Three Decades of Communities of Practice Conceptualization

Revisiting the foundations of Lave and Wenger's constructs and their impact on contemporary learning theory

Abstract

This article aims to identify the key authors and the theoretical foundations’ delineation of Lave and Wenger’s concept of Communities of Practice (CoPs) and its relationship with the learning theory. This exploratory and descriptive study applied a qualitative approach and bibliographic research based on Lave and Wenger’s (1991) publication “Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation”. All 48 references indicated in their research and the perceived relevance the authors have in academia. Data analysis was conducted using bibliometric and content analysis techniques with the aid of the NVivo software. The results showed the relevance of the key authors to the academy based on their number of publications, citation analysis, h-index, fields of study and contributions to those fields. We also identified that the concept of Communities of Practice is interdisciplinarity amongst anthropology, sociology, and psychology.