CONCEPT
Community of Practice
Wenger's foundational unit of social learning — a group bound together by shared domain, mutual engagement, and a collective repertoire developed over time through joint work.
A community of practice is not a team, a department, or a network. It is the specific social form through which practitioners who share a domain, interact regularly, and develop a collective repertoire of stories, techniques, and standards produce knowledge that exceeds what any member possesses alone. Wenger derived the concept from Jean Lave's anthropological fieldwork and his own observations of claims processors at an American insurance company — workers whose actual expertise lived not in the training manual but in the informal community that management did not design and barely recognized. The framework has since become one of the most widely adopted in organizational theory, precisely because it names a social structure that was always doing the heavy lifting of professional learning and that most institutions had failed to see.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The three constitutive elements are precise and each is tested differently by AI. The shared domain is the practice the members care about — not