Conflicting epistemic cultures and obstacles for learning across communities of practice

Abstract This paper addresses the challenges that arise when knowledge production occurs in cross‐disciplinary settings. To date most studies on communities of practice have focused on knowledge production within communities of practice rather than across communities of practice. We analyse the various professional groups in a medical R&D department as a constellation of distinct, but interconnected communities of practice with different epistemic cultures. The medical R&D case is particularly interesting for this purpose, because it involved creating new cross‐disciplinary practices between different pre‐existing and well‐established communities of practice. In line with our focus on the challenges and processes involved in cross‐disciplinary knowledge production, we describe negotiations and tensions during the establishment of the department, as well as in day‐to‐day practice. In particular, we focus on how the ‘machineries of knowledge production’, that is, the actual mechanisms by which knowledge is pursued, are different across the various communities of practice. These machineries belong to different epistemic cultures on a national or even international scale, and thus every community of practice is part of a complex web of people, activities and material structures extending well beyond the immediate work context. This networked character of knowing in practice explain why learning on the system level of communities of practice can be challenging. It may lead to path‐dependent learning processes, and radical change can become limited if the knowledge required by new and different practices is incompatible with the existing stock of knowledge. Consequently, we suggest that the communities of practice approach could be enriched by looking at diversity and discontinuity in the epistemic cultures and networks that the different communities of practice are associated with. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.