DESGASTE POR PANDEO HELICOIDAL

In order to foreground the empirical data I collected about the lived experiences of Kenyan innovators over theories that are often embedded in the socio-political norms and ideologies of Western countries, I chose to adopt a grounded theory approach (Charmaz & Belgrave, 2007; Strauss & Corbin, 1997). As such, the processes of data collection and data analysis were intermingled, while theory building largely came in the later stages of the fieldwork and into the writing process. And while I have tried to let my analytical framework emerge from the data, I nonetheless still bring my own subjectivities to this study informed by my own identities, experiences, and grounding in the field of communication. In the end, I found adapting and combining two existing theories – communities of practice theory and narrative theory – was the best way to makes sense of the complex array of socio-political pressures, financial incentives, inter-cultural dynamics, ideologies, and communicative practices around Kenyan technology innovators that I observed. I will begin here by outlining communities of practice theory as it is the foundation on which my analytical framework is built, but I will wait to introduce narrative theory until later in the chapter when I believe its utility will become the clearest.

Communities of practice theory was originally proposed by social anthropologist, Jean Lave, and educational theorist, Etienne Wenger, in their publication Situated Learning:

Legitimate Peripheral Participation (1991) as an analytical tool to help education scholars foreground the social and not just the psychological in the process of how people learn. Their focus in this publication was less on the communities as a whole and more on the learners and how professional communities “induct and train new members, and perpetuate set routines for accomplishing specific tasks” (Meyerhoff & Strycharz, 2013, p. 528). This might include nurses learning how to draw blood, lawyers learning the procedures for addressing a judge,

or…entrepreneurs learning how to pitch their ideas to an investor.

While they spent a great deal of time laying out how new members learned a

community’s practices, it was Wenger’s publication seven years later, Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity (Wenger, 1998), that helped to refine the theory around

communities of practice themselves. In it, he laid out in more specific detail what separates a community of practice from any other community or social configuration. The distinct

characteristics, he argued, were threefold. Those involved in a community of practice needed to have “mutual engagement, a joint enterprise, and a shared repertoire of ways of doing things” (Wenger 1998, p. 49). In this conceptualization, members of a community of practice are not united around a particular locality or identity or even social or political interest, as members of other communities might be, but instead are mutually engaged in a shared practice. Practice, in this instance, involves doing (as in doing your homework or practicing drawing blood), but is also informed by the social context in which practice is embedded. This social context, Wenger argues, is what gives practice meaning (Wenger 1998, p. 47). Practices here include both those that are explicit – things like contracts and tools, specific procedures and individual roles – and those that are unspoken – things like subtle cues, tactic conventions, shared understandings, as well as “underlying assumptions and shared world views” (Wenger, 1998, p. 47). Members of a community of practice are in turn mutually engaged in this shared endeavor. Engagement, for Wenger, goes beyond being involved in a practice; it is also “being included in what matters” (Wenger, 1998, p. 74) to the community. Defining a community around those mutually engaged in a shared practice rather than around a particular shared identity, for example, also means that

the group is more likely to be a heterogeneous (Wenger, 1998, p. 75), often requiring varied individuals with varied skills and often conflicting opinions and world views to perform a given practice to its full extent. For example, editors, journalists, designers, researchers, and interns alike may all be members of a community of practice around publishing a physical or online newspaper. Together, they are mutually engaged in a joint enterprise, which, for Wenger, is not joint “in that everybody believes the same thing or agrees with everything,” but rather is joint in that it is “commonly negotiated” (Wenger, 1998, p. 78). Members must together decide on how the practice will be carried out. Moreover, that process of negotiation is not necessarily a peaceful one, a community of practice does not imply that everyone has commonly held beliefs about how and why a practice is performed, just that they jointly negotiate how that practice is carried out. As a result, participation in a community of practice can have a positive effect creating a “sense of community” (McMillan & Chavis, 1986) and meaning, but it can also be detrimental, leading individuals to feel pressured to conform to a particular form of practice or to feel excluded from participating in ‘what matters’. Finally, Wenger adds that a community of practice must have a shared repertoire made up of “routines, words, tools, ways of doing things, stories, gestures, symbols, genres, actions, or concepts that the community has produced or adopted in the course of its existence, and which have become part of its practice” (Wenger 1998, p. 82). The inclusion in this final section of “words” and “stories” has made this analytical framework an appealing one for linguists, and it is where I believe the integration of a communications perspective, and narrative theory in particular, can be the most useful.

