Customer Reviews
Do your job better - because you want to - By: 50Hz, 29 Sep 2002 
For years I've experienced a work environment where my time is cluttered with many meetings that have little to do with my real work (Information System architecture & design) & few that do. Reading through this book has given me the motivation & means to go about improving my work situation along with other colleagues who want to do a better job, simply because we want to do so.
There are plenty of practical illustrations of the concepts taken from the work place. These help you spot the starting points for your work in your own organisation. If this is your first encounter with Communities of Practice then the book is a good starting point. Making the subject accessible in a way that other academic discourses on the subject do not.
A dreadfully disappointing book. - By: Charles Smith, 26 Jul 2002 
I arrived at this book via Situated Learning, the book Etienne Wenger wrote with Jean Lave, & his own earlier book, Communities of Practice. These present fundamental understandings on the nature of knowledge, practice & meaning in organisations. As a practitioner, I would very much like to see a follow-up, to address the practical implementation of these perspectives in the workplace. Unfortunately, Cultivating Communities of Practice fails to meet this need.
In their desperation to be friendly to a non-academic audience, the authors have avoided anything challlenging to conventional management thinking, watering down the original & valuable concepts of the earlier books. The Community of Practice, which was previously "an intrinsic condition for the existence of knowledge" is now an optional - "a practical way to manage knowledge as an asset". Instead of being a pre-requisite for meaning & practice, it has become merely the latest management idea - a useful place for people to exchange ideas & help each other with problems. Problems & solutions are thereby re-located back into the minds of individuals, rather than being sociallly constructed.
There are occasional paragraphs - for instance on stewardship & institutionalisation - which briefly touch on the real issues, but for the most part the content is anodyne, & would be better suited to beginner's guide to running a social club.
A dreadfully disappointing book.
