Does the Concept of “Community of Practice” Show New Trajectories for the Evolution of Industrial Districts?

Silvia Rita Sedita ()

Urban/Regional from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: The aim of this paper is to find a framework that could be useful to evaluate the utility of the concept of “Community of Practice” (CoP) for understanding the dynamics of knowledge creation and sharing in Industrial Districts (IDs). The CoP concept stems from the managerial experience of large corporations, which have found in it a kind of “living repository” of knowledge. The source of the concept of agglomeration of firms in ID is completely different. Anyway, many similarities can be found between the concepts of ID and CoP, as well then some differences. The paper proceeds as follows. First, it explains the three main concepts useful for understanding further argumentations: knowledge, ID, CoP. Next, it offers a framework to put in comparison the two concepts of ID and CoP. In the end, an example of how the applications of tools, coming from the CoP concept, can be useful to formulate some hypotheses on the evolutionary behaviour of IDs is shown.

Keywords: Community of Practice; Industrial District; Knowledge; Learning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D83 R12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 34 pages
Date: 2005-02-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo and nep-tid
Note: Type of Document - pdf; pages: 34
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wpa:wuwpur:0502001

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