Since their original publications in 1991 and 1998, Lave and Wenger’s theory has been adopted widely in academia, particularly in the fields of management, education, and linguistics. But, aided in part by Wenger’s own applied work in Paolo Alto and his 2002 publication,

Cultivating Communities of Practice: A Guide to Knowledge Management (Wenger, McDermott, & Snyder, 2002), it has also been adopted by management practitioners as a way to enhance productivity and knowledge sharing within organizations by purposefully creating communities of practice. These practitioners as well as some of their academic counterparts tended to apply communities of practice theory uncritically, as a prescriptive tool rather than an analytical one. This instrumentalist approach – taking a community of practice as an aspiration entity to be fostered and encouraged rather than a previously existing social entity to be understood – ignored the richest, most analytically useful, parts of the original theory (Amin & Roberts, 2008; Contu & Willmott, 2003; Roberts, 2006). As a result of this misinterpretation, Amin and Roberts have argued that “the original emphasis on context, process, social interaction, material practice, ambiguity, disagreement – in short, the frequently idiosyncratic and always performative nature of learning – is being lost” (Amin & Roberts, 2008, p. 353). In a piece published in 2008, Jean Lave herself lamented this misapplication of their theory. “Projects that undertake to start a community of practice seem to rely on assumptions that making this new thing does not involve already existing social relations…the main point is that they always already exist…[participants] are already members of multiple communities of practicing, including some that may exclude each other” (Lave, 2008, 291).

As a result of this imprecise adoption of the theory, some believe that the concept of a community of practice is too broad to be useful in certain disciplines, or that it is in need of revitalization by refocusing on certain aspects of the original framework that have been

overlooked (Contu & Willmott, 2003; Henderson, 2015; Roberts, 2006). In choosing to adopt the community of practice framework, I reject the instrumentalist interpretation in favor of heeding such calls and embracing the theory’s original analytical purpose. As such, the communities of practice I discuss going forward are not presented as communities to be desired and sought after, rather they are often fraught with conflict. In fact, for the purposes of developing an analytical framework that could be useful for understanding the experiences of Kenyan technology

entrepreneurs and designers looking to gain legitimacy for their work, the most useful, and among the most overlooked aspects of Lave and Wenger’s theory, are the incorporation of conflict and

heterogeneity as well as the power relations between existing members and new members into their original framework.

In 2008, Lave wrote that she believed their theory was all too often “read as painting a view of social life as closed, harmonious, and homogeneous,” (Lave, 2008, 288) and that most community of practice research had too often ignored issues of “social class or race or ethnicity” (Lave, 2008, 291). In focusing on the experiences of Kenyan innovators and the relationships with investors and partner – who often come from historically advantaged regions of the world, like Europe and the US – the role of power imbalances and social hierarchies become impossible to overlook. In this, I take inspiration from the concept of “postcolonial computing” introduced by Lilly Irani and her coauthors writing in the field of human computer interaction. For them postcolonial computing was an attempt to re-center development discourse around “questions of power, authority, legitimacy, participation, and intelligibility in the context of cultural

encounters” (Irani, Vertesi, Dourish, Philip, & Grinter, 2010, 1). I believe the community of practice framework can benefit from the same re-centering. In this dissertation, I intend to dispel the assumption that communities of practice are necessarily harmonious, by drawing attention to the conflict, the hierarchies of power, and the frequent power imbalances embedded in the experiences of new technology innovators trying to gain legitimacy. While, as Roberts has argued, Lave and Wenger may have under-theorized the role of power in the experiences of new community participants (Roberts, 2006), others have subsequently demonstrated in more detail how class, gender, and ethnicity can influence access to communities of practice, “truncating possibilities” for disadvantaged individuals “while for others, privileged access to these practices is enabled” (Contu & Willmott, 2003, 283). With this more critical, postcolonial computing mindset in place, communities of practice theory becomes a useful tool with which to analyze the work being done by technology innovators in and around the iHub in Kenya and to foreground the challenges and the hierarchies of power with which they have to contend.

