G&L (print) issn 17476321

G&L (online) issn 1747633X

Gender
and
Language
L ON D ON
doi : 10.1558/genl.2007.1.1.27
Article
Putting communities of practice
in their place
Penelope Eckert and Sally McConnell-Ginet
Abstract
Te study of language, gender, and sexuality has enthusiastically embraced the con-
cept community of practice. Now the feld needs to take the concept further in two
directions: (1) Te comparative direction examines diferent but similar kinds of
communities of practice to explore generalizations about how practice contributes
to the linguistic construction of gender and sexuality; (2) Te relational direction
locates communities of practice in relation to a world beyond to other communities
of practice, to social networks, to institutions (e.g. schools, churches, prisons), and to
more global imagined communities (e.g. nations, women). For each direction, we men-
tion exemplary studies, emphasizing that the construct community of practice does
not ofer new analytic units or replace other concepts, but provides fresh perspectives
on familiar social units and enriches analyses drawing on other analytic concepts.
Only an interdisciplinary research community where researchers connect their work
can put communities of practice in their proper place.
keywords: community of practice; social networks; institutions; imagined
communities
Afliations
Penelope Eckert, Stanford University, USA
Sally McConnell-Ginet, Cornell University, USA
Corresponding author: Penelope Eckert, Department of Linguistics, Stanford University, Stanford, California
94305-2150, USA
email: penny.eckert@gmail.com
G&L vol 1.1 2007 2737
2007, equinox publishing
28 Gender and Language
Nearly ffeen years ago (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 1992a; Eckert and
McConnell-Ginet 1992b), we proposed using the construct community of
practice as a way to study the situated construction of gender, sexuality and
language. What has happened since then in language and gender studies has
been both exciting and disappointing. Exciting because of the many stud-
ies that have made wonderful use of the insights ofered by the construct.
Disappointing because sometimes the construct appears to have been used as
a pretext for simply looking at particular groups of people sometimes selected
apparently at random, sometimes selected because members share some social
identity or some activity or interest. Such accounts either ignore practice or
confuse practice with activity. And also disappointing because the construct
has sometimes been viewed as replacing other analytic constructs, encouraging
a narrow focus on what happens within small groups or communities with no
reference to how their practice actually connects them to the wider world or
to wider discourses of gender and sexuality.
Developed by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger (Lave and Wenger 1991; Wenger
2000), the construct community of practice focuses on groups of people in
virtue of their regular engagement in common practice. Te notion of social
practice emphasizes the social signifcance of what people do, going beyond
simple individual acts and activities to socially regulated, repeated and inter-
preted collaborative doings. For the study of language, gender and sexuality,
a focus on these local practices is theoretically interesting to the extent that it
ofers insight into how the practices articulate with the wider world, and with
wider discourses of gender and sexuality. It is in this articulation between the
local, the extra-local, and the global, that we can understand how gender is
produced and reproduced that we can make a principled connection between
our observations of people on the ground and the gender order.
What we ofer here is a look at the use of the construct community of practice
in the study of language, gender and sexuality, with an emphasis on how it can
ft into a broader and more collaborative program of research.
1
We envision a
program that will examine the linguistic construction of gender and sexuality
from top to bottom and from bottom to top. Tat is, we envision a program of
research that will show how day-to-day practice at the local level both feeds,
and is structured by, larger social constructs and discourses. Practice, by its
very nature, involves a relation to the world: it looks outward. Relations among
participants within a community of practice are intricately tied to relations
beyond the community of practice, and to the communitys joint construction
of its place in the wider world. Te fundamental point of a community of
practice is to articulate its participants with larger social confgurations (note
that articulating can include connecting, but also cutting of or marginalizing).
Studies of communities of practice can only be productive if they are seen in the
p. eckert & s. mcconnell-ginet 29
context of the social order more generally if they ofer links to social networks,
institutions, and larger, and imagined, communities. Each of these (and others
as well) is a site for the production of gender and sexuality, and each of these
can be better understood in combination. It is important, therefore, to think
of theoretical constructs and research methods as not necessarily competing,
but as potentially complementary.
We propose that language and gender scholarship take the study of communi-
ties of practice in two directions. Te frst is comparative, examining related
communities of practice. A particular community of practice can only be
interesting as an example of something. In order to know what its an example
of, one needs to compare it with potentially analogous communities of practice
to move out to see how, and in what ways, what one has observed is general.
Similarly, the practices themselves should lead us to seek out where else they
occur. Te second direction is relational, focusing on the articulation between
the community of practice and other social confgurations. Individuals have
memberships in multiple communities of practice, and ways of moving among
them. Communities of practice are locations in individuals social networks,
and they mediate individuals relations to larger institutions (schools, churches,
legal systems), and to more global imagined communities (nations, hiphop,
women). Any account of a community of practice should attend to how its
practices articulate with the larger scheme.
