Organising communities-of-practice: facilitating emergence Sanne Akkerman IVLOS Institute of Education, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands Christian Petter Institute for Future Studies, Innsbruck, Austria, and Maarten de Laat IVLOS Institute of Education, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands Abstract Purpose – The notion of communities of practice (CoP) has received great attention in educational and organisational practice and research. Although the concept originally refers to collaborative practices that emerge naturally, educational and HRD practitioners are increasingly searching for ways to create these practices intentionally in order to stimulate learning and professional development in specific fields. This paper aims to gain insight into ways in which communities of practice can be deliberately organised. Design/methodology/approach – The study concerns a multiple case study of the deliberate initiation of 15 communities of practice of small and medium-sized companies in the tourist sector, located in seven European countries. The analysis focuses on how meaningful, shared and coordinative activity is organised in each of the 15 cases. A multiple case study allowed for comparison between the various cases in order to target fruitful conditions and actions in organisation processes. Findings – In the initiation of a CoP it is important that before an outsider starts to organise and coordinate activities questions such as “How are we relevant to one another?” and “Who are we and where are we going?” are answered first, and by the group itself. These questions relate to the development of meaningful activity (domain) and of shared activity (community). Following this, any coordinative system, any practice, should be subordinated to the motives of the group. Originality/value – Besides identifying various actions for human resource developers who aim to apply the concept of CoP in professional work, the study contributes to the scientific formulation of pedagogical notions around communities of practice. Keywords Communities, Learning, Professional education, Small to medium-sized enterprises Paper type Research paper Introduction The notion of communities of practice (CoP) has received great attention in educational and organisational practice and research. Though CoP is a concept referring to existing, informal groups of people who in a natural way advance and create knowledge related to their shared practice (Lave and Wenger, 1991), it is nowadays taken up as a concept in order to create a rich learning environment. Wenger (1998) defines CoPs as a group of people who are informally bound by a shared practice related to a set of problems: The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at www.emeraldinsight.com/1366-5626.htm Organising communities-of- practice 383 Received 1 November 2007 Revised 15 December 2007 29 February 2008 Accepted 25 March 2008 Journal of Workplace Learning Vol. 20 No. 6, 2008 pp. 383-399 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited 1366-5626 DOI 10.1108/13665620810892067