A later version is the concept of community of practice, which began
with work by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger at a Xerox PARC spinoff,
the Institute for Research on Learning, in the 1980s. Etienne later
wrote a book called Communities of Practice (Cambridge University
Press, 1998). A community of practice is a group of people with
its own culture, which uses its rituals to pool knowledge among
its members. New members are acculturated by participating at
the edges of the activity, for example through apprenticeship, and
then by moving to successively more central roles in the community.
The community of practice framework does not provide hard-and-fast
generalizations about the workings of the communities, but rather
a set of concepts that have proven useful in analyzing the workings
of many particular cases. In a series of papers and a recent book,
The Social Life of Information (Harvard Business School Press, 2000),
John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid have developed the community of
practice framework in making suggestions about the future of several
institutions, such as politics and the university. The key in each
case is to amplify (and certainly not to destroy) the conditions that
make communities of practice possible. A university, for example,
should be viewed (at least from one perspective) as a mechanism for
introducing an individual into the community of practice in which they
will spend their career.