Understanding Social Roles in an Online Community of Volatile Practice

Community of practice (CoP) is a primary framework in social computing research that addresses learning and organizing specific practices in online communities. However, the classic CoP theory does not provide a detailed account for how practices change or evolve. Against the backdrop of a rapidly changing occupational landscape, it is crucial to understand how people participate in online communities focused on practices that have a volatile nature, as well as how social computing tools can best support them. In this article, we examine user experience (UX) design as a volatile practice that has no coherent body of knowledge and lacks a concrete path for newcomers to become a UX professional. Our study site is the “/r/userexperience” subreddit, an online UX community where practitioners socialize and learn. Using a mixed-methods approach, we identified five distinct social roles in relation to knowledge production and dissemination in the online community of volatile practice. We demonstrate that knowledge production is highly distributed, involving the participation and sensemaking of community members of varied levels of experience. We discuss how online platforms support online community of volatile practice and how our findings contribute to the CoP literature.