Concept of community of practice

In the above, I have argued that norms of language are to be seen as a combination of linguistic-interactional behaviour and speakers’ normative beliefs and shared expectations of others’ behaviour. This means that the concept of language norm cannot be reduced to recurrent interactional behaviour only, nor can it be equated with normative beliefs (or expectations), since beliefs may or may not result in the appropriate action (see Bicchieri

& Muldoon 2011). The question arises, however, how beliefs and expectations come to exist¹⁹, and who can be seen to share them. In the following, I discuss this question by drawing on the concepts of speech community and community of practice, specifically relating the discussion to ELF.

Initially, the concept of speech community was used to refer to those speaking the same language (Bloomfield 1933). Following this definition, the whole of the English-speaking world could be seen to form a single speech community. Such an all-encompassing concept, however, is analytically problematic, since it raises the question of linguistic uniformity: how alike ought utterances to be in order for the speakers to form a speech community (Patrick 2002: 582)? Later, Hymes (2003 [1972]) and Labov (1966, 1972a, 1972b) emphasised shared norms as the defining criterion for the existence of a speech community, which means that a speech community is a social, rather than a linguistic entity (for detailed discussions on the development of the concept see Patrick

19 According to Bicchieri and Muldoon (2011), this is also generally speaking an undertheorised aspect of (social) norms.

31

2002; Rampton 2003). Despite the similarities in emphasing shared norms, the two approaches can be seen to differ in other respects.

For Hymes (2003: 36 [1972]), the concept of speech community is mainly an ontological one:

Speech community is a necessary, primary term in that it postulates the basis of description as a social, rather than a linguistic, entity. One starts with a social group and considers all the linguistic varieties present in it, rather than starting with any one variety.

The researcher (ethnographer) starts by identifying resources used in a social group, after which s/he can define the speech community as the set of speakers who appropriately exploit these resources (and norms). This, however, renders the concept redundant: Since a speech community is seen to be consistent with a set of norms, the definition is partially circular in that a speech community has to be conceived of as both the result and the cause of the norms (McKirnan & Hamayan 1984: 159–160; see also Rampton 2003) – the result because we can only define a speech community by determining shared norms, and the cause because shared norms are the prerequisite for the existence of a speech community.

Labov’s definition of speech community is similar to Hymes’s in terms of the emphasis on shared norms, but his approach is more empirically-rooted. He is concerned with not only shared norms but also linguistic uniformity as the patterned variability of linguistic structure:

The speech community is not defined by any marked agreement in the use of language elements, so much as by participation in a set of shared norms; these norms may be observed in overt types of evaluative behavior, and by the uniformity of abstract patterns of variation which are invariant in respect to particular levels of usage. (Labov 1972a: 120–121)

Labov’s definition has been criticised for not taking into account divergence within communities (see Patrick 2002: 586–587). Patrick (2002: 286), however, points out that rather than require uniform adherence to norms, Labov emphasises reference to a set of shared norms, which allows for divergence within communities. What remains problematic with the definition, though, is its empirical emphasis: Only with careful research can it be determined whether a group of people forms a speech community

32

(Kauhanen [Piippo] 2006: 37). Further, when different variables are found to have different social distributions, and people in different regions share some features but not others, the boundaries of a speech community become blurred and the map of the speech community needs to be revised (Rampton 2003).

Since both Hymes’s and Labov’s definitions take shared norms as the prerequisite for a speech community to exist, the concept only lends itself to analysing well-established communities and the norms followed in them. It can say little about the different stages of group or community development, especially the early stages where shared norms are not a given. Moreover, since a set of shared norms are taken to determine the existence of a speech community, the concept cannot say much about the emergence and change of norms within the community. What we thus need is a concept that does not assume the existence of shared norms.

The concept that lends itself well to this purpose is community of practice²⁰. It was coined by Lave and Wenger (1991) and further developed by Wenger (1998) as an integral part of a social theory of learning. The concept was introduced to sociolinguistics and gender studies by Eckert and McConnell-Ginet (1992: 464), who define the concept as follows:

A community of practice is an aggregate of people who come together around mutual engagement in an endeavour. Ways of doing things, ways of talking, beliefs, values, power relations—in short, practices—emerge in the course of this mutual endeavor. As a social construct, a community of practice is different from the traditional community, primarily because it is defined simultaneously by its membership and by the practice in which that membership engages.

Instead of requiring shared norms, a community of practice is thus defined based on mutual engagement in a joint endeavour. This means that shared norms are not considered a prerequisite for the existence of a community of practice, as they are for the existence of a speech community. In addition, the concept draws attention to practices around which the members have gathered and which the members construct during their mutual course of action. Membership in a community of practice is thus not inherited “by birth, accident or adoption”, as is membership in a speech community (Swales 1990: 24);

20 Among the first studies to suggest using the concept of community of practice in ELF studies is House (2003). Further discussions about the concept and its usefulness include Seidlhofer (2007), Dewey (2009) and Ehrenreich (2009).

33

but rather it is based on the practices that the members engage in and that in turn form the membership itself.

