Communities of Practice in Language Research

A Critical Introduction

Brian King

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000008005
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Languages & Linguistics
• Categoría: Languages

Communities of Practice in Language Research provides an up-to-date and critical introduction to the community of practice framework and how this can be applied to language research. Critiquing and offering alternative suggestions for the ways in which researchers frame research participants as members of communities of practice, with the goal of inspiring use of the Community of Practice (CofP) model in new areas of research, this book:

• engages in extended critical analysis of past research as well as questioning recent applications and suggesting limitations
• incorporates instructive examples from multiple fields, including Sociolinguistics, Linguistic Anthropology, Critical Discourse Studies, Language Teaching & Learning, Literacy Studies, and a trailblazing section on Language & Digital Media
• brings up-to-date the key questions and concerns around the Communities of Practice model, debunking myths and re-emphasising ongoing challenges.

Communities of Practice in Language Research is essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students studying research methods or undertaking research projects in those areas.

1

INTRODUCTION

This volume is framed around a series of interrelated questions. First of all, what is the Community of Practice (CofP) model? And what was it developed to do? Equally, what is it not? And what was it not developed to do? Most centrally, I align with Alan Bell’s recent plea to ‘challenge neo-orthodoxies as well as the orthodoxies against which they are a reaction’ (Bell 2017, 594) by querying how the CofP has been interpreted, adapted and used in language research thus far. As Penelope Eckert has made clear in a recent interview (Tagliamonte 2016, 152), it is undesirable for this approach to become so ingrained that people can use it ‘as an excuse to study any old group . . . ’, thus defeating the purpose of its original introduction to language research (i.e. as a challenge to orthodoxy). Second, what forces, features and elements of happenstance have driven its application in some areas of study more than others? And finally, what are the ways that it remains a vital approach for addressing new questions and ‘turns’ in language research? Although these questions are quite expansive in their reach, the book is not an attempt to be exhaustive. Rather, it reflects my own interest in two main aspects of critical engagement with the CofP concept – the need to be meticulous in empirically identifying communities of practice (and other social aggregates) and the need to stimulate the responsibly informed use of the CofP in a wider variety of fields of language-oriented research so as to enable the investigation of a much wider field of questions.

Although not designed to be a catch-all construct that does everything (Eckert and Wenger 2005; Meyerhoff 2005; Tagliamonte 2016), CofP theory is well-equipped to deal with a much greater variety of problems than those to which it has, thus far, been applied. I will make the case that, far from being spent or finished (i.e. something to move ‘beyond’ – Barton and Tusting 2005), the CofP is as relevant as ever, particularly in light of the multimodal and intersectional research ‘turns’ that have both become firmly established in sociocultural language study in recent years. I align with other researchers (e.g. Holmes and Meyerhoff 1999; Androutsopoulos 2006; Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 2007; Ehrenreich 2017) in arguing that its grounding in practice more generally, not language alone, and its focus on dynamic local systems made and experienced by people at intersections of social categories, make it an excellent model for framing many types of investigation that are most relevant at present and in the foreseeable future.

In the remaining sections of this introductory chapter I will expand on some of the points introduced earlier to prepare for the chapters that follow. I will also take stock in this chapter of some broader questions, such as how its theorisation has evolved, especially in the past decade or so (i.e. since the publication of key critiques such as Barton and Tusting 2005; Davies 2005), and how it has been interpreted and elaborated to suit the needs of researchers whose research questions require full theorisation of the social as much as the linguistic (Meyerhoff and Strycharz 2013). All of these critical points will be revisited in the concluding chapter.

Past debates and developments

Despite the frequent application of the CofP in sociolinguistics and language research more broadly, there has been only one volume that has examined and developed aspects of the theory as used in language studies, namely Barton and Tusting (2005). This volume raised a number of questions about what its editors and authors perceived to be the limitations of the CofP as it had been used heuristically in language studies up to that time. The contributing authors made suggestions about how to elaborate the CofP by either combining it with models from other disciplines, for example ‘language-in-use’ approaches from Speech Community theory (e.g. Creese 2005), or replacing it in some contexts with other heuristics that overcome the identified limitations (e.g. the ‘semiotic social spaces’ of Gee 2005). The editors of that book expressly set out to deconstruct the CofP on the basis that the original formulations of its dynamics (i.e. Lave and Wenger 1991; Wenger 1998) did not ‘bring out’ theoretical elements of language, literacy, discourse and power that they asserted were ‘missing or underdeveloped’ (Barton and Tusting 2005, 6). Certainly, deconstruction is one way to work against neo-orthodoxy, and it was a timely effort that asked useful, critical questions.

