Chapter 6: Community Scale and Complexity

This chapter focuses on a dimension overlooked in earlier models – the scale of a CoP. While the scale was not addressed in the knowledge sciences treatment of a community, there is much to learn from sociology, urban studies, education sciences, economic development, and transportation. The authors explain how the expanded model accommodates scale and how scale can affect community topography, structure, relationships, interactions, and learning. The authors also consider how scale can affect the practice. CoPs that adapt to changes in scale are described as elastic, whereas those that do not are described as inelastic.

In the knowledge sciences literature, there is an implicit assumption that effective communities of practice (CoPs) are small or medium in size. This assumption follows from the early years of knowledge management and our focus on the business value of internal CoPs. In that context, the membership of a community of practice (CoP) would resemble a team (Hertting et al., 2022; Katz et al., 2020). Exploring CoPs at this micro-level had many advantages. We could observe the communities’ internal dynamics and draw important observations. These early observations were the basis of the domain-community-practice model.