Article body

The term CoP refers to groups of people informally bound by sharing the same expertise and passion for a domain of interest, learning and improving their shared practices through regular interactions (Lave & Wenger, 1991). The community was a central construct in early CoP research (Wenger, 1998) interested in ‘social learning’, related to various social dynamics: the legitimate peripheral participation (LPP) (Lave & Wenger, 1991), the situated curriculum (Gherardi et al., 1998) and community continuity and regeneration (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Gherardi et al., 1998; Mørk et al., 2010). Similarly, social learning is not just about acquiring knowledge and developing competences in a certain domain of expertise, but also a process of enculturation (Lave, 1993) and learning to become a community member (Brown & Dunguid, 1991).

Over the decades, research has shifted focus on how CoPs are constructed and cultivated inside companies (Dupouët & Barlatier, 2011; Guérineau et al., 2017) and subordinated to the achievement of managerial goals (e.g. knowledge sharing, value creation, organizational performance – see Probst & Borzillo, 2008; Corso et al., 2009; Roberts, 2006). This has progressively shelved CoP’s interpretation as a social phenomenon (Harvey et al., 2013) and deepened interest in the functional and technical learning in CoPs (Nicolini et al., 2022). This functional aspect has been focal in CoP research even when it has referred to the importance of the symbolic and cultural inside communities, with these latter dimensions being mainly understood as means to share practice knowledge implicitly (Styhre et al., 2006; Myers, 2022; Macpherson & Clark, 2009) and only briefly mentioned in relation to social dynamics (e.g. Gherardi & Perrotta, 2014). Yet, limiting the focus of social learning to what is technical (the domain of expertise) and useful (functional) for the company contrasts with the initial focus on “learning to be a member” and with the nature of most problematic issues for CoPs development within organizations related to participation, motivation and cultural barriers (Borzillo et al., 2011; McDermott & O’Dell, 2001; Retna & Ng, 2011). Centering on the functional, thus, ultimately limits the understanding of CoP’s community dynamics.

With this paper we want to reconcile (see Nicolini et al., 2022) extant literature with the notion of community referring both to symbolic and functional aspects (Cohen, 1985) while also interrogating the role of learning to be communal, i.e. learning to take part of any community and the abilities it requires. Thus, we ask: how does a CoP emerge, develop, and maintain through social symbolic learning (in addition to functional learning) and how does this social symbolic learning interact with the functional one?

To fill this gap, we introduce the cultural perspective and what it can offer to the comprehension of community dynamics in a CoP (Harvey et al., 2013). This perspective, anchored in sociology and anthropology studies, has proven relevant to understand communal phenomena in marketing and organization research (Arnould & Thompson, 2005; Haveman & Wetts, 2019, a & b) unveiling how people’s attachment to shared symbols, such as rituals and totemic objects, equips them with the competencies to be communal (Cohen, 1985). Applying the cultural perspective to two CoPs spanning multiple organizations - financial analysts and physicians - this paper aims at unraveling how material and immaterial symbols’ mobilization at the individual and collective levels orients the emergence, development and maintenance of a CoP.

The paper continues with a literature review discussing CoP ’s research on social learning and its relations to community dynamics. It then takes up the cultural perspective on learning to be communal and highlights the body of symbols used to develop and maintain a community. Taken together, this provides a link between functional and symbolic learning in CoPs and a glimpse of their potential impact on community dynamics, especially in the context of professional and inter-organizational CoPs. In the methodology section, the whys and wherefores of reusing data from CoP cases are detailed. Finally, the findings illustrate how learning to be communal processes link with community dynamics and offer insights to further develop the cultural approach in CoPs studies and to gain relevant practical and managerial implications.

Theoretical background

Learning to be social in CoPs research

From their inception, in the late Eighties, studies on CoPs have complemented traditional understanding of learning as an isolated activity of abstract knowledge transfer, with a view of learning as a process structured by the social context in which it happens (Lave 1988; Lave & Wenger 1991). The social view of learning emphasizes that knowledge cannot be disconnected from the practice it is used for (Lave & Wenger, 1991) and that the key competences related to the practice are continuously socially redefined (Lave, 1988; Wenger, 2000). Learning situated in a social context, therefore, does not only imply acquiring the competences defined by a social group, the CoP, but is also intrinsically linked to the experience that the individual has of the social world as a member of the group and beyond its boundaries (Wenger, 2000). Although other authors made similar reflections on knowledge “embedded in people” (Davenport & Prusak, 1998), the notion of CoP was initially not focused on organizational knowledge management, but on CoPs encompassing professionals from the same field operating in different organizations (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Contu & Willmott, 2003; Cox, 2005). This allowed to give more emphasis to the socio-cultural dimension in learning, defined as “a process of enculturation” whereby learners “adopt the behaviors and belief system of new social groups.…observe and practice in situ the behaviors of members of a culture, people pick up relevant jargon, imitate behavior, start to act in accordance with its norms” (Brown & Duguid, 1991, p. 305).

Within this perspective three main social dynamics appear related to individual and communal learning: the legitimate peripheral participation (LPP) (Lave & Wenger, 1991); the ‘situated curriculum’ (Gherardi et al. 1998); and community continuity and regeneration (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Gherardi et al., 1998; Mørk et al., 2010).

The LPP (Lave & Wenger, 1990) defines individual learning dependent on the access and acceptance of a novice as a member of a community. Only securing legitimate entrance in the community allows the novice to participate in its productive activities and therefore learn, allowing the individual to become a community insider and to acquire not only explicit, formal ‘expert knowledge’ but also the tacit and embodied ability of acting as a community member (Brown & Duguid, 1991).

The “situated curriculum” (Gherardi et al., 1998) intervenes once novices are accepted as members of a community, indicating a pre-ordered path of tasks and interactions to follow. Novice’s performances on certain tasks and therefore the possibility to advance along the predefined situated curriculum depend on tacit learning happening through multiple social encounters and observations, in relation to contingent situations (e.g. specific practice needs within the community at a certain historical point in time) and through access to different technological artefacts.

While learning is the path of an individual who, participating in the cultural life of the CoP, gets a sense of its history and heritage, develops a legitimate skilled identity, and becomes an increasingly central CoP’s member, learning is also an issue of community continuity and regeneration (Gherardi et al., 1998; Wenger & Snyder, 2000; Singh et al., 2002). Through the replacement of former “newcomers-become-old-timers” with novices (Lave & Wenger, 1991, p. 114) the community can achieve continuity over generations, guaranteeing its reproduction, but can also transform itself.

