e-Training to Communities of Practice as a New Key toward Globalization Strategies Within Venezuelan Companies

Mastering global diversity means understanding the differences that exist within countries as well as between them. The most successful business strategies utilize not only a global scope but a depth of knowledge concerning the various circumstances faced by local customers, employees, and suppliers. Such knowledge is vital for individual managers who are selling their services and/or products in foreign markets.E-learning, e-training, and distance education are all terms that define the possibility of training people in different places asynchronously or synchronously. Historically, this strategy has been implemented by the military, according to Simonson, Smaldino, Albright, and Zvacek (2006). Much of this has been made possible because of the concept of distance education, which is the bringing together of learners and the content of instruction no matter where it’s located—interactively, in real time, on demand, learner-centred, authentic, and learner-constructed events that characterize the educational environment of the future. The distance factor will be replaced by interaction.In Latin America, specifically in Venezuela, the concept of e-training within the corporate world is ambiguous; and, as such, the design and implementation of distance education strategies have not been included as part of an expansion or globalization initiative.Venezuela, as stated by Morrison and Conaway (2007), shares with its Caribbean neighbors, as it has with Latin America, the display of a Caribbean easy-going informality. Riera (2007) maintained that the status of e-training or, in more general terms, that the inclusion of technologies of communications, were: “Here we state, colloquially, that the knowing how is worth gold; but, the knowing who has no price.” That’s why we can see that in theory there are plans for training that never see the light of day because its approach is not sufficiently personalized.Riera (2007) stated in the interview as an example that inRiera (2007) concludes thatThis is not surprising; books ranging from global diversity to franchises’ initiatives fail to describe how expanding companies should plan to train accordingly local franchisees and limit themselves to assert that they need to develop an operations manual.Communities of practice provide technological opportunities, at very low cost, to design and implement virtual and dynamic procedure manuals, which implies that it has the advantage of traditional manuals. That is, it inherits the benefits and minimizes the glitches so that it can create a productive and nourishing interchange environment and a corporate memory bank.Most Latin American countries are working to reactivate their economies as a result of the structural adjustment crisis. In light of growing economic globalization, several of them have been opening up their economies to world markets. At the same time, enterprises are beginning to be recognized as the basic unit on which economic recovery rests. It is through their success that goods and services will become competitive in internal markets and international trade, that new jobs will be created, and resources and income tax will be generated for financing national development (Ducci, 1997).In Venezuela, on the other hand, there has been a reversal in trend as compared with the rest of Latin America. With the recurrence of nationalizations, transnational companies are terminating operations locally due to insufficient economic or fiscal guarantees. Consequently, the rates of new entrepreneurships are directed toward small- or medium-sized initiatives in addition to the internationalization of their products and services.In all cases, Ducci (1997) stated that to place exports successfully in the world markets, some economic sectors and enterprises of various sizes require new kinds of training and development assistance. In this new situation, the purpose of national vocational training authorities (VTAs) is expanding beyond training workers. They are moving toward strengthening a new culture of production based on increased productivity, quality, and cost-effectiveness. VTAs are seeking to provide labor with a greater commitment to economic goals and to develop a workforce with greater possibilities for personal fulfilment and social benefit.According to Brown and Duguid (1991) ethnographic studies of workplace practices indicate that the ways people actually work usually differ fundamentally from the ways organizations describe that same occupation in manuals, training programs, organizational charts, and job descriptions (see Figure 1). Nevertheless, organizations tend to rely on the latter in their attempts to understand and improve work practice.This article examines one such study, then relates its conclusions to compatible investigations of learning and of innovation to argue that conventional descriptions of jobs mask not only the ways people work, but also significant learning and innovation generated in the informal communities of practice in which they work.Much conventional learning theory, including that implicit in most training courses, tends to endorse the valuation of abstract knowledge over actual practice and, as a result, to separate learning from working and, more significantly, learners from workers. Together Lave and Wenger’s (1990) analysis and Orr’s (1990) empirical investigation indicate that this knowledge-practice separation is unsound, both in theory and in practice.Learning theorists (e.g., Lave Brown 1991). From this perspective, Brown and Duguid (1991) deduced that learners can in one way or another be seen to construct their understanding out of a wide range of materials that include ambient, social, and physical circumstances; and the histories and social relations of the people involved.According to Fournies (1999), the three main reasons employees don’t know what they need to know (and don’t do what they are supposed to do) are:On the other hand, from personal experience, the author has found that it is difficult for people to transfer newly acquired knowledge or skills if there is not enough social construct and a place where to apply it. Brown and Duguid (1991) expressed that workplace learning is best understood, then, in terms of the communities being formed or joined and personal identities being changed. The central issue in learning is becoming a practitioner, not learning about practice. According to Brown and Duguid (1991) work practice and learning need to be understood not in terms of the groups that are ordained (e.g. “task forces” or “trainees”), but in terms of the communities that emerge, because the latter description will not provide a clear picture of how work or learning is actually organized and accomplished. It will only reflect the dominant assumptions of the organizational core.The term was first used in 1991 by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, who used it in relation to situated learning as part of an attempt to “rethink learning” at the Institute for Research on Learning. In 1998, the theorist Wenger extended the concept and applied it to other contexts, including organizational settings. More recently, communities of practice have become associated with knowledge management, as people have begun to see them as ways of developing social capital, nurturing new knowledge, stimulating innovation, or sharing existing tacit knowledge within an organization. It is now an accepted part of organizational development.Wenger (1998) described CoPs in terms of the interplay of four fundamental dualities: participation vs. reification, designed vs. emergent, identification vs. negotiability and local vs. global although, possibly because of the possible link to knowledge management, the participation vs. reification duality has been the