Handbook of Research on Communities of Practice for Organizational Management and Networking: Methodologies for Competitive Advantage

The individual chapters in this collection are well written and wide-ranging. The book provides a clear and detailed table of contents; there is also a brief summary of chapters. [...] "All these details make the collection equally valuable for academics, industry-related researchers and mangers needing to explore Communities of Practice."

Emphasizing the managerial approach to communities of practice and the benefits, the volume defines communities of practice and illustrates the differences and similarities with other organizational forms, and how these can be used, through case studies and guidelines. A detailed table of contents, in-depth index, and compilation of references make this work useful again and again as a resource.

This book explains very important aspects of the relevance and representativeness of the state of investigation into the concept of CoPs and their degree of acceptance and the creation of a theoretical reference frame in contemporary society and economy. This relevance becomes clear on examining the wide variety of subject areas in the contents of the twenty-five chapters in this study, organized into five sections, each with its own area of interest, used to explain the practical and theoretical reach of CoPs. With regard to this, relevance can be demonstrated by the large numbers of case studies and CoP implementations in very different types of organizations and contexts; this diversity is dealt with in many chapters, from perspectives that are in favour of CoPs, in terms of various different processes of working, learning and innovating, for which knowledge sharing is used to create value, with the dissemination of knowledge inside and outside the organization, in other words, through external or internal CoPs, in the networking processes which are characteristic of contemporary society.