Despite the strong connections between learning and the three types of dynamics depicted above, the way symbolic learning links to these social dynamics has been disregarded in CoP’s literature. The managerial turn in CoPs studies’ (Bolisani & Scarso, 2014) has emphasized the importance of learning as technical and functional for the company, even when learning happens through verbal and symbolic interaction (Styhre et al., 2006), storytelling (Myers, 2002) or artifacts (Macpherson & Jones, 2008; Macpherson & Clark, 2009). Yet, the main factors hampering a successful thriving of CoPs inside organizations seem related to cultural factors (Borzillo et al., 2011; McDermott & O’Dell, 2001; Retna & Ng, 2011) and some researchers still invite to consider community socio-cultural aspects such as shared symbols and objects (Thompson, 2005), subcultural routines and artifacts (Cohendet & Simon, 2016), or meaning and identity (Pyrko et al., 2019) to foster participation and engagement in organizational CoPs.

To overcome the contradiction between managerial oriented literature focused on meeting organizational goals and the socio-cultural problems hampering the development of CoPs within organizations, some scholars have urged considering CoPs again as ‘a social phenomenon’ (Harvey et al., 2013). Taking this invitation seriously, we argue, would mean enlarging the notion of learning considered in CoP’s studies from the functional learning alone, instrumental to organizational success, to also include a deeper investigation of ‘learning to be communal’ which was emphasized in early CoP’s conceptualization but has never been fully integrated in the notion of ‘social learning’.

Learning to be communal from a cultural perspective

Especially in its early conceptualization, CoPs literature has insisted on the interlink between the social practice learning and “learning to be communal” or the social learning of a symbolic nature which enables everyone to become and remain an insider, a legitimate member of the community.

This kind of social symbolic learning is approached by the cultural perspective in organizational and/or professional or consumer communities (Arnould & Thompson, 2005; Haveman & Wetts, 2019, a & b) focusing on how “an individual’s sense of belonging is inextricably entwined with the socially constructed practices and resources that shape community” (Thomas et al., 2013, p. 1012). Applying concepts originated mostly in anthropology and sociology research, the cultural perspective accounts for group practices involving the interaction between people and between people and things and illuminates how symbolic resources connected to the practice are mobilized by individuals and the community to structure their interactions.

Even outside the professional or organizational contexts, symbolic resources are necessary to engage in community practices. Communities are symbolically constructed (Cohen, 1985) and people acquire and develop the culture which will equip them to be communal through the attachment to “a common body of symbols” (Cohen, 1985, p. 16). This common body of symbols or “repertoire of symbolic devices” is specific to each community and includes: 1) material symbols “in the forms of totems, football teams or war memorials” (Cohen, 1985, p. 19); 2) immaterial symbols and, above all, rituals which “occupy a prominent place in this repertoire” (Cohen, 1985, p. 50). Either material or immaterial, symbolic markers allow the community to distinguish itself from other communities. The symbolization of community boundaries allows people to become aware of their community’s distinctiveness and the community to affirm and reinforce its confines: “The symbolic repertoire of a community aggregates the individualities and other differences found within the community and provides the means for their expression, interpretation and containment” (Cohen, 1985, p. 21).

The symbolic repertoire of a community provides the context within which individuality is recognizable. By their very nature, symbols are open to individuals’ interpretation and offer them scope for interpretive maneuver to use symbols considering their own conditions and experiences. What counts most for a community member is being able to interpret symbols and bring them into play in a proper way, depending on the circumstances. Learning to be communal consists in achieving this appropriate cultural mobilization of the group repertoire of symbols, including totems (material symbol) and rites (immaterial symbol).

Totems

First studied in aboriginal culture organized in clans, the totem is the sacred object which identifies each clan (Durkheim, 2001). The powers attributed to the totem determined the behavior of community members, for example prohibiting marriage outside the clan. It is only through symbolism that human life can objectify its moral exigencies by superimposing them on nature (Durkheim, 2001). The totem is openly placed at the center of the community’s attention, the object of conscious cult, shared veneration, and fear. “The totem attracts the gaze; it captures attention and embodies energetic charges” (Schiermer, 2011, p. 86).

Totems and other totemic objects that are part of the sacred aspect of the community serve as boundary markers, distinguishing one community from another through difference, even opposition. “A war memorial, for example, is not merely a symbol used by the community to signify the sacrifice made by the fallen, but is a representation of the community itself” (Stratton & Northcote, 2016, p. 500) and of those who are or have been its opponents. Within a community, every celebration of a totemic object is an opportunity to develop a ritual that renews and reinforces collective beliefs and feelings.

Symbolization processes are at work amongst members of every community, and objects are their essential support (Fleming & Spicer, 2005). Without going back to the canonical examples of community objects mobilized in traditional tribal rituals (Knorr-Cetina, 1997), it is possible to find similar cases also in contemporary society: for instance, nowadays, the asthma community around the world represents itself and is represented by a totemic object, the Ventolin inhaler (Cova, 2022), which is both functionally and symbolically instrumental for its community members. The presence of such totemic objects are daily reminders of members’ connections with and obligations to their community.

The cultural approach shows that totems are necessary for individuals to learn to be communal and to interact with the outside world. The totem helps each member to accept their condition and learn to live appropriately within the scheme of communal things.

Rituals

According to the cultural perspective, every social group needs rites to affirm and reaffirm its existence and the belonging of its members (Turner, 1969). Without rites, no community can endure, whether composed of workers (Smith & Stewart, 2011) or consumers (Sreekumar et al., 2023). Amongst the most powerful rituals observed in aboriginal tribes are the rites of passage whereby the elders chose a few pairs to go in seclusion for several days and nights, performing special rituals and learning the highest secrets of the clan. Rituals renew and invigorate adherence to beliefs, have a psychologically soothing function, and help integrate the individual into the community (Bell, 1992). Rituals are a community’s expression of shared beliefs and social belonging.