1 Direction one: generalizing from one community of practice
Replication is central to empirical work, and however interpretive our studies
may be, there is almost always the opportunity to seek verifcation in multiple
sites in equivalent sites, and in quite diferent sites. Elinor Ochs and Carolyn
Taylor (Ochs and Taylor 1992), in their study of families at the dinner table,
selected a repeated and highly symbolic practice that they termed father-
knows-best. Te dinner table is key because of its regularity, its ritual aspects,
its salience as a locus for the performance of gendered parental and work roles,
and its status as one of the few occasions on which entire families gather with
little to distract them from sustained talk. What Ochs and Taylor found in the
dinner table talk they examined was a pattern in which fathers evaluated the
narratives produced by children and mothers. Mothers actually elicited most of
these evaluations, providing fathers with the opportunity to make authoritative
pronouncements. As a common ritualized event, the family dinner table is one
that can be studied across families, and Ochs and Taylor did fnd this practice
across a number of families. One can imagine moving on from the fndings
of this study in a variety of ways to dinners or other occasions involving a
diverse range of families. In families that do not assemble regularly for dinner,
30 Gender and Language
are there other places where something like the father-knows-best scenario
they identifed unfolds? And how widespread is this practice? Does it occur in
other situations? Are there situations in which mother-knows-best scenarios
emerge? And if so, around what subject matter?
Penelope Eckerts study of the heterosexual market in two elementary schools
(Eckert, 1996; Eckert in progress) focused on practices that are common to
schools across and beyond the U.S. Te emerging popular crowd, a heteroso-
cial community of practice, is central to the co-construction of gender and
heterosexuality and to the emergence of compulsory heterosexuality. Te crowd
engages in a highly visible activity of pairing up boy-girl couples. Tese couples
might be together for a day or a week, but they are together only in a symbolic
alliance in fact, they barely interact with each other. Te practice of pairing up
is not about individual heterosexual relationships, but about social engineering,
the consolidation of social power, and the construction of social value.
Tis practice is widespread in schools, but which aspects of the practice
are widespread, and which are local? By comparing popular crowds in two
ethnically and socioeconomically distinct schools, Eckert found profound
similarities in dynamics involved in the construction of a social market, and in
girls engagement in social engineering in the course of this construction. At the
same time, she found profound diferences in such things as the discourses of
heterosexuality and romance that were used to explain and justify this activity,
and in the role and nature of confict and confrontation in the making and
breaking of alliances. Similarly, Eckerts study of jocks and burnouts in the
Detroit suburbs (Eckert 2000) followed a close-up ethnography of these social
categories in one school with month-long studies in four other schools, fnding
the same social categories with diferences related to the larger socioeconomic
setting of the schools.
Janet Holmes and her colleagues (e.g. Holmes 2006; Holmes and Stubbe 2003)
have selected several diferent workplace communities of practice in which to
investigate communicative interactions, paying attention not only to gendered
participants but also to the particular institutional cultures that produced, as
they put it, gendered workplaces. Some workplaces promoted a stereotypically
masculine all-business approach to meetings and emphasized efciency, while
others promoted a more feminine workplace, weaving together work and
social exchanges and emphasizing cooperation and supportive relationships.
Workplaces are changing their gendered patterns as some women and men
assume positions traditionally not open to their sex, in some cases reshaping
institutional values. By focusing on a wide variety of workplace teams, research-
ers can examine how people on the ground respond to, and articulate with,
this larger culture.
p. eckert & s. mcconnell-ginet 31
2 Direction two: placing the community of practice in a wider world
Participation within any community of practice assumes, and importantly
builds on, a life beyond the community. In the frst place, the community
defnes itself in relation to other such communities (Gal and Irvine, 1995).
Te self-identifed adolescent geeks that Mary Bucholtz studied (Bucholtz
1996), for instance, defned themselves adamantly as slightly countercultural
intellectuals in distinction from their local mainstream peers. Teir selection
of linguistic resources (for example, released stops) diferentiated their speech
from mainstream adolescent Americans by reaching out towards a model
of articulate intelligence a model to be found in concrete and imagined
communities. Related work on stop release in a variety of other communities
of practice is showing how meaning established at an abstract level for this
variable is deployed in communities as diferent as these geeks, Orthodox
Jews (Benor 2001), and gay professionals (Podesva 2004; Podesva, Roberts
and Campbell-Kibler 2002). And in every case, the meaning of this variable
has contributed to a diferent and unexpectedly related gendered style.
Tis brings us a considerable distance from the traditional view of linguistic
resources as directly indexing gender and/or sexuality (see Ochs 1991), showing
that a meaning such as articulate can play roles in constructing quite diferent
styles. Tis work also emphasizes the ways in which the local deployment of
resources draws on and produces meaning at more abstract levels.
