonging (or not belonging) to a particular practice. How is the common ‘domain’ (communis) of practice settled (or un-settled) in the course of specific performances of membership? Empirically, the article draws upon a 2-year investigation of how community of practice boundaries and participation were negotiated in ‘UltraGlass Plc’, a multinational manufacturing company, and specifically of the failure of ‘community’ to cohere around practices.
AB - The idea(l) of ‘legitimate peripheral participation’ remains at the heart of debates over the nature and potential of communities of practice. Yet the question of how the legitimacy or otherwise of participation is actually established is seldom addressed. In this article, we focus on ‘legitimacy’ as figure instead of ground. We attend to the ‘displays of competence’, and their associated ‘labours of division’, by means of which ‘practitioners’ claim recognition and are made recognisable to each other as members, or non-members, of an ‘us’. We seek to understand how members come to recognise particular ‘doings’ and forms of knowledge as belonging (or not belonging) to a particular practice. How is the common ‘domain’ (communis) of practice settled (or un-settled) in the course of specific performances of membership? Empirically, the article draws upon a 2-year investigation of how community of practice boundaries and participation were negotiated in ‘UltraGlass Plc’, a multinational manufacturing company, and specifically of the failure of ‘community’ to cohere around practices.
KW - Business process
KW - Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
KW - Knowledge
KW - legitimacy
KW - membership
KW - technology
U2 - 10.1177/13505076231194831
DO - 10.1177/13505076231194831
M3 - Journal article
VL - 55
SP - 790
EP - 810
JO - Management Learning
JF - Management Learning
SN - 1350-5076
IS - 5
ER -