Rituals are generally defined as “a fixed sequence of actions that convey symbolic, rather than functional, meaning, and are formal and repetitive in nature” (Ratcliffe et al., 2019, p. 87). Every ritual has its recurring temporalities, its models (those recited throughout history), and its spatial partitions (the stage on which it is performed). The entire process is overflowing with meaning, yet participants remain largely or entirely unaware of the theatrical roles they are being asked to play, the values and purposes the ritual conveys, the real and symbolic means at its disposal, or the coded systems it uses to communicate (Bell, 1992; Turner, 1969). The power of a ritual is measured in part by the emotions it evokes, emotions that are sustained by the attention they require from the masters of ceremony, the audience, and the participants who communicate in this way.

Participation in a community often takes the form of rituals, which may be macro-rituals, such as ceremonies, or micro-rituals, such as daily routines. Belonging to the community can be seen as a function of repeated engagement with the communal culture, where emotional proximity to material objects, and by extension members, is usually concentric with the level of individual personal involvement. In today’s societies, where individuals are constantly on the move, rituals involving them guarantee the permanence and solidity of the community.

Rituals can be classified in four main categories, all of which refer to time:

  • ‘initiation’ rituals or rites of passage (like the ragging of first year students);

  • ‘calendar’ rituals or commemorative rituals (like Saint Patrick Day on March 17th);

  • ‘cyclical’ rituals (like the weekly dance ritual of Friday Night Fever);

  • ‘occasional’ rituals (rituals for special occasions like a marriage).

Mauss (1925) has shown that the ritual mechanism is not static but also creative and conflictual. New social connections can be established by extending rituals to new participants; and those excluded by rituals from group structures can fight their way into membership.

The cultural approach highlights that rituals are necessary for individuals to reinforce their sense of belonging to the community and to learn navigating within it. They are necessary to the collective to define the community’s place in the world and to perpetuate it.

Learning how to perform rituals and mobilize totemic objects within a community contributes to the community dynamics. It is through the use and transformation of these symbols that members build, develop, and maintain the community (Belk & Tumbat, 2005; Cova & Cova, 2002; Morgan & Ogbonna, 2008; Stratton & Northcote, 2016). They make it possible to clearly define the boundaries of the community as opposed to what is not part of the community (totemic objects and rituals from another community) and to foster the sense of “we-ness” or belonging (Cova & Cova, 2002). The totemic object is not only the symbol of the community, but also its founding principle (Stratton & Northcote, 2016). Any change in the totemic object has an impact on the dynamics of the community. The rituals are based on the founding practices of the community. Their evolution reflects a change in practices. The mobilization of the same objects and rituals keeps the community together and prevents fragmentation (Morgan & Ogbonna, 2008). However, a community is always on the move. Its members seek to extend it through ‘evangelizing’ processes (Belk & Tumbat, 2005), which enable them to recruit new members. Evangelizing often leads to the adaptation of rituals and totemic objects to a new population. The cultural perspective highlights that the symbolic is not only important to convey tacit knowledge about a practice but also has crucial importance to convey socio-cultural knowledge interconnected with community dynamics.

The challenges of inter-organizational CoPs

Our aim is to highlight the combination of functional and symbolic learning in CoPs and its impact on community dynamics. To do this, we go back to the pioneering contributions in CoP studies which focused on professional communities (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Contu & Willmott, 2003; Cox, 2005), which are “groups of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting (with each other) on an ongoing basis” (Wenger et al., 2002, p. 4). Professional communities, also named occupational communities (Nicolini et al., 2022), are inter-organizational CoPs not created on purpose to fulfil a specific organization’s goal but emerged spanning multiple organizational affiliations to tackle an issue concerning an entire group of professionals engaged in the same practice to facilitate learning across boundaries. While with time two different academic traditions have distinguished CoPs from occupational communities and have focused on different issues, the two concepts have several historical and conceptual overlaps, with some social groups holding properties typical of the two concepts (Nicolini et al., 2022). Because of their inter-organizational nature and self-organizing character, professional CoPs face different challenges. In contrast with the much-studied intra-organizational communities, inter-organizational CoPs include relatively independent professionals (e.g. doctors, nurses, notaries, lawyers, tax advisors, consultants and others), requiring consistent efforts to reconcile various identities spanning across multiple organizational and epistemic boundaries (Ivcovici et al., 2022) and sometimes adopting different approaches towards the same practice (Pyrko et al., 2017). Moreover, within such broad and non-hierarchical communities (Crespin-Mazet et al., 2017), contrasting interests and different levels of seniority ask for self-organization and the establishment of membership and functioning regulation to avoid CoP’s development stagnation due to unsolvable tensions or strong anchorage into binding traditions (Gonçalves & Guimarães, 2020; Roberts, 2006). What is more, with the possibility of extending beyond the physical world through the internet, these communities potentially increase their impact including more members, but they also risk to disperse and dilute loosing significant interactions. Thus, constant effort is required to revitalize members’ interest to ensure community’s longevity which may imply assign centrality to new CoP’s sub-groups or to modify rules, values, structures and even focus (Brown & Stokes, 2021). The main challenges of professional CoPs are therefore related to social interactions and relationship dynamics within them, which aligns with scholarly positions insisting to interpret CoPs again as a social phenomenon (Harvey et al., 2013) and with highlighting the relevance of symbolic learning along with functional learning.

Yet currently few studies on CoPs professional communities acknowledge symbolic learning and its resources. Exceptions are Brown and Stokes (2021), who emphasize the importance of social events for event professionals and Ivcovici et al. (2022, p. 772) noting the importance “of social events as a means of keeping up to date with peers” for veteran clinicians’ communitarian identity. Since CoP literature does not provide a precise understanding of professional inter-organizational communities and collectives’ functioning (Crespin-Mazet et al., 2017), these latter provide fertile terrain for elucidating the power of the cultural perspective and how the entwinement of functional and symbolic learning affects the social dynamics of such dispersed communities of practice. The following sections will aim at: 1) illustrating how the mobilization of symbolic meanings in CoPs entwine technical learning about the practice with learning to be communal; 2) examine the impact of this entwinement on the understanding of community social dynamics identified in CoPs.