Similarly, Cynthia McLemore (McLemore 1992) has studied the use of high
rise intonation on declaratives in a sorority, arguing that situated meanings
of HRT derive from the unfnished quality of the utterance that has no fall-
ing tone. Tus declaratives with HRT can signal that the speaker is seeking
confrmation, but they can also call more generally for a response on the part
of the interlocutor. McLemore illustrates a coercive use of HRT, as the sorority
president elicits commitments to work from members during meetings. At
the same time, while the sorority members recognize the strong uses of this
pattern, they recognize that it is interpreted diferently in other communities
of practice and say that they would not, for example, use it when addressing a
group including fraternity members.
Tis leads us to the fact that people participate in multiple communities
of practice their families, workplace groups, sports teams, church groups,
classrooms, friendship groups and so on. Te diferences in their forms of
participation as they move among these communities of practice, and the dif-
ferences in their use of linguistic resources in the course of participation, create
and reveal connections among communities of practice and among linguistic
resources. Robert Podesva (Podesva 2004) examines changes in patterns of
phonetic and phonological variation in the speech of gay professional men as
32 Gender and Language
they move from the workplace to personal gatherings. Focusing on variables
that have been associated with gay male speech, Podesva shows how these men
construct quite diferent personae in the two settings and as they engage in very
diferent practices in these settings. In this way, gay speech ceases to be a way of
speaking and connected to a person, and becomes a constellation of resources
that a person may call upon in diferent ways to diferent ends.
Te cultural diference model of gender (Maltz and Borker 1982) can be
viewed as based on communities of practice, with the idea that boys and girls
grow up in single-gender communities of practice and develop gender-specifc
ways of interacting within those communities. Te missing piece of this model
the reasons why boys and girls may develop those particular diferent ways
of interacting is to be found in the links that connect and orient their single-
gender communities of practice to the wider gender order. Tis includes both
how kids within these communities co-construct an orientation to the outside,
and the things that happen when people enter mixed-gender communities
of practice. Marjorie Harness Goodwins ofen-cited studies of boys and girls
playing together (Goodwin 1991) examine two single-gender communities of
practice. But Goodwin does not simply focus on those communities of practice
when they are doing their girl and boy thing; she also observes what happens
when members of those two communities come together, showing that they
are not limited to a single way of interacting.
Communities of practice, in other words, are sites for the construction of
meaning, but they are by no means random or independent sites. Communities
of practice emerge in response to objective conditions every community of
practice fts into a complex structure that connects individuals to each other,
and to the political economy. Similarities and diferences among communities
of practice are part of the fber that holds the social order together. It is not by
studying one particular community of practice that we will learn how gender
is constructed, but by studying communities of practice in virtue of their place
in the social fabric. Tis means not only that we need to study communities
of practice in relation to each other, but that we need to integrate the study
of communities of practice within the context of other constructs. And while
the notion of community of practice is an ethnographic one, and the study of
communities of practice is of necessity an ethnographic enterprise, this ethno-
graphic work must be located within a broader set of approaches appropriate
to the multiple sites at which gender and sexuality are constructed.
Apparently, some people have seen communities of practice as an alternative
to social networks (Davies 2005). But social theory would be impoverished
indeed if every new construct were a replacement for the preceding. In fact,
communities of practice are themselves network clusters, and functioning
within those networks is central to community practice. A persons personal
p. eckert & s. mcconnell-ginet 33
network includes even builds out from a variety of communities of practice,
and each enriches our understanding of the other. Network studies seek to
fnd paths by which innovative forms make their way from community to
community (Milroy and Milroy 1985), but whats missing from such treatments
is the set of practices that constitute receptivity or resistance towards external
infuence. In Penelope Eckerts ethnographic study (Eckert 2000) of Detroit
suburban high schools, jocks and burnouts emerged as opposed and class-based
communities of practice. Among other things, the burnouts urban orientation
was manifested in the pursuit of network contacts beyond the school, while the
jocks institutional orientation was inseparable from their careful limitation of
close ties to their graduating class. Te receptivity of the burnouts of Belten
High to sound change emanating from the urban center is directly related to
their urban-oriented practice, while the jocks resistance to such changes is
directly related to their institutional orientation. Tus the structure of social
networks is deeply embedded in jock and burnout practice.