Other scholars similarly looking at digital labor or technology producers have chosen other conceptual frameworks like “cultures” or “ecosystems” or “communities” more broadly. Gideon Kunda, for example, conceptualized both the work inside an unnamed high-tech company and the products they produced as manifestations of “culture” (Kunda, 2009). Others have written about “hacker culture” (Palmas & Von Busch, 2006; Thomas, 2002) or “innovation culture” (Chan, 2014), or the “high-technology culture” particular to Silicon Valley (Rogers & Larsen, 1984; Sprague & Ruud, 1988; Weiss & Delbecq, 1987) or have described tech hubs like the iHub or national-level approaches to technology innovation as “ecosystems” (Feld, 2012; Stangler & Bell-Masterson, 2015; Wong, 2006) “ecologies” (Munroe & Westwind, 2009) or “habitats” (Lee, 2000). I have even done so myself in a previous publication referring to the “organizational culture” at the iHub and the “startup ecosystem” in Nairobi (Marchant, 2017). But for this dissertation and as a result of the new fieldwork I conducted, “culture” felt too broad. While for example, innovation culture certainly plays a part in the work around the iHub, I wanted to focus on the practice of innovating new technologies at startups, and not on other kinds of innovative work like those performed in Kenya’s informal economy by road-side jua-kali salespeople or even those enacted at larger companies. Even “Silicon Valley culture”, while a useful way in which to look at the culture around the particular Silicon Valley approach to technology

innovation, and one that I draw from later on (English-Lueck, 2002; Haines, 2014), is too broad a concept with which to understand the profoundly multi-cultural experiences of Kenyan

innovators.

By contrast, “ecosystem” is too narrow. The metaphor of an ecosystem connotes a finely balanced network of interconnected systems and actors. Often in biological ecosystems changing any one of the actors, or even introducing new actors can ‘throw off’ the ecosystem’s balance. Seeing the plethora of international, regional, and Kenyan actors, ideas, organizations, and data coming through the iHub, changing all the time, it no longer felt like an accurate metaphor to think of the iHub’s or even Nairobi’s innovators as acting in any kind of isolated ecosystem.

“Communities” also lacks specificity for my purposes. In her encyclopedia entry on the subject, for example, Karen Tracy, outlined no less than five different forms of use for the term (Tracy, 2009), ranging from a geographically-situated community to an identity community to a political community and so on. A community is also a term that generates quite positive

imaginings, feelings of belonging and kinship – a “purr word” as Underwood and Frey put it (2007), something I believe that has contributed to the misapplication of communities of practice theory. However, unlike other kinds of communities, communities of practice, as I have shown above, are inherently heterogeneous and defined by the process of jointly negotiating through such difference. As the linguist Mary Bucholtz wrote in her study of “nerd girls” in a high school, “by defining the community as a group of people oriented to the same practice, though not necessarily in the same way, the community of practice model treats difference and conflict, not uniformity and consensus, as the ordinary state of affairs” (1999, p. 210).

Additionally, within linguistics and communications, scholars often employ the narrower community frameworks of “speech” (Dorian, 1982; Gumperz, 1997) or “discourse” communities (Luck, 2003; Swales, 1987) for their ability to accentuate the role of language. But while

communicative tools like storytelling and narratives will feature prominently in this study, they comprise just one component of the whole “repertoire”, as Wagner calls it, that these innovators share. While I have found communicative practices to comprise an important part of that

repertoire and one that has been underexplored by researchers of communities of practice, it is not the primary “joint enterprise” around which the work in this community revolves. While

innovators in Nairobi frequently tell stories, they more often talk about designing technology or building startups as the main practice in which they are engaged.

In the end, I believe the communities of practice theory is the most analytically useful tool for this study for three main reasons: 1) Its obvious focus on the particular practice in which its members are mutually engaged; 2) its foregrounding of the role of language without its fetishization of it; and 3) its integration of the potentially conflictual nature of “jointly negotiating” practice and legitimacy into its framework for analysis.

By adopting this framework, I am also taking to heart Lave and Wenger’s perspective that individuals are all members of multiple communities of practice simultaneously. As Wenger has explained, “At home, at work, at school, in our hobbies – we belong to several communities of practice at any given time” (Wenger 1998, p.6). Those involved in the practice of technology innovation in Nairobi are simultaneously involved in numerous communities. They may also be members of families, religious institutions, or sports teams outside of the iHub, or may engage with particular interest communities around specific programming languages or managerial skills, or belong to particular identity, political, or tribal communities. However, as Lave has pointed out, some of these communities of practice may exclude each other” (Lave, 2008, 291).

Membership in multiple communities – be they communities of practice or otherwise – can create tensions, conflicting loyalties, and misunderstandings. An individual may be at the center of some communities while on the periphery of others, and membership in some may involve more upkeep and consistent involvement than in others.

In the next section, I will introduce the case of a community of practice that emerged around the practice of technology design and production in Silicon Valley for a dual purpose: 1) To flush out my theoretical framework more thoroughly, including introducing the narrative theory component; and 2) to lay out the characteristics of the community of practice that has most greatly influenced the practice of technology innovation on a global scale.