Methodology

Adopting the cultural perspective, we examine how social ties are formed and maintained in professional inter-organizational CoPs, social groupings that intercept the workplace, entrepreneurial ventures, and professional identities. To address these anthropological and cultural dimensions, the most appropriate method is long-term participant observation within the community (Denny & Sunderland, 2016). However, participant observation in this context is difficult and impractical because inter-organizational CoPs are multi-sited, with members situated in many online and offline locations around the world (Van Duijn, 2020). One possible pathway toward an anthropological and cultural understanding of multi-sited inter-organizational CoPs is data reuse: “now considered a key benefit for the wider research community” (Van de Sandt et al., 2019, p. 1). Far from being a novelty, since this method with a philological flavor was already advocated by Marcel Mauss over a century ago to describe and explain a complex phenomenon (Dubar, 1969), data reuse has been rediscovered over the last decade. It maintains research continuity and exposes data to new tools, methods, and approaches (Sherif, 2018). Researchers can apply new research questions to their own data, access data collected by other scientists and descriptive studies to answer specific questions. Researchers may even have direct access to those who conducted the original research, where “the increased access may provide the qualitative reuse researchers with a “‘close proximity’ advantage” (Poth, 2019, p. 3). Careful examination and assessment of preexisting qualitative data increase the validity and reliability of data reuse (Sherif, 2018). The recognized expertise of the researchers who produced the qualitative data that will be re-used is an important factor for the validity of the method.

We reuse data primarily from the ethnographic studies of two inter-organizational CoPs of financial analysts and physicians:

  • For financial analysts, we reuse the findings of a two-year ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a Swiss bank by Leins (2018) and the findings of the ethnography of HP12C calculator users in four countries conducted by the market research institute Argonautes (Cova, 2016).

  • For physicians, we reuse the findings of a one-year ethnographic fieldwork in London hospitals conducted by Rice (2010a, b).

To study these multi-sited CoPs, we supplemented the above data with:

  • Direct access, where possible, to the researchers who conducted the original research (Argonautes’ study of HP12C users in four countries).

  • The results of non-ethnographic work that could shed relevant light on other sites or on a general aspect of one or another CoP.

The corpus of books, articles, and archives consists mainly of written texts and some photographs: the writings on the financial analysts’ CoP comprise about 85,000 words, and on the physicians’ CoP more than 50,000 words. This wealth of material provides information about life in these CoPs in different countries and between different countries. This allowed us to provide two ethnographic accounts (Denny & Sunderland, 2016) not aimed at summarizing everything that happens in these CoPs, but at highlighting the non-functional, non-utilitarian, and sometimes seemingly futile aspects of community life using the aforementioned symbolic categories (rituals, totems). Through these aspects community members recognize themselves and feel that they belong to a whole. Our interpretive approach aims to understand how they meaningfully shaped the life of the CoP.

The key focus of the analysis I on the symbolization of community participation. Based on our prior knowledge of the cultural perspective to communities, we have used totemic objects and rituals as guiding themes for the analysis. We have then recombined these themes with social symbolic learning and the way it interacts with functional learning. The material has been subsequently sorted and arranged to be presented in the form of ethnographic accounts (Van Maanen, 2011) organized according to the learning process of a new member of a CoPs. As a consequence, we have focused on part of the story of each CoPs, the one related to the process of learning to be communal. We have mobilized the portions of the material that corresponded with such aim. We have not sought to decode the ethnographic writings we mobilized as if they contained a single truth, a single message, which our analysis should reveal. On the contrary, we have considered the writings and verbatims they contained to be sincere and faithful to lived reality.

Findings

CoP 1: Financial analysts

Financial professionals include analysts, institutional investors, and bankers (Malsch & Gendron, 2009). Financial analysts occupy a special place in this group:

“The analyst’s major roles include the writing of research reports on listed companies, the forecasting of corporate earnings and the generation of buy/sell recommendations: these are known as sell-side activities and are provided to major clients. Analysts may also engage in the management of portfolios and the purchasing of stocks, known as buy-side activities”

Hussain, 2023, p. 606

Financial analysts share both the ability to identify relevant information and computational expertise (Stolowy et al., 2022). The best of them have taken the C.F.A. exam[1] to become chartered financial analysts (Nguyen, 2021). For young graduates, the task is very challenging. They work long hours, so they must study for the exam on weekends and during vacations. However, if they pass the exam, CFA is a strong signal of expertise and differentiates them from other financial professionals: they become financial analysts.

Becoming a financial analyst: Learning to be seen as an expert

A newcomer to the community of financial analysts must learn how to be seen as an expert through the ‘right’ combination of tangible and intangible symbols needed to mark the difference:

“Financial analysts are highly educated bankers who see themselves as experts on financial markets… The expert status of financial analysts often is reinforced in the way they dress, act, and talk to other market participants. They usually dress in a conservative manner, wearing black or grey suits with no accessories such as cufflinks or colored features.”

Leins, 2018, p. 47

Overall, the journey of legitimation from being novice to expert goes through the initiation to the use of the financial calculator and to continue until they reach expertise. The financial calculator is the tool that financial analysts cannot do without in internal company meetings or external client meetings. The job of a financial analyst “is not so much about strict calculation as about using numbers in a creative way to support particular investment narratives formulated by financial analysts” (Leins, 2018, p. 73).

The proper use of a dedicated financial calculator, such as the HP12C (Cova, 2016), legitimizes the role of new analysts but also helps develop a career in finance, from junior analyst to CFO (Chief Finance Officer). Indeed, a typical career path goes from Entry-level Financial Analysts to Mid-Level Financial Analyst Jobs, then Senior Financial Analysts, to end as Finance Manager and even CFO. The mastering of the financial calculator, both functionally and symbolically at meetings, is an important dimension of a financier’s growing legitimacy in her career.

“When I start a meeting, I put everything I’ll need out on the table. It’s more professional. I’ll set everything up rather than digging in my briefcase during the conversation. The 12c will always sit on the desk.”

M, 30, Vice-President, New York – Argonautes’ study

A newcomer must learn to work hard and, above all, much harder than normal through a kind of ‘gruelling ritual’:

“Newly minted financial analysts routinely work more than 70 hours per week, with 100+-hour weeks not unheard of”

Johnson, 2018, p. 28

During each reporting season (Leins, 2018), four periods in a year when most publicly listed companies release their financial results to the market, the production of investment reports is a ritualized way of stressing the individual ability to understand market movements. Consequently, the reporting season often is the time when analysts work even harder than usual:

“As much as fundamental analysts like to be dramatic about their workload, their protestations were in fact no exaggeration, for their long working days become even longer during the reporting season. Laurent, a thirty-three-year-old analyst covering the biotech sector, usually came to work between 7:30 a.m. and 7:45 a.m. During reporting season, however, he never arrived later than 7:00 a.m. He had to be there early, especially on the days when a company he covered reported its numbers.”

