4 - “I've picked some up from a colleague”: language, sharing and communities of practice in an institutional setting

Summary

This chapter examines interfaces between the notion of community of practice and the sociolinguistic study of a workplace. The workers are all police officers, and the chapter focuses on one tiny aspect of their working lives: the statement and explanation of the right to silence to people under arrest. This focus makes it possible to see how a routine, pervasive work task permeates and becomes permeated by communities of practice. By focussing on one discrete activity which is common to a large organisation, and performed through talk, I am also able to demonstrate how close study of language data can be informed by the community of practice framework and can, in turn, enrich the framework.

INTRODUCTION

Community of practice is an elusive term. Clearly, the term involves communities – collectives of people – and practices – frameworks of doing. However, those who articulate each concept, typically in oppositional terms, illustrate how far beyond these notions the concept goes. Community, here, does not denote socially recognised categories (Wenger 1998a) or relationships; rather, these communities are “ ‘about’ something” (Wenger 1998b:4). This makes the concept useful for sociolinguists, who propose that language serves such ‘about-ness’ or social engagement, “not the place and not the people as a collection of individuals” (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 1998:490). Practice too conveys more than shared “behaviours” (Meyerhoff 1999:226) or shared ways of “doing things” through talk, convictions or norms (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 1998:490).