A Review of Community of Practice in Organizations: Key Findings and Emerging Themes

Considerable research has been conducted in the area of Communities of Practice (CoP) over the past two decades. This concept, introduced and popularized Brown and Duguid (1991), has been applied in practice and has formed the basis of numerous scholarly articles. This paper takes a small step towards reviewing the extant literature on CoPs, focusing only on empirical papers. We use the following three step process for the literature review - 1) develop a criteria for the types of articles to be included in our analysis, 2) a literature search strategy, and 3) prepare a scheme for categorizing and analyzing the articles. Based on the review, we synthesize the literature on CoPs within the organizational context and uncover key emerging themes which can be used to reveal research gaps for future work.