Communities of Practice for Inter-organizational Knowledge Management: An Empirical Study

Facilitating communities of practice for knowledge sharing and application is a goal pursued by knowledge managers, intra-organizational or inter-organizational. One major short-coming in the CoP literature is the lack of attention paid to power relations. The term communities of practice (CoPs) invoke the notion of peers sharing knowledge as equals. In actual practice, power relations within a community or between a community and its external actors can determine the nature and the efficacy of a CoP. In this study, we apply social network analysis to illuminate the nature of power relations in communities of practice in a particular inter-organizational context. The organizations concerned are the 217 local authorities in six selected provinces in Sri Lanka and the actors are the solid waste managers in each. Social network analysis is combined with a multi-level multi-theoretical analysis to understand the factors driving the apparent self-organization of this community of practitioners as hubs and nodes.