A community of practice has recently been defined as “a flexible group of professionals,
informally bound by common interests, who interact through interdependent tasks guided by
a common purpose thereby embodying a store of common knowledge”(Jubert, 1999, p.
166). The association of communities of practice with the production of collective knowledge
has long been recognized, and they have been objects of study for a number of decades in
the context of professional communication, particularly communication in science (Abbott …