Paul, Thanks for raising the similarities between Becker's social worlds
perspective and communities of practice. Becker's Chicago School approach
to social worlds goes back to the work of Robert Park and Everett Hughes,
and their studies of the city as "matrix of social worlds that touch but do
not interpenetrate." (Which of course quickly became the question of how
they do interpenetrate, overlap, and share space.) Both concepts are
important as crossing-cutting traditional sociological organizational
categories -- and that is just what makes them so methodologically
difficult too. L*
> > I wanted identify what
> >might be some problems in applying the construct of community of practice to
> >this setting, and what might be some alternative interpretations or
> frameworks
> >which may be useful in understanding activity and participation in this
> >context.
>
>What if we start with the practice and then identify who is involved with
>the practice and in what capacity and at what time? I've been thinking
>that the spatialization, the mapping, the territorialization is part of the
>problem, part of what makes activity/practice too static, too bounded, too
>much like our ideologies of nationality that imaginatively circumscribe and
>own us.
>
>Howard Becker, coming from different theoretical perspectives, arrived at
>something like a COP perspective I think in his notion of art worlds, where
>he drew together people acting in quite varied capacities and times
>(audiences and actors, educators and critics, carpenters and tailors,
>writers and printers, sponsors and electicians, etc.). The limits then may
>be limits of interest, of traffic, of change. Latour is another who has
>argued for quite dispersed, heterogeneous networks that don't necessarily
>fit within ethnosociological categories or geographically/institutionally
>defined sites.
>
> >The problem with mappying communities of practice when it comes to an actual
> >research setting is that I'm finding it's a lot more complicated than I
> >thought. How does one delimit? To determine where one COP starts and
> another
> >ends? What about people who identify/belong to multiple COPs that cross
> >contexts? How do we inventory all the COPs we belong to? I'm sure if I
> tried
> >this I might miss something. This overlapping notion is problemmatic. What
> >happens when COPs are nested, for example, hierarchically? Then, I keep
> >thinking I'm making it all too static, it's not a thing, dammit.
>
>Paul Prior
>p-prior@uiuc.edu
>University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
______________________________________________
Susan Leigh Star, Professor
Department of Communication
9500 Gilman Drive
University of California at San Diego
La Jolla, CA 92093-0503
lstar@ucsd.edu http://weber.ucsd.edu/~lstar/
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