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Professional Identity Within a Workplace Community of Practice

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Professional Identity Within a Workplace Community of Practice Volume 4: 2011-2012 ISSN: 2041-6776 School of English Professional Identity within a Workplace Community of Practice Lindsey Dorrington Introduction Communities of Practice (henceforth CofP) was developed by Etienne Wenger and Jean Lave (1991) as a framework through which to consider group and individual identity, focusing specifically on learning and development through membership of and participation in groups. This framework has been adopted and modified by discourse analysts, often as a means by which to analyse gender identity. This study focuses on professional identity within a workplace CofP. The transcript comes from the Maintenance Weekly Review meeting between Pete and three managers of a medium-sized manufacturing company in the East Midlands. Pete, Maintenance Project Engineer, will shortly be receiving a promotion to Maintenance Manager. This essay concentrates on Pete’s brokering (Wenger 1998) between two distinct CofPs, that of the maintenance staff who work on the shop floor and the managerial, as a method of affiliating himself to the managerial CofP. Pete’s professional identity in transition will also be considered as well as the effects of his multimembership within the institution and how he orients to individual CofPs, thereby demonstrating the complexities surrounding identity negotiation and formation in the professional workplace before promotion. Literature Review The Communities of Practice framework was developed by Wenger and Lave (1991) as a means of describing and categorising groups and their members. According to Wenger (1998), for a group to constitute a CofP it must demonstrate mutual engagement in a certain task, a joint enterprise to achieve some common goal and a shared repertoire between members to express meaning (73-83), summarised by Eckert and McConnell-Ginet (1998) as ‘an aggregate of people who come together around mutual engagement in some common endeavor’ (490). Wenger (1998) categorises members as marginal, peripheral and core depending on their allowed or possible level of participation or engagement within a CofP, emphasising particularly how newcomers shift from being marginalised, inexperienced members to eventually achieving full participation through learning within their new CofP (164-167). Peripheral members, or those able to participate to a certain, although not by Wenger explicitly defined, level within a CofP are viewed by Wenger and Lave (1991) as having a potentially ‘empowering position’ (36) whereby the member can progress through learning and development towards core membership and therefore able and allowed to participate fully. Linked to his consideration of differing levels of participation, Wenger (1998) examines the effects of multimembership of various CofPs, drawing upon his own observations of a claims supervisor who must operate in both the workers’ and managers’ CofP and feels a marginalised member of both (168). Drawing on work already done by Eckert, he adapts her concept of brokering to apply to a more generalised, hypothetical CofP, INNERVATE Leading Undergraduate Work in English Studies, Volume 4 (2011-2012), pp. 168-84 Lindsey Dorrington 169 whereas Eckert had used it in relation to playground cliques (cited in Wenger 1998: 109). Like peripheral members of a CofP, brokers, those that operate across the boundaries of multiple CofPs, can also be in a powerful position to affect change and bring different experiences and knowledge to a CofP, which Wenger (1998) equates to engaging in the ‘“import-export”’ (109) of information and capabilities. However, a drawback to adopting Wenger’s, or Wenger and Lave’s, concept of Communities of Practice is that it was not developed as a linguistic framework. Linguists who have adopted a CofP framework, such as Mullany (2006, 2007 and 2010), Moore (2006 and 2010) and Eckert and McConnell-Ginet (1992 and 1998) have done so with caution since modifications must be made for Wenger’s framework to be applicable to the study of genuine, recorded speech and not just anecdotes, general observation and analogies. Eckert and McConnell-Ginet (1998) went so far as to not only offer their own definition of a CofP but to also rename Wenger’s shared repertoire as a ‘linguistic repertoire’ (492), restricting its definition from the vague and lengthy list of features offered by Wenger (1998), including ‘routines, words, tools, ways of doing things, stories, gestures, symbols, genres, actions or concepts’ (83) and locating it firmly in the field of Discourse Analysis. A CofP analysis of group interaction is especially useful when considering group as well as individual identity, differing from a collaborative floor (as used, for example by Edelsky (1981), in her attempt at modifying the transcription system for group interaction) in that, firstly, it provides fixed, underlying criteria for what must actually form the foundation of the group (Wenger’s three required elements of a CofP) and, secondly, as a means of drawing attention to asymmetries within interactions rather than