Community Development Journal Advance Access originally published online on July 12, 2005
Community Development Journal 2006 41(1):50-64; doi:10.1093/cdj/bsi067
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Community development research: Merging (or submerging) communities of practice? A response to Van Vlaenderen
Centre for Adult Education at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The Centre's research and community development work is conducted through close collaboration with NGOs and community-based organizations (CBOs)
Address for correspondence: CAE, University of Kwazulu-Natal, Private Bag X01, Scottsville 3209, South Africa. johnv{at}ukzn.ac.za
A response to Van Vlaenderen (2004) is needed both as a corrective measure and as a stimulus for debate. This article argues that Van Vlaenderen incorrectly draws on the theory of ‘communities of practice’ (Lave and Wenger, 1999; Wenger, 1998) and discusses the conceptual and political implications of such incorrect usage. The article contends that the merger of communities of practice that Van Vlaenderen describes using two case examples is unlikely to have occurred and that presenting such transactions as mergers can be unhelpful to the community development field in that they mask important status and power asymmetries that exist within and between communities. This latter argument is supported by a discussion of the concepts of participation, participatory process, power, and empowerment. Van Vlaenderen appears to have written about joint activity between communities rather than the merger of communities of practice.