Leins, 2018, p. 104

To appear as “calculative experts” in their business life, financial analysts don’t just have to work well, they have to work hard and show it through the enactment of the cyclical ritual of the reporting season. Once again, this ritual combines a symbolic dimension strongly connected to the seasonality of the profession with a functional dimension demonstrated by the ability to adapt one’s work rhythm to achieve one’s objectives.

Becoming a member of the community of financial analysts: learning to behave like others

The financial calculator is at the core of rituals for integrating newcomers. As in a mentor-mentee relationship, the financial calculator is offered to young analysts as an indispensable tool of the trade by senior analysts. They do not have to buy it. This gift is usually part of a ritual sequence related to the newcomer’s introduction to the financial community, a kind of initiation ritual that may also include learning sessions:

“For me, the story started in XXXX with a secret initiation ceremony. I was taken to the personnel director’s office and handed a small cream cardboard box. I was told the serial number had been recorded against my name and, should I ever leave the bank, I would be expected to return the package – complete – upon my last day. Inside that cream box was an HP-12C financial calculator.”

M, 40, Analyst, New York – Argonautes study

“I think someone gave it to me as a gift in the business. I think it was the guy who taught me how to use it. He nurtured me in the business, and it was a kind of congratulatory gift.”

M, 30, Vice President, New York – Argonautes study

In addition to initiation rituals directly connected to the mobilization and mastering of the totemic object, learning to be a member of the community involves commensal rituals:

“To become an accepted member of the group, analysts have to go through an initiation on a social level as well. Many social events serve as initiation rites for new analysts to become accepted members of the group. These events are usually linked to going out and drinking beer. Analysts do not necessarily have to drink alcohol in large quantities to become accepted, but if they get drunk with a number of other analysts, the team is likely to accept them sooner.”

Leins, 2018, p. 66-67

In these commensal rituals, the individual learns to be a member of a social group, to act and behave like others through a process of imitation (La Cecla, 2022). But these rituals should not be seen only in their non-utilitarian learning process. In these commensal rituals, a great deal of technical and socio-technical information is exchanged, which are very important in practical terms, as they enable members to better develop their practices of financial analysis.

Learning to mark and consolidate community boundaries

Newcomers have to learn the practices of financial analysis, which are so incomprehensible to ordinary mortals that they take on a symbolic dimension bordering on the mystical:

“Financial professionals are the shamans of the global economy… They rely on esoteric divination rituals [such as technical analysis and charting]…The mystique surrounding financial professionals resonates with practices associated with shamans in small-scale societies”

Johnson, 2018, 28

Symbolic distance from the rest of humanity is mainly expressed in the use of a technical and magical device: the ‘financial calculator’. This electronic calculator has dedicated keys for many financial calculations and functions, making these calculations more direct than standard calculators. It can be user-programmable, allowing the user to add functions that the manufacturer did not include by default. The financial calculator is an important component of the analyst’s role legitimation – their ‘calculative expertise’ (Stolowy et al., 2022) – in the eyes of their audience:

“You can carry one with you all the time, you’ll always gather some admiring, inquisitive glances the moment you take it out of your pocket as if by magic, you’ll always have it at hand for a quick calculation, or even a quick feat of keystroke programming, to convert those pesky euros to decent money, for instance.”

Albillo Valentin[2]

“Usually, people who aren’t familiar with it, when you pull it out, they say, ‘Gosh, how can you use that?’. They’re impressed. They don’t know that I don’t know how to use 90% of the functions! They think you know a lot about finance”

F, 27, product executive – Argonautes’ study

Among all the financial calculators – such as the HP-10B and the TI BA II – the HP12C is widely known as the gold standard for calculators in the banking and financial services industry. First released over forty years ago in 1981, the HP12C is the preferred choice of financial analysts. From being the objective ‘tool’ of a profession, like a professor’s chalk, the HP12C has become a sign of belonging to the financial community and of financial lifestyle.

“It’s nevertheless one [the HP12C] of the machines that are reserved to certain professions, notably finance.”

M, 50, Financial Executive, Paris – Argonautes study

The HP12C runs on an unconventional operating system called ‘Reverse Polish Notation’ (RPN), which is for the uninitiated an incomprehensible mystery:

“No average person could pick it up and perform the simplest equation without being utterly confused and frustrated. This is mainly due to the fact that these calculators utilize the postfix RPN interface (Reverse Polish Notation)”

Adam, Group Admin, HP Calculator Fan Club[3]

It should be noted, however, that the HP12C has gone beyond the confines of the financial analyst community to be used by real estate brokers and credit experts, more for its functional qualities than for its symbolic dimension.

Resistance to Innovation

Time and again, it has been heard that the HP12C would be replaced by another calculator, by software on the computer and, more recently, by an app on the smartphone, but nothing has changed. After unsuccessful attempts to adopt a new device, newcomers submit to the ritual use of the HP12C totem.

“Nearly all HP12C users have access to computers with Microsoft Excel or another spreadsheet program . . . but a calculator is often the tool of choice. PCs do many things splendidly. If I had to use a financial model or run a complicated financial calculation repeatedly with only minor variations, I would fire up a spreadsheet. But spreadsheet models or calculation templates take a lot of time and effort to create, and they are very inefficient for a one-time calculation. That’s where calculators shine… once you’ve learned the tricks, specialized calculators have large advantages over computers in a lot of settings. Unlike a laptop, you never have to decide whether having it along is worth the trouble of carrying it. The HP12C, about the size of an index card and just over a half-inch thick, will travel all but unnoticed in a briefcase or a purse. You don’t have to worry about power, because the 12C will run for up to three years”.

