eSSENCE of Organisations, Social/Business Networks, Communities of Practice (Cops) and its dISPARITY..?

Organisations, what is it and what i believe…?

Organisation, Is a well known term and there are various definition and views on it. But my view towards organisation is bit different. To me Organisation has to do something with systematize a business or activity with a group of people working together. As the definition state it's a group of people working together for a particular objective/activity/goals, It means that I am talking about organisation which is not only the business organisation, It can be found in schools, colleges, welfares, etc. where ever a group of people getting collected to attain certain goals.

But I believe organisation drive in the theory of incompetence. By contrast, the idea of competence support flat organisation. The characteristic theory of incompetence is controls and directives, rules and procedures, layers of management and pyramids of power. Incompetence is a quite important but minimally explored variable in organisation. (Ott and Shafritz, 1994)

Further, incompetence just is not what it used to be. Traditionally one person could be fully responsible for a major failure in business. Although it is still possible to properly credit one individual for a major instance of mission failure, the far more likely explanation is that an organisation's structure, culture, or policies are at fault. Still it is far more emotionally satisfying to lay blame on a single individual. But this attitude does not take into account the nature of modern organisations.(Handy, C.)

Social/Business Networks, What is it..?

Social/Business Network is a social structure which consists of standalone nodes which are connected to each others by some means. These means are the purpose or needs of each another which brings them to form a group or called as networks. Nodes are basically Individuals or Organisation.(Anklam and Hoppe, 2005)

Social Network is nothing new for us, We are already part of one of the social network for an example as we look within ourselves we have relationship in the family. When all of our relatives come together for certain occasion we form a social network. And if one new member is entered in the family the size of the network increases because of the existing relationship get merged with the new relationships and so on and on..

Now a days there are lots of internet application playing role in connecting different people with each other. So these internet applications become means for forming network. As there is a saying "World is become small place to live". It has been tested by Stanley Milgram's in Six Degrees of Separation.

Communities of Practice (Cops)...?

According to Mr. Fred Nickols (2000) "Communities of Practice are the group that form to share what they know and to learn from one another regarding some aspects of their work". Further Mr Etienne Wenger (1998) had a unique explanation; he said "Communities of practice are everywhere". With these definition and many others I believe Communities of Practice can be simply explained as a groups of people working together to share work-related knowledge and experience.

After the research on Cops I believe that we are linked with many of Cops in the form of School, work, home or in our hobbies. You might have joined an online community or might be a part of sports club. No matter what forms of involvement is there, but most of us have experienced the belonging in community of practice (Wenger, E. (1998) a)

While reading about CoP I recollect one of the incidents in my past organisation where my profile was of System Administrator and also I have possess knowledge in programming so I use to work parallell with programmer for certain automation on AD and Exchange. Automation of a process took quite some time but till it was in process of being completed I had to work with them so I had to meet them two days in a week. This was a kind of CoP where there is a purpose to achieve within certain group of people over a period of time.

There is one better example for COP; it's about the Technicians at Xerox Corporation.

Organisations, Social/Business Networks, Communities of Practice (Cops), its dISPARITY…?

There are many different opinions and view on the above topic, as I went on looking views of different experts and ActKM members what I found was

According Steve Denning's book, The Leader's Guide to Storytelling, in chapter 7 Steve makes a clear distinction between CoPs and Networks as shown in the Table 7.1 (from the authors book, Click on the link to view the table) also he makes a mark by saying

"Communities are often confused with networks. Networks are collection of people who maintain contact with each other because of a mutually perceived benefit of staying in touch for purposes that may or may not be explicit" (Denning, S. 2005)

Further to his saying I looked over a view from Communities of Practice, by Etienne Wenger.

"Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly." (Wenger, E. b)

I would like to comment that, it entirely depends on people's perception to consider a COP as a network or Network as a COP. Because Etienne Wenger also said in his earlier article that COP is found every where which mean for example, ActKM, is a network or a community of practice. According to Steve Denning's book

"I see ActKM as a CoP. I'm also a member of CP Square but I don't know that group's stories and consequently I see it more as a network than a community. I would like to change my perception in that case."(Denning, S. 2005)

To elaborate more about the disparity between the group types see Table 1.0 dISPARITY between Organisation, Social/Business Network and Communities of Practise.

Table 1.0 – dISPARITY between Organisation, Social/Business Network and Communities of Practise.

Note: Due to lack of space, Table 1.0 is saved as image to view the table please click on the link.

Reference

1. Ott, J., and Shafritz, Jay. 1994. toward a definition of organizational incompetence: A neglected variable in organization theory. Available: http://www.questia.com/googleScholar.qst?docId=5000218958 [2/7/2009, 2009].
   
2. Handy, C., managing the dream -- learning organization article. Available: http://www.ourfuture.com/arts02.htm [2/7/2009, 2009].
   
3. Anklam, P. and Hoppe, B. 2005, social network - wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Available: http://p2pfoundation.net/Social_Network_Analysis [2/7/2009, 2009].
   
4. Wenger, E. 1998 a, CoP: best practices. Available: http://www.co-i-l.com/coil/knowledge-garden/cop/lss.shtml [2/7/2009, 2009].
   
5. Denning, S. 2005. "The Leader's Guide to Storytelling". Page No. 150, Available: Google Book Search: http://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&id=wuorz5X0KsIC&dq=The+Leader%27s+Guide+to+Storytelling&printsec=frontcover&source=web&ots=lNgnguUzkl&sig=yhFgQh2oIKjIgzqtLFCWa16cVc4&ei=QH6RSfTgG-TSjAe2sdmoCg&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=10&ct=result#PPP9,M1 [2/10/2009, 2009].
   
6. Wenger, E. b, Communities of Practice : A brief introduction. Available: http://www.ewenger.com/theory/index.htm [2/7/2009, 2009].
   
7. Nickols, F. 2000, Communities of Practice (CoP): Definition, Indicators and Identifying Characteristics. Available: http://home.att.net/~discon/KM/CoPCharacteristics.htm [2/7/2009, 2009]