The rise and fall of a community of practice: A descriptive case study

For more than a decade, the notion of communities of practice has drawn attention from both scholars and practitioners. Its popularity has been fuelled, in part, by the realisation that knowledge is heavily social in nature. Communities of practice therefore provide an ideal context for developing, sharing and stewarding knowledge in organisations. Many knowledge management researchers present communities of practice as a compelling form of informal organisational structure capable of producing remarkable outcomes. However, eclipsed by the celebrations of numerous success stories are unpublished but nonetheless important cases in which efforts to build and sustain communities of practice have failed. This paper traces the inception, development and eventual demise of a community of practice among e-learning instructional designers at Holden College. It also attempts to explain why the initiative, which seemed to enjoy a promising start, fizzled out completely in less than one-and-a-half years. The key learning points distilled from this case can be used to inform managers who are contemplating starting communities of practice in their own organisations.