Business Week, May 12, 2003[4]

Although the HP12C is now over 40 years old (it was born in 1981), financial analysts still make it the totemic object of their community by invoking a range of practical reasons to justify this resistance to innovation. In a world of constant acceleration, and in a profession where everything is dematerialized, keeping this totemic object alive is a guarantee of stability and difference for the community. The community doesn’t want to see it evolve (Cova, 2016). Even Hewlett Packard has tried to evolve its calculator, but financial analysts have always resisted. A slightly modified version named HP12C Platinum (with a platinum plate to differentiate it from the historic HP12C, which had a gold plate) was met with a cold reception. Today, the HP12C is still one of only two calculator models that are authorized for use during CFA program exams (the other being the Texas Instruments BA II Plus, for reasons of balance between the major calculator suppliers) and for many other examinations in other countries, such as Brazil. The posts dedicated to HP calculators in Brazil on social media show many young graduates in financial analysis taking group selfies with their 12C symbolizing their entry into the community[5]. In many emerging countries, the financial calculator is the low-tech tool and totemic object that lets the newcomer join the community without breaking the bank by buying a PC and a software package. And there is quite no alternative. There is not a more specific financial calculator adopted by a sub-group of financial analysts.

CoP 2: Physicians

Healthcare includes all services for the diagnosis, treatment, and care of people suffering from any physical or mental illness, injury, or disability provided by different types of professionals, including family doctors, community nurses, local clinic staff, or other allied health professionals. Physicians, or medical practitioners (MPs), are health professionals who possess both the knowledge (usually certified by a medical degree) and the practical skills to promote, maintain, and restore human health. Using modern clinical methods, physicians have gradually replaced diagnosis through physical examination and patient description of symptoms with diagnostic instruments. The modern medical profession is based on a focal triad: the doctor, the patient, and the instruments (Schubert, 2011). Technological progress in medicine, initially injected by the introduction of the stethoscope, influences the way doctors construct their knowledge and practice (Reiser, 1977) as well as the way they frame patients and interact with them (Casey, 1992).

Becoming a doctor: learning to adopt a new identity

Becoming a ‘doctor’ has been the object of multiple sociological and anthropological studies highlighting its transformative nature (Harris & Rice, 2022). Knowledge and technical skills acquisitions are integral part of the learning process where instruments such as the stethoscope have a central role, as students progressively discover the secret ‘art of listening’ (Rice, 2010b). First auscultations are full-fledged initiation rituals:

“When you first come in you don’t know what you’re listening for. You’re just listening. You’ve got your ears open and everything’s coming in and you’re like ‘Arrrgh!’ The first time I came in I didn’t know anything. I didn’t know what were the heart sounds, I was just listening and thinking Oh my God.”

Tom – Rice, 2010b, p. 49

While acquiring practical competences the individual goes through “a remarkable and important transformation” implying the loss of the initial identity to hang on to the new identity as ‘doctor’ (Shapiro, 198, p. 27).

“I think there are sort of seminal experiences. The first cut in anatomy, the first time you see a patient die, first time you see a treatment that was really aggressive and didn’t work… First few procedures that I conducted myself, first time I realized that I really did have somebody’s life in my hands… It seems like a whole lot of first times. The first time you take a history, the first time you actually hear the murmur. There are a lot of ‘Ah-ha!’ sort of experiences.”

Denise4 – Beagan, 2001, p. 277

The main tension all along this path is between the values of humanism inspiring novices and professionalism, requiring detachment to be performant (Casey, 1992). Becoming a doctor, indeed, often means constructing professional distancing from patients and ‘building a hard shell’ to deal with feeling and to avoid over-identifying with patients (Beagan, 2001). Role-playing has a strong importance in becoming a doctor, as the more students are treated as doctors the more, they feel like doctors:

“Rina: The more the staff treats you as someone who actually belongs there, that definitely adds to your feeling like you do belong there. . . . It’s like, “Wow! This nurse is paging me and wants to know my opinion on why this patient has no urine output?!”

Beagan, 2001, p. 284

The White Coat Ceremony (WCC), taking place at the beginning of the medical school year, especially in the US, is an important initiation ritual for physicians, which symbolically reiterates to novices, in the presence of their family and school administrators, that they will acquire new competences while also becoming someone else. A typical WCC includes rituals such as an inspirational message given from a role model, receiving the white coat from a physician, taking the Hippocratic oath, and a reception with a party atmosphere. In this ceremony “it is often commented that one takes on a new identity as one dons the white coat” (Huber, 2003, p. 365).

Some of these ceremonies also include a formal recognition of each student and the gifting of a stethoscope. Most universities (e.g. Standford, Boston) offer a Littman stethoscope as a gift, described in 1961 by its inventor, Dr. Littmann, as the “ideal” stethoscope. Accompanying a physician daily for years, the stethoscope becomes a real ‘biographical object’ (Rice, 2010), generating personal attachment and sometimes requiring a rite of passage for the retired physician to relinquish it and accept to no longer practice as a doctor (Rice, 2010).

Belonging to doctors: learning the community ropes

Becoming a doctor is also becoming members of a community, learning through multiple transformative first times, construction of a professional appearance, learning the ‘medica-lese’ technical language (Beagan, 2001).

Being accepted in the community requires acquiring title-based-authority as well as trust-based authority (Russel, 2002). While students gain knowledge and technical skills, they also learn the rules guiding interactions and feelings and begin to conform to them publicly and privately (Rice, 2010). For instance, becoming a doctor means being ‘good team players’ and supportive of colleagues in actions taken in front of the patients, which implies learning to behave united in front of them, for instance, when deciding on the right treatment: “You have to go along with some things…in front of the patient. For teams it wouldn’t be good to have the ranks arguing amongst themselves about the best approach for patient care” (Beagan, 2001, p. 282). Material objects signify advancements in the situated curriculum: “students are allowed to wear a short white coat and to speak with patients at the discretion of physicians, they are not permitted to make treatment decisions. Physicians are allowed to wear a long white coat and make treatment decisions” (Russell, 2002, p. 57). Novices need to learn which material objects they are allowed to mobilize, how and in which contexts. For instance, students learn the use conditions of the short white coat: where, when, how, and with whom it is legitimate to wear it and perceive improper mobilizations as strange and fraudulent:

“[…] there’s this one person in our class that wears her white coat to class and we’re like, “Why does she wear her white coat to class?”—I’m like, fine, you’re cold, a lot of people do that, but then she like puts the stethoscope around her neck in class and sat in the first row today […] I thought it was strange. Someone else brought it up, I didn’t even mention it—they were like, “Did you see so-and-so was wearing her stethoscope? And she does this a lot.”

