Chapter 5: Community Growth, Development, and Duration

This chapter presents a fresh perspective on community growth, life spans, and development patterns. It reframes the life cycle model as a life span model and categorizes duration as short, medium, and long. The authors describe eight growth patterns common to CoPs and recommend the patterns as archetypes for further study. In developing the new perspective, the authors explain how they drew from research and practice in sociology, mathematics, biology, and environmental sciences. Applying observations of duration to real-world case studies surfaced CoPs with short, medium, and long durations.

Time is an essential component of an expanded model of communities of practice (CoPs) Communities require time to define their shared goals and purpose, build relationships, develop ways of collaborating and learning, and settle on ways of working. We expect every community to have a life span, to move through stages and states, and to take whatever time is required to accomplish its goals. When a community does not have time to develop its practice or engage in learning, it will not realize its full value and potential (McDermott, 1999; Saint-Onge & Wallace, 2012). CoPs are comprised of human beings. As sociologists remind us, people develop social structures, relationships, and interactions over time.