Discourse Communities and Communities of Practice: On the social context of text and knowledge production in the workplace

This paper aims at giving a more detailed description and discussion of two concepts of `community' developed in the research areas of text production/ writing and social learning / information management / knowledge sharing and comparing them with each other. The purpose of this theoretical exer-cise is to determine the degree to which the concepts of discourse commu-nity and community of practice are suitable for investigating the social and organizational context of text and knowledge production. Finally, the paper examines the explanatory value of the two concepts for analyzing text and knowledge production at different Danish workplaces (a consulting engi-neering company, a university department and a bank) and discusses their significance in the context of co-located as well as geographically distrib-uted communities.