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A Theory-Based Approach to the Relationship between Social Capital and Communities of Practice
El-Sayed Abou-Zeid
Department of Decision Sciences and MIS, John Molson School of Business, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada
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There is almost a consensus that the tacit component of organizational knowledge is of critical strategic importance because, unlike explicit knowledge, it is both inimitable and appropriable. Because of its characteristics, organizational tacit knowledge is usually created and shared through highly interactive conversation and shared experience, i.e., through a socialization process. At the firm’s level, the effectiveness of the socialization process depends on the firm’s social capital. At group level, it has been argued that communities of practice form the basis of a firms ability to create and share tacit knowledge. Therefore, investigating the relationship between social capital, communities of practice and individual human action is crucial in understanding the dynamic across levels of knowledge creation and utilization and in understanding the organizational learning process. In order to study this relationship Giddens’ theory of structuration is used as it provides an integrating meta-theory that recognizes social reality as constituted by both subjective human actors and by objective institutional properties and attempts to articulate a process-oriented approach that relates the realm of human action and the institutional realm. Based on Giddens’ theory a model of the interaction between human action and social capital of the firm is developed. According to this model such interaction is mediated through a firm’s communities of practice which are conceptualized as the means for realizing the different types of modality between social capital and human action. Such conceptualization of firm’s communities of practice is the means for realizing the different types of modality between social capital and human action provides a fine-grained approach to study the impact of their elements, i.e., shared repertoire, mutual engagement and joint enterprise, on the structural, relational and cognitive dimensions pf firm’s social capital respectively. In addition, it explicates the duality of the firm’s communities of practice, namely: they are both the medium and the outcome of collective human action. This model also shows the need for further research in two areas. First is the study of the constraining roles of the firm’s communities of practice in creating and sharing organizational tacit knowledge. Second is the study of the social which influences organizational members in their relation to communities of practice
Keywords:
Knowledge management, social capital, communities of practice, structuration theory
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