International Conference on Engineering & Business Education, Innovation and Entrepreneurship 2012 LBUS Sibiu, Romania, 18 - 21 October, 2012 A TRANSDISCIPLINARY APPROACH TO BUSINESS EDUCATION THROUGHOUT FAMILY FIRMS AS COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE Fotea, Ioan, Pop, G. Ioan, Vaduva, Sebastian, and Fotea, Silvia Emanuel University of Oradea, ioan.fotea@emanuel.ro Emanuel University of Oradea, igh.pop@gmail.com Emanuel University of Oradea, sebastianvaduva@emanuel.ro Emanuel University of Oradea, silvia.fotea@emanuel.ro ABSTRACT: The paper explores the relationship between family bussinesses (FB), communities of practice (CoP), and entrepreneurship education in the context of the knowledge production and sharing within and between these communities. The relationship between these three spheres of knowledge is presented from a transdisciplinary point of view. The contextual legitimacy identifies the communicational channels between the fields of family businesses and the communities of practice and entrepreneurial education in a transdisciplinary generative synergistic context. The notion of CoP suggests that organizational community boundaries do not correspond with typical functional boundaries, including practice - and person - based networks, while family businesses underlie the necessity of sustainable business education which can be achieved through collaborative interaction in a creative entrepreneurial framework. The paper proposes to find the common ground of the three fields of knowledge and the way these points develop new knowledge windows towards a new entrepreneurial understanding of life, and generating new alternatives. 1. INTRODUCTION Knowledge and its management represent the heart of the informergic economy, with the unprecedented possibilities of production and sharing of knowledge, of learning and change in knowledge place organizations and individuals alike under the imperative of capitalizing on this new reality [1]. In order to meet the knowledge imperative economic actors resorted on various organizational solutions, some of these solutions brought teams as a central element (e.g. cross-functional teams), others have focused on the customer as a central element, and others were interested on business model [2]. The search for better solutions that capitalize on knowledge continues, the paradigm shift regarding the approach of knowledge needs consider the conservation of fundamental elements of knowledge, of invariants as relevance, correctness and value, reconfiguring the approach of the knowledge process in terms of a synergistic generative methodological approach. In this context transdisciplinarity approach is considered the best way to be chosen in order to understand the different channels the entrepreneurial learning could work in family business as a community of practice, even they are partially distinguished incompatible systems, with potential tensions and conflict [3, 4, 5]. The transdisciplinarity as a new way for knowledge has to manage, to redistribute and to share the new spaces opened up by new opportunities through specific processes [6]. The CoPs become an important source of learning and innovation in connection with family business in an entrepreneurial learning context as new knowledge spaces [7, 8, 9, 10]. Such a synergistic generative approach is better to explain processes of learning and innovating then the monodisciplinary approach. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to a better understanding the way entrepreneurial learning is working in the family businesses as community of practice, offering insights and stimulating to reflections on the challenges and processes involved in transdisciplinary knowledge production. Several studies have emphasized that knowledge production is socially, historically, culturally and materially situated [11, 12, 13, 14, 15]. To understand knowing in practice is necessary to go beyond the local level and look at how it is distributed into larger socio-technical networks, connecting different levels of reality in the new context of the informergic knowledge based society [5]. The knowledge search window, with top-down as theoretical approach and bottom-up levels, as practical experiences allows to put together things, people, and events that are distant and only partially congruent, because they allow the coexistence of old and new, because they are able to deal with change and disorder while explaining persistence and order, in the new synergistic generative perspective [4, 16, 17, 18]. 2. MONODISCIPLINARY APPROACH 2.1. Communities of practice CoPs are important as they weave the organization around competencies without reverting to functional structures, facilitating an informally environment formally structured, supported by knowledge, people, organizational processes and infrastructure [7]. These CoPs hold a vast base of knowledge ranging from bottom-up level, working as practical experiences, to top-down level, as theoretical concepts. CoPs are considered as the engines for acceleration in an organization, as knowledge fabrics for apprentices of CoP in order to acquire communitarian identity with shared passion, relationships, roles and ways to achieve a common knowledge, practices, based on detailed empirical evidence of a globally operating organization [8, 9]. CoPs feature distinctive characteristics from other organizational forms such as project teams, formal work group or informal networks, which are also present in organizations for managing knowledge [19]. CoPs, unlike the other three organizational forms, spring from the members’ interests and passions (glue) with the purpose of developing the auto-selected members’ (membership) capabilities and to create and share knowledge (purpose) and therefore their span of life is directly connected to the interest to maintain the group (duration). Communities of practice are fertile environments where knowledge is produced but also they themselves function on the basis of knowledge. These