Communities of Practice and Habitus: A Critique

Abstract

Alistair Mutch is Principal Lecturer in Information Management in NottinghamBusiness School at the Nottingham Trent University. He began academic life as a historian exploring rural life in Victorian England and then worked for British Telecommunications for ten years. He is interested in developing a critical realist perspective on the use of information, as well as in exploring the historical dimension of information use. He has published on, amongst other things, the current status and historical formation of welding, and the use of information by trades unions. He is currently working on a history of public house management in the United Kingdom, following a study of contemporary practices. AbstractPierre Bourdieu's concept of 'habitus' is frequently drawn upon in work on learning and knowledge in organisations. However, this use is much looser than Bourdieu's emphasis on habitus as generative structure. This tension is explored in an examination of the work of UK public house managers, using the notion of communities of practice. The issues that this raises about habitus are developed through a consideration of the work of Basil Bernstein. His work indicates the value of a concept that emphasises durable dispositions to act, but such a concept needs to be embedded in a relational conception of the agency-structure divide.

Adults and Children Engaging With Eportfolios in an Early Childhood Education Setting

“…The original designers of the theoretical perspective themselves note limitations, contending that the attributes "that make a community an ideal structure for learning -a shared perspective on a domain, trust, a communal identity, long-standing relationships, an established practiceare the same qualities that can hold it hostage to its history and its achievements" (Wenger et al, 2002, p. 141). Other authors have highlighted further limitations and weaknesses with the communities of practice approach, those most relevant to this study being power, trust and predispositions (Contu & Willmott, 2000Marshall & Rollinson, 2004;Mutch, 2003;Roberts, 2006 extensive knowledge about the children and their whānau, and that children and whānau should be given opportunities to get to know the teachers (Gibbs, 2009).…”

Formalisation versus tacitness: keys for creating and sharing knowledge in innovative large organisations

“…the CoP are, in essence, structures that emerge from practice (WENGER, 1998;MUTCH, 2003). It then follows that tacitness is critical for the speed of learning (NONAKA et al, 2006).…”

Neoinstitutionalism and the appropriation of bourdieu's work: a critical assessment

“…The well known resistances to psychoanalysis among American sociologists, along with a historical inclination to positivism, may explain the popularity of the more cognitivist works of the "first" Bourdieu among American sociologists, particularly those linked to the neoinstitutionalist tradition. While Bourdieu's notion of field seemed to be well suited for the neoinstitutionalist project, habitus has always been seen with suspicious and barely employed Thus familiar to many scholars in social sciences, habitus is far from being well understood and applied in its full potentiality, and, for that reason, it is still object of intense debate (BRUBAKER, 1993;EVERETT, 2002;FUCHS, 2003;LAU, 2004;LIZARDO, 2004;MUTCH, 2003;SEWELL, 1992;SWARTZ, 2002;WARDE, 2004). In a review essay on Bourdieu, DiMaggio (1979, p. 1464 describes habitus as "a kind of theoretical deus ex machina by means of which Bourdieu relates objective structure and individual activity".…”