Vinson, 2019, p. 406

Other objects also convey different meanings about the status and skills of physicians within their groups, which represent another important aspect of communal learning:

“The vast majority (of students) purchased a Littman Classic II SE with black tubing. The more expensive Littman designs, such as the Cardiology III or the Master, tended to be used only by more senior doctors – registrars and consultants. Some senior doctors possessed particularly unusual types.”

Rice, 2010a, p. 294

Physicians’ community: delimiting the borders of a practice and its sub-groups

Medicine and the meaning of being a doctor have not always been the same in history. Modern medicine and physician practice are based on a scientific approach as opposed to magic and traditional beliefs. The remembering of this fundamental distinction, important to define the boundaries of current medical practices from fake professionals, is perpetuated in initiation rituals or rites of passage such as the white coat (or stethoscope) ceremonies described above. These rituals provide practice guidelines to newcomers, trace the advancement of individuals through a curriculum and symbolically reiterate the borders and scope of the CoP to guarantee its integrity and continuity in time. The Hippocratic oath, for instance, reiterates the refusal of any rigid medical dogma or therapeutic system, rejects medicine based upon religious systems and promotes practice oriented toward the patient well-being first (Hulkower, 2010). The stethoscope, representing a major turning point in the transformation of traditional medicine into modern healthcare, sums up the meaning of being a modern physician as it puts auscultation at the ‘cornerstone of the physician’s daily work’ (Prior & Silberstein, 1959) while also being ‘the hallmark of a doctor’ (Rice, 2010a). Using the stethoscope is part of medical expertise and involves learning progressively the subtle art of the ‘tunable’ diaphragm (Prior & Silberstein, 1959). As the stethoscope symbolizes the exclusive ‘listening expertise’, carrying and displaying it in many everyday diagnostic practices helps physicians remind those around them about their specific competence. Doctors defend the legitimacy of this practice (Rice 2010a) against new threatening technologies because the stethoscope is more than a simple detail of their uniform: “I love wearing it, … I get this feeling when I get into the lift and I’ve got my stethoscope on and I’ve been in the hospital all day and I’m feeling rough and I’m feeling tired. I feel like all the other people in the lift should be nice to me, because the stethoscope shows I’m a medical student. I’ve been walking around the wards all day dealing with people. I feel something like, not superiority, but I know what’s going on and you guys don’t.” (Tom – Rice, 2010a, p. 293). Despite symbolizing scientific medicine, yet the stethoscope also keeps something magic, recalling the shaman healers (VanBlerkom, 1995). The magical powers that the instrument confers on the physician is the ability not available to most, sometimes called ‘claireaudience’ (Reiser, 1997), to hear ‘through’ or ‘beyond’ the sensory horizons, to interpret and see meaning behind sounds.

Modern medicine is articulated in many medical specialties, each associated with sub-communities using the stethoscope differently and requiring doctors to carry a stethoscope in a certain way, creating specific micro-rituals. In fact, the way the stethoscope is carried can tell the medical community which specialty the doctor belongs to:

“[…] the way a stethoscope is worn has meaning to those in the know. A family medicine specialist may wear hers around her neck, but a surgeon would only carry hers in a pocket, and an ophthalmologist is likely to claim to have lost hers altogether. The ‘proper’ way to wear a stethoscope varies by medical specialty and local tradition, and is learned not in the classroom, but by the example of senior personnel and via warnings from peers not to risk humiliation by wearing it incorrectly”

Casey, 2014, p. 9

Community reflexivity: contesting and (re)defining physicians’ practice

While participating in the definition of community borders strongly identifying the profession and its community, the stethoscope also carries change in meaning. Harris and Rice (2022, p. 8) pinpoint that the instrument allows a reflexive work for the community “on the medicine we want in the contemporary world, raising questions such as: what are the embodied skills of doctors? How are these skills threatened or enhanced by technologies like the stethoscope? Should we defer medical judgements to a growing battery of technologies, or invest faith in the knowledge and skill of the physician?”. In our technologically sophisticated world, where innovations and the rise of artificial intelligence offer attractive claims of objectivity, data combining and transparency with patients, the stethoscope has almost become obsolete and ‘died’ for some experts. However, counterclaims also emerge defending the stethoscope as more important than ever nowadays since “it has come to stand for the doctor at the bedside talking and listening to the patient. It represents a human and humane type of medicine, which some perceive to be under threat”. (Harris & Rice, 2022, p.8). This controversy permeates hospitals, clinics and medical schools demising traditional material objects of the profession as potential careers of infections and replaceable by alternative technologies. This debate, however, remains typical of Western and wealthy countries, whereas in other contexts where doctors need to improvise with instruments they have on hand, “the stethoscope is very much alive” (Harris & Rice, 2022, p. 149). The contemporary contrast between the physician practice as humanist or detached and cynically professional, also involves other material objects such as the white coat which “has been taken to stand for virtue and excellence in medicine, but has also stood for paternalism, abuses of power, and austere separation between physician and patient” (Huber, 2003, p. 365). Initiation rituals such as the WCCs allow to reorganize these contrasting community meanings and connect students with contemporary ideas of medicine as a humanistic competence and not just a scientific or technical ability (Huber, 2003).

Discussion

Our research focuses on a type of learning in CoPs which has been often silenced, that is not ‘practice learning’ but ‘communal learning’ or getting to know the ropes of the community to progress within it. ‘Learning to be communal’ has been simply mentioned in early CoPs studies (Brown & Dunguid, 1991), but never examined in detail as the research focus has shifted to the management of practical and functional knowledge (Roberts, 2006). As from our table 1, our findings illustrate the way ‘learning to be communal’ unfolds, mobilizing cultural material and immaterial symbols, throughout the individual and collective learning social dynamics well established in CoPs literature (i.e. LPP, situated curriculum, community continuity and regeneration). The two major contributions of our research to the study of CoPs are: 1) the core role of the symbolic in building, developing and maintaining a CoP; 2) the entwinement between ‘learning to be communal’ at the individual and at the community level and its consequences for fostering participation and engagement.

