The role of physical design and informal communication

formal face-to-face communication not unlike that which would occur in a meeting)
because face-to-face discussion is highly valued but difficult to schedule, and any
opportunity is avidly seized.
1.8 Communities of Practice and Knowledge Networks
The studies providing evidence of the tendency for healthcare staff to prefer
informal, face-to-face conversation as a method of information seeking illustrate the
communities of practice concept, which focuses on knowledge sharing across informal
networks of people who share a common interest or task (Lave & Wenger, 1991). For
our purposes, the network of people are the nurses, doctors, technicians, etc. who
informally share information during a spontaneous encounter at, say, the nurses station
as they focus on the common interest of patient care. The communities of practice
framework emerged from ethnographic analysis of how groups actually worked and
communicated in practice, which sharply contrasted with the work described in an
organization’s manuals, training courses, and job descriptions (Brown & Duguid
(1991). Horsburgh’s (1989) research confirms this notion, finding that the rhetoric
and practice of the school of nursing is different from the rhetoric and practice of
nursing within general hospital settings, causing graduate nurses to experience
difficulty in transitioning from the classroom to their first job. Duchsher (2001) found
similar results concluding that graduate nurses experienced disillusionment as they
faced the inconsistencies between classroom theory and practice contexts.
Brown and Duguid (1991) describe the traditional perception of training as
“the transmission of explicit, abstract knowledge from the head of someone who
knows to the head of someone who does not in surroundings that specifically exclude
the complexities of practice and the communities of practitioners.” In contrast to this
14