However, in the end, essentially what most of these contributions brought to light was not that the CofP necessarily needed elaboration but rather that multi-perspectival research incorporating it allows a greater diversity of problems to be investigated. Thus, if one uses the CofP in tandem with other compatible models such as those outlined in the previous paragraph, the combination can result in certain synergies in research (see also Zappa-Hollman and Duff 2015 – Chapter 6). These outcomes could perhaps explain why none of these critiques seemed very surprising to many working in social research about language at the time because it is what researchers had already begun to do (e.g. Holmes and Stubbe 2003). Therefore, ultimately, the CofP has continued to be very useful in language research over the past decade and a half with little (if any) need for alteration or enhancement. On the other hand, what has become richer and more diverse over time is knowledge about how to best apply it, where and when.

One contribution in the Barton and Tusting volume (i.e. Myers 2005) called for a more complex notion of discourse to be incorporated into CofP theory in order to account for issues of power and legitimacy in the workplace, and how one gains legitimacy or alternatively does not have it granted to them. This critique was anticipated in earlier chapters of the book and was similar at the time to that of Bethan Davies (2005) who also called for an integration of ‘missing concepts’ into CofP theory such as hierarchy and acceptance, as well as a more complete treatment of the notions of peripherality and marginality. However, as Emma Moore’s empirically grounded response to that critique demonstrated, internal hierarchies do not preclude consensus about membership and practices, and analysis can indeed account for hierarchical relations within a community of practice (Moore 2006). Additionally, Moore pointed out that peripheral membership is fully used in the CofP model and a clear distinction between peripheral and marginal membership lies in the meticulously outlined, corresponding distinction between practices and activities:

peripheral participants are not core members, but they contribute to some of the practices of a given community of practice. Marginal participants are involved in the same activity as community of practice members, but not in an ‘engaged’ way.

(Moore 2009, 126)

Thus, it has become clear that these concerns raised by Davies need not result in changes to the model itself.

As Penelope Eckert and Etienne Wenger indicated in their response to Davies’ critique, ‘There is always a delicate balance in the construction of a model between the work that the model does and the work that the model demands’ (Eckert and Wenger 2005, 588). Or as Moore has put it, ‘Ultimately the true test of the community of practice may not be in its theoretical abstraction but in its application’ (2006, 636). In other words, one must be careful about what gets incorporated into a model because those elements cease to be empirical. That is, they cease to be elements that need to be researched and explained in relation to communities of practice. Their point is that instead of asking for elaborations of the theory or replacements of it, as all of the aforementioned critiques of the CofP have tended to do, ethnographic empirical investigations and analyses are what is required. It is in such investigations that power, hierarchy, language-in-use or activity can be explained and accounted for rather than via further development of the model itself in order to have the model do the explaining.

To take this reasoning further, if, as researchers, we cannot (or do not) explicate and demonstrate the work that a model is ‘doing’ (or being used to do), and furthermore we do not undertake the work that it demands, then it becomes superfluous to research design. It is in demonstrating the work that it is doing (i.e. through its built-in explanations) and the work that it demands (i.e. through the types of analyses that it necessitates) that a model’s relevance is made clear, and these processes go hand in hand with verifying that a model fits a research site and fits the data there generated. Finally, a logical extension of this previous point is that if a model neither does any work for the researcher nor generates any imperative that the researcher should show or demonstrates anything, then I would question its value as a contribution to a given piece of scholarly research. This point will be central to many of the critiques I conduct in the coming chapters, regardless of whether a CofP approach is applied or another model takes its place.