We answer our research question – ‘how does a CoP emerge, develop, and maintain through social symbolic learning (in addition to functional learning) and how does this social symbolic learning interact with the functional one?’ – by showing that the symbolic embedded in CoP’s totems and rituals can convey two types of knowledge: practice knowledge useful to improve and advance CoP’s domain of expertise but also community knowledge to define belongingness and strengthen engagement, ultimately both contributing to the social dynamics inside CoPs. This adds to extant literature on CoPs, which has mainly considered the symbolic as a potential source of functional knowledge development for the community (Styhre et al., 2006; Myers, 2022; Macpherson & Clark, 2009). Our cases, instead, illustrating the attachment and emotional power exerted by totems and rituals, prove that the symbolic is also at the core of community sociality, members’ cohesion, and individual engagement in the CoP. Studying totems and rituals and understanding their role would therefore contribute to the research which has suggested that CoPs cannot be created (Thompson, 2005; Harvey et al., 2013; Pyrko et al., 2019), but that their development can be facilitated through the dissemination of “seeding structures” (Thompson, 2005), that are elements in CoP’s communal repertoire of the nature we have described. In addition, while we conceptually distinguish communal learning from social practice learning, our findings confirm and illustrate what posited in CoPs studies, that they intertwine one another (Lave, 1993): learning to be communal facilitates access to relevant practice and technical learning as well as practice learning reinforces or modifies a predefined mode of social interaction within a community. This is visible in our cases whereby misunderstanding the social norms of the community (e.g. wearing inappropriately the white coat) can interrogate peers or an incident violating an expected routine (e.g. missing the HP12C at an appointment) impedes the effective unfolding of the practice. At the same time our cases show that a change in practice (e.g. with or without auscultation through the stethoscope) would have impact on community interactions (e.g. patient contact and dialog, master-novice relation, sub-community membership recognition).

Table 1

Synthesis of the 4 CoPs dynamics

Synthesis of the 4 CoPs dynamics

-> See the list of tables

In our analysis, the examination of the symbolic in CoPs provides insights on the entwinement between ‘learning to be communal’ at the individual and at the community level. At the individual level, access to totems and rituals allows the novice to learn how to pertinently mobilize or perform them and to learn about the community, its values, rules, social structure, and roles, what it means being a member and how to behave as a member while also linking this learning to emotions and corporeal sensations. At the same time, rituals and totems serve the community to reinforce its borders and perpetuate its social structure and values, while also being important spaces for contesting the current order and transforming the community. This completes the understanding of the entwinement between the individual and community learning already pointed out by ‘social learning’ research (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Gherardi et al., 1998). As such, our results may help foster participation and engagement in organizational CoPs. On the one hand, the categorization of rituals (initiation - cyclical - commemorative - occasional) can serve as a basis for CoPs’ facilitators to create moments of sociality that are less functional and more emotional than meetings, workshops and other exchanges of practices, and that involve the members to a greater extent. On the other hand, the fact that the totemic objects used in the rituals are, like the calculator or the stethoscope, functional objects that have become cult objects, opens the door to a ritual reinforcement of the use of these objects. Within the CoPs studied, the object and the ritual are usually inseparable. This can be effective to strengthen the engagement within inter-organizational CoPs (Gonçalves & Guimarães, 2020; Pyrko et al., 2019), but also within intra-organizational CoPs (Thompson, 2005; Harvey et al., 2013) such as a financial analyst’s firms or hospitals. In these cases, the mobilization of totemic objects in corporate rituals can be used to reinforce the sense of belongingness to the intra-organizational CoPs.

Conclusion

With this research we show that the cultural perspective can offer a valuable theoretical perspective to examine the role of the symbolic inside CoPs and how it can impact learning and social dynamics within them. However, our analysis of the symbolic in this work is not without limitations, and we acknowledge that further studies would be needed to fully take advantage of the insights the cultural perspective may offer.

First, while our study shows that artifacts can both convey functional and symbolic meaning, we are aware that we observe this statically in objects whose meanings are already crystallized as the result of a long process of meaning cumulation which we could not examine through our research. Therefore, we suggest that future research could investigate how the symbolic appropriation of functional artifacts dynamically happens in time, to gain insights which could help stimulate similar processes in established communities.

Second, while we propose to include totems and rituals as part of the shared communal repertoire, we are also aware of the fact that other symbolic material and immaterial elements could be included amongst them. Future studies adopting the cultural perspective could attempt to identify other symbolic elements and enlarge the definition of the symbolic repertoire.

Moreover, we observe in our cases that even in knowledge-intensive communities, based on the scientific method, the magic comes back through reference to the shaman. This confirms studies (Latour & Woolgar, 1996) highlighting that the symbolic and mythical have a strong influence even on the practice and meaning developed within the scientific community. While our examination does not allow to delve into the details of the way this “magic” is mobilized, it offers indications of alternative and relevant entry points to further examine power-relations inside CoPs.

To conclude, while our study focuses on professional inter-organizational CoPs, it still shows that the debates and controversies permeating these vast communities affect also tensions and controversies developed inside organizations and educating institutions, therefore fostering broader debates for future research related to CoPs. First, despite the unifying and smoothening power of cultural symbols, our results show that totems and rituals are not necessarily and always unifying. Indeed, the practices and interactions of new individuals inside the community can also transform the scope and definition of the practice as well as the rules governing social interactions within the community and the way meanings are attributed to symbols. On the one side, the cultural perspective may pave the way to a new strand of CoP research which can reconcile it with the notion of community and interpret CoPs as a social phenomenon (Harvey et al., 2013). On the other side, however, we find particularly important to signal that this does not mean to forget the controversies and contrasts inside communities, quite the opposite (Thomas et al., 2013) the cultural approach offers an alternative to the power relations perspective (Mørk et al., 2010) to study tensions inside CoPs. Second, it emerges from our research that the context is important: the same symbols can be submitted to contestation (or not) depending on the context where they are mobilized. Indeed, our cases suggest that great differences exist between Western and poorer countries, as in these latter traditional meanings associated to totems and rituals are still relevant and not contested. Also, we realize that the CoPs analyzed in this research may be specific in that these are professional CoPs. We argue that focusing on these communities, neglected in recent research but at the core of the pioneering contributions in CoP studies, may help to put into dialogue studies on occupational communities and CoPs (Nicolini et al., 2022). Notwithstanding, the professional communities investigated are both highly knowledge-intensive and related to a strong occupational culture in contrast with others such as construction CoPs (Gherardi et al., 1998; Styhre et al., 2006), for instance. While research has illustrated that the symbolic may be equally important also within scientific communities (Latour & Woolgar, 1979), still the cultural perspective could help gain deeper understanding of how symbols differently work in various types of CoPs.