| dc.description.abstract | Most Management and Organisational Studies research attempts to conceptualise Communities of Practice (CoP) within and between organisations. In contrast, with an empirical focus on a single community of practitioners experiencing what Salaman (1974) refers to as, locally structured occupational work, out of the organisation spotlight, this thesis responds to the call to join the conversation about occupational communities as an adjoining branch of CoP theory (Nicolini et al., 2022).
The aim is to yield insights about the social interaction and mechanisms of coordination employed by practitioners engaged in modernisation. In other words, a local occupational community (Salaman, 1974) whose work has been transformed by mechanisation and technology. To achieve this aim, a combination of different conceptual aspects of CoP and occupational communities are amalgamated to theorise about a community of practitioners who share a specific work situation albeit with contrasting and competing reference points.
Adopting an interpretative approach, combining observation-interview techniques, field data was collected using a scheme of qualitative methods which included unrehearsed questioning of participants using photographs and loosely planned observations. More specifically, while developing an ethnographic case study, called Leigh-on-Sea Cockle Fishery, a collective of independent shellfish merchants who harvest cockle beds along the estuary of the river Thames were observed whilst undertaking their ordinary work of commercial shellfishing.
The results are the product of observational analysis of the same group of participants over several annual fishing seasons (2011-2018). As such, the findings reveal a rich cultural description of the everyday work and drama that typifies small-scale fisheries in the UK. The research shows that whilst the effect of modernisation on communities and their practice may well be transformational, the process of modernisation typically involves many intermediate steps. The findings also indicate that modernisation has become a salient element in the self-image of the UK shellfish merchant. Moreover, in the context of CoP and modernisation, but with an alternative formulation of occupational CoP, this study asserts that licence and mandate constitute a proprietary attribute of, to use Wenger’s (1998) term, a community’s shared repertoire.
By liberating CoP from the conventional context in which they are enacted, namely organisations, the characterisation of occupational CoP as outlined in this study provide an alternative template for theorising about the dynamics of learning and/in work. Or, to make this point more strategically, because of synthesising two adjacent literatures (CoP and occupational communities) this thesis can offer a nuanced theoretical perspective (Thatcher and Fisher, 2022) on divergent types of communities and their work practice which, in turn may energise Management and Organisation scholars. | en_GB |