The negotiation of norms can be seen as one such practice. Since the practices are seen to emerge in the course of a mutual endeavour, the concept can be used to describe norm development also in the early stages of community development. In addition, it is in accordance with the developments in social sciences, where social constructionism has gained ground against more deterministic (or modernist) approaches (see Rampton 2003).

In social constructionism, human reality is no longer seen as the product of forces that actors cannot control (as, for instance, suggested by Bourdieu (1991)), but rather it is

“extensively reproduced and at least partially created anew in the socially and historically specific activities of everyday life” (Rampton 2006: 25, original italics; see Berger &

Luckmann 1971; Giddens 1976, 1984). In this framework, interaction among members of a community of practice is to be seen as a site for both reproducing and creating anew its practices – and norms.

Wenger (1998: 72–85) uses three criteria to define communities of practice: mutual engagement, joint enterprise and shared repertoire. Mutual engagement means that participants get together to interact with each other and build relationships. Joint enterprise refers to a joint goal or purpose, and it entails that the participants create relations of mutual accountability. With shared repertoire, Wenger (1998) means, for instance, the construction of shared linguistic and symbolic resources, over time, negotiated within the community of practice.

The first two criteria appear to hold for the data used in this study. Each study event (a seminar course and two series of group work meetings) entails that the participants gather together around a joint goal of completing a course or finishing a group work presentation for their studies. The participants create relations of mutual accountability in that all members are expected to contribute to the joint goal, and they start building relationships in the course of their meetings.

However, the third criterion of shared repertoire is slightly more problematic with its suggestion of shared linguistic resources (and ultimately shared language norms). Since the time-span of the study events is limited to a few weeks and a few meetings, the question arises: how long does it take for a shared repertoire, especially in the sense of shared linguistic resources (with the associated norms), to develop, and thus a community of practice to materialise? So far, it seems that the discussions around the concept of community of practice have concentrated on fine-tuning the definition, and considering what criteria a “group” needs to fulfil in order to be called a community of practice.

Attention has also been given to how new members are taken on board and what it

34

requires from the new members to be socialised into the community of practice.

However, less attention has been paid to how communities of practice come into being, and how long it takes for one to materialise. Wenger (1998: 96) merely points out that a community of practice “takes a while to come into being, and it can linger long after an official group is disbanded”. He differentiates between a community of practice and a task force or a team by saying that a community of practice is based on learning rather than reified assignments that begin and end (Wenger 1998: 96). A community of practice thus incorporates the idea of learning from the experts in order to join the community.

In the case of international study programmes and the teaching in the programmes, some of the practices are determined beforehand by the teachers – as representatives of a subject and a university. For instance, assignments that students are asked to complete during a study event are typically decided in advance, and they come to guide the practices adopted later on in the study event. Study events are thus built around specific assignments, and they have a clear beginning and an end, which means that they may not form communities of practice in themselves. Rather, they could be seen to feed into a programme-wide or university-wide ‘academic’ community of practice. However, since negotiation of shared practices does take place within the study events suggesting a development towards shared norms, it seems reasonable to treat the events as communities of practice coming-into-being – even if they may never develop into fully-fledged communities of practice with shared repertoires. I am thus modifying the concept in this regard in order to incorporate the idea of overlapping communities with fluid boundaries. The point is that communities of practice do not develop in a vacuum, but rather practices get developed and norms emerge across different study events. We may thus end up with several, partly overlapping communities of practice.

A welcome exception to the scant attention paid to the development of communities of practice is Smit’s (2010) study with its longitudinal take on the language practices in an Austrian Hotel Management Programme. Smit’s (2010: 96) study focused on three phases:

(1) the introductory phase, which covered the first two weeks of the programme, (2) the months 3–5 of the first semester and (3) the third semester, which took place a year later.

She reports changes in each phase, also during the first one, but describes the second phase as the one where the participants developed their shared repertoire of linguistic resources (Smit 2010: 401–402). It seems, then, that for such a shared repertoire to develop, more than a few weeks are needed. However, it could also be hypothesised that the speed and depth of constructing a shared linguistic repertoire depends on the importance of the joint endeavour to the participants – even a short endeavour requires

35

the emergence of shared practices, which could lead to the development of a shared linguistic repertoire.

What makes the concept of community of practice useful for this study is that it draws our attention to practices that are (made) relevant in specific communities. In terms of language-regulatory practices, the concept thus provides a means to conceptualise emerging communal norms, and to consider the regulatory practices in relation to the practices of the community rather than in relation to some external conceptions of normativity. Ehrenreich (2009: 146) concludes her ethnographic study of business ELF communities of practice suggesting that, for the business professionals, the

process of being socialized into international business CofPs [i.e. communities of practice] involves leaving behind traditional notions of appropriateness as experienced in ELT [i.e. English language teaching] classrooms during secondary and tertiary education and adjusting their use of English to what is required and therefore ‘appropriate’ in these professional communities.

What is relevant and appropriate is thus defined, negotiated in the community of practice. By using community of practice as an organising concept, we thus change our perspective to see that what matters in a specific community may have little to do with prescriptive language standards. What is important for the participants is to learn to function in the specific community in a way that is appropriate and acceptable there, and what, then, matters are the living norms of that particular community arising from their practices.