the harmony implied by collaboration. A CofP approach has frequently been used to examine identity, and particularly gender identity, focusing especially on how individual members and CofPs perceive their identity as well as how it is oriented to by others. Tajfel (1978) defines identity as ‘that part of an individual’s self-concept which derives from his knowledge of his membership of a social group (or groups) together with the value and emotional significance attached to that membership’ (63), used also by Joseph (2010: 13) and considered in Benwell and Stokoe (2006: 25-6). Although Tajfel’s definition is associated with Social Identity Theory, pre- CofP, it aligns with the examination of professional identity in this study since professional identity is here considered as created and oriented to through membership of and participation in workplace CofPs. The term professional identity is used in the same way as by Richards (2006) to indicate that part of an individual’s identity that is shaped and brought to bear in an institutional setting, in this case in the workplace. That identity is subject to change and inherently malleable has been commonly accepted. The suggestion that identity constantly changes as a result of context and experiences and is therefore fundamentally flexible and unable to be solidified into one entirety has been proposed by, for example Widdicombe (1998) with her concept of the ‘“fragmented self”’ (202), which corresponds to Richards’ (2006) notion of ‘the dynamic process of identity (re)construction’ (3) and Drew and Heritage’s (1992) proposal of identity as ‘transformable at any moment’ (21). This is the idea adhered to in this study and Pete’s professional identity is shown to be currently in the process of transition. The difficulties associated with negotiating or reconstructing identity before or after workplace promotion is considered by neither Richards (2006) or Drew and Heritage (1992), all of whom examined the professional identity of groups within institutional settings (although not using Wenger’s CofP framework), making further research in this area necessary especially since, to my knowledge, no major research within Discourse Analysis has yet been undertaken to examine professional identity before workplace promotion. Indeed, the attention within identity research appears to centre on ‘fixed’ identities, whether virtually unchangeable such as gender (for example Mullany 2006, 2007 and 2010) or for the INNERVATE Leading Undergraduate Work in English Studies, Volume 4 (2011-2012), pp. 168-84 170 Professional Identity within a Workplace Community of Practice time being stable, such as doctor/patient relations (particularly Drew and Heritage 1992) and not on the process of identity in transition as is the case in this study. Method The extract comes from the Maintenance Weekly Review (MWR) meeting on 16 November 2011 at a medium-sized manufacturing company in the East Midlands, renamed MANU. During this extract, Production Manager, John, Compliance Manager, Henry, and Maintenance Project Engineer, Pete, were present (Extrusions Manager, Malcolm, arrived late and is absent during this particular period). They discuss an upcoming disciplinary hearing as well as other activities relating to maintenance issues. These weekly meetings are oriented around achieving institutional goals through sharing information and experiences from the previous week and agreeing upon tasks for the upcoming week (Wenger’s (1998) mutual engagement and joint enterprise). As Drew and Heritage (1992) propose, the interaction is mostly fashioned according to a ‘standard ‘shape’ or order of phases’ (43), following the agenda (see Appendix), a common characteristic of institutional interaction and especially business meetings. This extract was chosen as being particularly revealing in terms of how Pete orients to his professional identity. Evident in this extract are how Pete tries to align himself with the managers through utilising his multimembership of two distinct CofPs, that of the maintenance staff on the shop floor and the management. Pete was told in September 2011 that he would be promoted to Maintenance Manager in January 2012. Since then he has been assuming some managerial duties alongside his role as Maintenance Project Engineer on the shop floor but currently has neither the title nor associated benefits of a managerial role. He has been attending MWRs since starting at the company in 2009, initially supporting the previous Maintenance Manager but, for the past five months, as sole representative of the Maintenance staff and future Manager. Linguistic Analysis Extract 1 Prior to this extract, Pete has commenced his report about maintenance actions in the past week. He has just admitted that he hasn’t yet updated his figures for downtime this week and so what he has just read out is out-of-date. John interrupts to tell him to update the figures: 80. John: [let’s] do that tomorrow befo:re (.) Nick’s review on 81. [Friday ] 82. Pete: [Ye:]I used to do it on a Thursday so erm 1.3% the assembly PPMs completed was 71% (1.1) 83. and the reason being is w- erm (.) Paul was off the weekend and left Rupert on his own (0.7) and 84.
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