It is also clear that the very existence of jocks and burnouts depends on
the institution within which they compete for resources, and with respect
to which they fnd themselves mutually opposed. Inasmuch as they bring
people together for their own purposes, institutions are important sites for
the study of communities of practice. Communities of practice frequently
emerge in response to the institution itself, and cannot be understood without
viewing their relation to the institution. Qing Zhangs work (Zhang 2005) on
Beijing Mandarin compares the speech of managers in traditional state-owned
businesses with that of managers in foreign-owned fnancial businesses. She
found few gender diferences among the managers in traditional state-owned
businesses, but considerable diferences between male and female managers in
the foreign-owned businesses. Te diference lay in institutional organization
in diferent trajectories into, and roles within, the institutions. Foreign-owned
businesses tended to hire female workers for their decorative value, putting
highly trained women in front-end jobs, while their male peers went directly
into management positions. With the emphasis in the foreign-owned busi-
nesses on presenting a cosmopolitan image, women enhanced their potential
value as cultural capital by developing a new cosmopolitan style of Mandarin,
creating a stark diference from their male peers speech. In so doing, they were
orienting to and participating in the construction of an imagined global
Chinese community.
Orientation to global imagined communities (Anderson 1983) such as
nations, corporations, sports team fans, or TV show audiences is ofen central
to community practice, and helps mediate individuals relation to larger social
structures. In the U.S., there is considerable talk of the gay community and,
among those who embrace various minority sexual identities, sometimes just
34 Gender and Language
of the community. A number of studies have examined the work of the media
in constructing imagined communities around gender and sexuality. Andrew
Wong and Qing Zhang (Wong and Zhang 2000) have shown how a Chinese gay
and lesbian magazine uses language in such a way as to construct an imagined
tongzhi community. Niko Besniers study (2002, and this issue) of the Miss
Galaxy beauty pageant in Tonga shows the use of English in the construction
of a cosmopolitan status for the transgender community. Mary Talbot (Talbot
1992) showed how a teen magazine constructs an imagined community for its
readers by modeling a trendy young style, Anna Livia (Livia 2002) examined
how personals in a French magazine construct a French lesbian community,
and Miyako Inoue (Inoue 2006) traced the role of dialogue in nineteenth-
century novels in constructing a distinctive womens Japanese.
Tese media phenomena do not simply rain down on individuals, but play
a central role in communities of practice as media products are consumed
on the ground. Miyako Inoue (Inoue 2006) describes girls who encounter
Japanese womens language only on the television using this variety in play
with their Barbie dolls. Girls ofen encounter, read and react to teen magazines
in groups, and indeed the arrival of a months issue is a jointly anticipated event.
Preadolescent girls in Eckerts elementary school study (Eckert 1996) devoured
the Japanese anim television program Sailor Moon separately at home, but in
anticipation of re-experiencing it together, making the moves, singing their
songs, and each claiming identity with a chosen character.
And of course, the internet has made more global communities of practice
local. Recently, there have developed online communities of practice that are
important for many peoples lives, such as game-playing sites, blogs, and chat-
rooms. Some of these are very like traditional local communities of practice, in
which rich interactional histories unfold that tie together participants in dense
social networks in which distinctive sociolinguistic practices emerge. Others
ofer thinner connections and are more like imagined global communities.
Tere is not, however, a sharp dividing line between the global and the local or
between the imagined and the real, and computer-mediated communicative
practices allow many diferent kinds of communities to develop.
2
Conclusion
Te need for locating studies of language and gender in an explanatory context
was brought home vividly by Deborah James and Sandra Clarkes review (James
and Clarke 1992) of studies of interruption, with their apparently conficting
stories about who interrupts whom, and Deborah James and Janice Drakichs
review (James and Drakich 1992) of studies of volubility showing some difer-
ences that beg for interpretation. Carole Edelskys study of faculty meetings
p. eckert & s. mcconnell-ginet 35
(Edelsky 1981) had already pointed the way to more fruitful research strategies
by locating gendered participation and volubility within diferent conver-
sational practices within, in turn, a particular community of practice. Te
construct community of practice does not ofer a new unit of analysis, but a
new perspective on social units that have long been the focus of language and
gender studies. Although Edelsky did not speak of a community of practice, her
study was one of the frst to illustrate what such a focus could ofer in explaining
apparently contradictory aggregated data.
Te community of practice is useful for locating the production and repro-
duction of gender and sexuality in day-to-day practice. Tis location can be
confned to a single group of people only in virtue of that groups relation to
other local communities of practice, to institutions, across social networks, and
with reference to much more difuse global imagined communities. No single
researcher can make all those connections, just as no single network analyst
can have an eye on what happens in the multiple communities of practice in
which people network, and no student of the media can have an eye on how
those media are being consumed on the ground. But a unifed interdisciplinary
research community can keep its collective eye on the connections, and it is just
such a research community that we hope this journal will foster.
Notes
1 For relevant earlier discussion, see contributions to the June 1999 special
issue of Language in society, edited by Janet Holmes and Miriam Meyerhof,
which is devoted to discussing communities of practice, as well as Meyerhof
(2002).
2 For discussion of some computer-mediated communities with an emphasis
on practices of gender and sexuality, see e.g. del-Teso-Craviotto, forthcom-
ing; del-Teso-Craviotto, 2005.
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