Linking Competitive Advantage with Communities of Practice

This article argues that a dominant set of current themes in the management literature themes of learning, participative leadership, collaboration, strategic thinking, and total quality management, converge around the creation of a set of metacapabilities. Metacapabilities allow organizations to adapt to change on a continuous basis by contributing the kinds of skill and knowledge that underlie the process of capability building itself. The creation of these metacapabilities, in turn, requires new metaphors for thinking about organizations. One such metaphor conceives of organizations as communities of practice. Communities of practice are composed of groups of individuals united in action. This view allows us to move beyond the emulation of fragmented best practices to focus on the underlying value system that is likely to support such communities. The author argues that this discussion is informed by more than a decade of work by feminist moral theorists on an ethic of care.