Year
2007
Abstract
Organization sciences are interested in the « community » concept, particularity to overcome the opposition between “methodological individualism” focused upon the subject and “methodological holism” focused upon the organization. “Communities of practices”, based upon practices common to a group of actors, provide a useful frame to study professional craft communities. There are not so useful to study the cooperation between actors who are involved in a “conjoint activity” an activity which is not characterized by similar practices, bt by their heterogeneous complementary – , for which we propose to recur to the concept of “community of inquiry” owed to the pragmatism philosophers Pierce and Dewey. First we examine the “community of inquiry” concept and its specificities in studying collective activity: heterogeneity and complementarity of activities and knowledge, dialogical sens making in the interactions between actors, need for mutual intelligibility in a context which makes it difficult, key role of semiotic and instrumental mediations of activity, cooperativeness/reflexivity coupling in the inquiry frame. Finally we shall mention communities project and process as examples of communities of inquiry in firms. In one case study, we shall see that situations of change may require the simultaneous construction of communities of practice communities of inquiry so that actors can take the control of their own collective activity.
LORINO, P. (2007). Communauté d’enquête et création de connaissances dans l’organisation: le modèle de processus en gestion. Annales des Telecommunications, pp. 753-771.