Historical trends and accidents

As pointed out by Miriam Meyerhoff and Anna Strycharz (2013), the widespread adoption of the CofP approach by scholars working with adolescents, and especially language and gender scholars (a pattern also reflected in this book to some extent), is mainly an historical accident rather than indicating any unique compatibilities between the CofP and gender studies (Bucholtz 1999; Meyerhoff and Strycharz 2013) or even between the CofP and institutional environments (Jones 2012; Strycharz-Banaś 2016). The CofP found an early and sympathetic audience in language and gender (see Chapter 4), and in language in the workplace (see Chapter 5), because its advanced theorisation of the social was helpful in tackling the research questions being investigated by scholars in those fields at that time. In spite of this pathway, however, its affordances should, by all logical estimates, equally appeal to scholars beyond these fields of interest because the CofP is particularly helpful when demonstrating how the particular relates to the general/universal (Meyerhoff and Strycharz 2013). In fact Meyerhoff and Strycharz (2013) make the strong and interesting case that the CofP model’s abstention from separating the particular and universal (or practice and macrostructure), a paradigmatic schism that is rooted in post-enlightenment thought, is a sign of loftier ambitions to help undo nothing less than the separation between science and the humanities. This is a thought-provoking, if grand, claim, but as will be seen below, a number of scholars in sociolinguistics have recently turned their attention squarely to this question of how structures are locally shaped in communities of practice.

The community of practice in language research

The varied application of the CofP model in diverse fields and sub-fields of language research has resulted in distinctive challenges, generating new methods and permitting new questions to be asked. In Chapter 2 the main insight that emerges, via my own reflections on using the CofP model in sociolinguistic classroom-based research, is that ethnographic participant observation is crucial to the reliable verification of a group’s status as a community of practice. This is not a new insight in itself; rather, what this chapter demonstrates is how the localised practices of a community of practice might be quite unnoticeable unless experienced as emergent by the researcher on the ground. Without the benefit of field notes and the emic-etic processes of an ethnographic approach, there is much that can be missed or misinterpreted. In Chapter 3, CofP-oriented research in variationist sociolinguistics is shown to have contributed an impressive toolbox of methods for the identification of communities of practice, and researchers working in that paradigm have elaborated the CofP model in ways that have greatly enabled its use in other areas of language research. However, we will see that asking some critical questions about other modes of belonging (besides mutual engagement), and their potential influence, can generate new research possibilities, even in this foundational sector.

Discourse-focused gender and sexuality research, the topic of Chapter 4, has made a very large contribution, with key insights emerging around authenticity, social structures and their localised interpretations in communities of practice. Another important insight in that chapter emerges from my analysis of original data, and we see that gender, sexuality, spatiality and community are all entangled in the practices of participants, but not necessarily in ways that are immediately obvious. By observing an established community of practice as they move online, it becomes clear that not all local practices remained consistent, and this has implications for further research into the relationship between communities of practice, time and space (very much an under-researched area). In Chapter 5, I switch focus to the CofP model as deployed in language in the workplace research. It becomes obvious that it is not always enough to just look at the activities within a community of practice but rather researchers must attempt to locate those activities and relationships within the broader patterns of people’s lives.

In Chapter 6, the focus turns from language use to language learning, and the key insight here is once again that accurate identification of communities of practice (and other social aggregates) matters a great deal for the interpretation of findings, with two points emerging as key factors in language socialisation experiences – the difference between activities vs. practices, and being ‘at the table’ where community practices are negotiated (i.e. being ‘included in what matters’ – Wenger 1998, 74). The same theme is further supported in Chapter 7 when digital interaction is featured, but we see also that we must consider whether and how the different aggregates that participants are encountering or participating in might be overlapping and influencing one another (see also Chapter 5). That is, research participants might be in multiple aggregates at once or successively. This configuration could largely determine an accurate analysis but also affects the researcher’s ability to discuss implications. We are also reminded that adaptation of the various available models might be necessary, and we must address why it might matter to the analysis that participants are interacting in a community of practice, an affinity space, or what have you. Finally, the importance of breaking away from the online/offline binary in our research design and conceptualisation is reinforced by current theorisations.

Setting the stage

If the current intersectional turn in language research is taken seriously, it is not difficult to s...