Meaning making, communities of practice, and analytical toolkits James Paul Gee University ofWisconsin-Madison Eckert and Wenger argue that we should not build particular assumptions about hierarchies of social power into the notion of a‘community of practice’ (hereafter ‘COP’).What sort of hierarchy exists within any specific COP should be left as a matter to be discovered through ethnographic observation. This is to say that any particular hierarchy is not definitive of what a COP is, rather different COPs incorporate different sorts of hierarchies. I agree with this point, but I also believe it applies more generally. It is not always clear what features are best taken as definitive of a COP and which are best left as matters of variation across different COPs, features to be uncovered through empirical investigation, not assumed present by definition. Take, for instance, the very notion of practice itself. Can we ^ should we ^ separate acceptance bya COP from some form of participation in the COP? Davies argues we can and should; Eckert and Wenger argue we can’t. One tack we can take here is to say that an activity counts as a practice in a given COP just in virtue of its role in allowing a person to be accepted (recognized) as a member of the COP (like wearing the right color of lipstick in Eckert’s example). On this sort of tack we really cannot separate acceptance, participation, practice, and learning in a COP framework as they are all mutually implicated. But consider an extreme case, say a group of Neo-Nazis. Herman is a central participant in every way, let us assume, but one day it is discovered that Herman is Jewish and has hidden this matter from his colleagues. Now, all of a sudden, all of Herman’s activities that once counted as practices within the Neo-Nazi COP, don’t count. Herman is no longer accepted and his doings don’t any longer count. He’s an imposter. Herman’s being Jewish need not, for the Neo-Nazis, reside in any particular practice in which Herman participates in some other COP ^ any more than someone’s black skin need reside in any competing practice in order to get them excluded from being a Neo-Nazi. His failure to count now has to do not with practice per se, but with a (social and historical) attribute and the workings of belief/ideology. So, it would seem, the extent to which practices are wholly constitutive of a COP and definitive of acceptance is itself a matter to be discovered. Journal of Sociolinguistics 9/4, 2005: 590^594 # Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden MA 02148, USA.