focus of most interest.Wenger (1998) describes the “negotiation of meaning” as how we experience the world and our engagement in it as meaningful. If all change involves a process of learning, then effective change processes consciously facilitate negotiation of meaning. In his model that negotiation consists of two interrelated components: reification and participation.Wenger (1998) describes the process of reification as central to every practice. It involves taking that which is abstract and turning it into a “congealed” form, represented, for example, in documents and symbols. Reification is essential for preventing fluid and informal group activity from getting in the way of coordination and mutual understanding. Reification on its own, and insufficiently supported, is not able to support the learning process.Participation, the second element in the negotiation of meaning, requires active involvement in social processes. Wenger (1998) describes participation as essential for getting around the potential stiffness (or, alternatively, the ambiguity) of reification.Crucially, Wenger describes the relationship between reification and participation as a dialectical one: neither element can be considered in isolation if the learning/change process is to be helpfully understood:Wenger calls the successful interaction of reification and participation the “alignment” of individuals with the communal learning task. Alignment requires the ability to coordinate perspectives and actions in order to direct energies to a common purpose. The challenge of alignment, Wenger suggests, is to connect local efforts to broader styles and discourses in ways that allow learners to invest their energy in them:To the extent that a deep conceptual change involves importing practices and perspectives from one community of practice into another, such change involves what Wenger calls “boundary encounters.” Such encounters change the way each community defines its own identity and practice. Crucial to the success of the boundary encounter is the role of highly skilled “brokers” who straddle different communities of practice and facilitate the exchange process:The distinction between communities and teams sometimes leads to confusion. Storck and Hill (2000) suggest that the differences between the two constructs can be characterized as follows: team relationships are established when the organization assigns people to be team members. Community relationships are formed around practice. Similarly, authority relationships within the team are organizationally determined. Authority relationships in a community of practice emerge through interaction around expertise. Teams have goals, which are often established by people not on the team. Communities are only responsible to their members. Teams rely on work and reporting processes that are organizationally defined. Communities develop their own processes.Attempts to introduce “teams” and “work groups” into the workplace to enhance learning or work practice are often based on an assumption that without impetus from above, an organization’s members configure themselves as individuals. In fact, as Brown and Duguid (1991) suggest, people work and learn collaboratively, and vital interstitial communities are continually being formed and reformed. The reorganization of the workplace into canonical groups can wittingly or unwittingly disrupt these highly functional noncanonical—and therefore often invisible—communities.In some organizations, according to Lesser and Storck (2001), the communities themselves are becoming recognized as valuable organizational assets. Acknowledging that communities of practice affect performance is important, in part, because of their potential to overcome the inherent problems of a slow-moving traditional hierarchy in a fast-moving virtual economy. Communities also appear to be an effective way for organizations to handle unstructured problems and to share knowledge outside of the traditional structural boundaries. In addition, the community concept is acknowledged by a means of developing and maintaining long-term organizational memory.Nahapiet and Ghoshal (1998 as stated in Lesser for example, the willingness to return a favor with a favor. Norms include the setting of common standards of behavior that individuals are willing to abide by. Trust involves the predictability of another person’s actions in a given situation, whereas identification refers to the process whereby individuals see themselves as united with another person or set of individuals.Another factor that reinforced trust was the development of shared repositories and discussion databases that were actively managed by the community. In these shared spaces, individuals began to evaluate who was making contributions to the greater community knowledge pool, and they began to judge the willingness of others to share the documents, templates, and other similar knowledge artifactsIn addition to connections and trust, the third important dimension of social capital is the development of shared context between two parties. As described by Nahapiet and Ghoshal (1998), “To the extent that people share a common language, this facilitates their ability to gain access to people and their information. To the extent that their language and codes are different, this keeps people apart and restricts their access” (p. 253).Hess (2007) concluded that companies that grow from within have six key elements. The most relevant for this discussion, is that they “build an engaged, loyal and multitalented people pipeline” (p. 22).Hess (2007) implied that employees doing the work know and understand the business and the importance of their individual jobs. Their success will be measured by what is important to the success of the business.Vainrub (2007) shared during his interview an important insight, thatDuring his interview, Vainrub (2007) continued by stating that locally, training is a politically good word, nobody will publicly state the contrary. It is not politically correct to do so.With this local reality, there is an emerging need, on the other hand, to create alternative strategies that can promote updated and centralized information for relevant employees, which coincides with part of what Lesser and Storck (2001) learned though their research, based on suggestions made by the community members of different mechanisms in which communities of practice influenced business outcomes.Although many of these were tied to the specific business environment that each of the communities operated within, their analysis highlighted four areas of organizational performance that were impacted by the ongoing activities of communities of practice:Lesser and Storck (2001) concluded that one of the primary reasons that communities were seen as an important vehicle for innovating was their ability to create a safe environment where people felt comfortable in sharing challenges. The development of these interpersonal relationships within the community was especially useful in asking sensitive questions or testing ideas that were not fully “baked.” In many of the companies that they examined, the ability of individuals to use other community members as a sounding board was a highly valued feature of community life. In these situations, individuals were willing to share innovative thoughts with those whom they trusted, yet were also able to tap their expertise to and these new and (2001) found some between the of communities of practice by and stated by & and the community of practice by and studies have various that appear to be important in nurturing a community of practice. In a of organizations in six three main who and tacit who and and who connect knowledge with & (2001) community knowledge matter and group (2001) described including content matter and several of members. 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