Week 6, 6.2 Joint Enterprise

Durkheim’s description of a community is that they all need to have ‘shared norms and values’ and Baym argues that they need to have a ‘group specific meaning such as text language’ etc, this is true for normal types of community like a neighbour hood, or online fan site. However, Communities of Practices are an advancement to these type of communities, they are not there necessarily because of a shared opinion or because of where you live, but because there is a mutual agreement that these members come together in order to learn something, or reach a goal. Joint enterprise is the key element to being a community of practice, as Wenger states in his article ‘Communities of practice develop around things that matter to people’ therefore the audience want to reach a goal or develop a skill, as does the other members in the group. So, this type of community does have factors of ordinary communities or online communities with the idea that there is a sense of ‘togetherness’ and like Durkheim said ‘shared norms and values’ but they are working together to reach a certain goal, rather than just discussing views etc. The example I gave before about Kickboxing shows the idea of communities of practice through Wenger’s model, and even though it has all the original factors to be just a community, the members are working together to achieve a certain standard of self defence. Wenger’s idea of communities of practice, agree with the ideas of Putnam’s social capital for example they ‘enable people to build communities, to commit themselves to each other, and to knit the social fabric. A sense of belonging and the concrete experience of social networks (and the relationships of trust and tolerance that can be involved) can, it is argued, bring great benefits to people’. However, social capital is criticised as being able to exclude people as well as make them into a community. These close knit groups have the ability to seem quite overpowering and may result in people feeling too overwhelmed to join. Do you agree?

An example of a CofP which I found online was http://www.weightwatchers.co.uk/ . This website helps a community of people work together to loose weight. They have goals that they can work towards together and it gives them a sense of ‘belonging’ and they learn information about how many points to eat per day and what constitutes a good diet. Even though weightwatchers meetings are held IRL, the website still allows the idea of CofP, because of the tab called ‘community’ where you can write on the message board and swap recipes. This idea is showing CofP, as its helping people come together with a shared agenda and a shared goal.


Putnam's journal http://www.infed.org/thinkers/putnam.htm