Modern commercial organisations are facing pressures which have caused them to lose personnel. When they lose people, they also lose their knowledge. Organisations also have to cope with the internationalisation of business forcing collaboration and knowledge sharing across time and distance. Knowledge management (KM) claims to tackle these issues. This paper looks at an area where KM does not offer sufficient support, that is, the sharing of knowledge that is not easy to articulate. The focus in this paper is on communities of practice in commercial organisations. We do this by exploring knowledge sharing in Lave and Wenger's (1991) theory of communities of practice and investigating how communities of practice may translate to a distributed international environment. The paper reports on two case studies that explore the functioning of communities of practice across international boundaries. The authorsPaul Hildreth is a Research Student, and Chris Kimble and Peter Wright are both Lecturers all at the Department of Computer Science, University of York, UK. Keywords Communities of practice, Case studies AbstractModern commercial organisations are facing pressures which have caused them to lose personnel. When they lose people, they also lose their knowledge. Organisations also have to cope with the internationalisation of business forcing collaboration and knowledge sharing across time and distance. Knowledge management (KM) claims to tackle these issues. This paper looks at an area where KM does not offer sufficient support, that is, the sharing of knowledge that is not easy to articulate. The focus in this paper is on communities of practice in commercial organisations. We do this by exploring knowledge sharing in Lave and Wenger's (1991) theory of communities of practice and investigating how communities of practice may translate to a distributed international environment. The paper reports on two case studies that explore the functioning of communities of practice across international boundaries. Electronic accessThe current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at

This paper explores the economic thinking behind the UK Coalition Government's new framework for achieving local growth and the creation of Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs) in England. While the government's Local Growth paper sets out ambitions to achieve greater spatial and industrial balance across England (and by implication the UK), in practice there are competing economic ideas in circulation within government which have influenced the 'base' to policy in different ways. A 'space-neutral' approach has influenced the proposed approach to planning in the National Planning Policy Framework, while variants of the New Economic Geography and recent Place-Based Approaches can be seen as having an impact in terms of documents such as Cities with its proposals for decentralisation. While recognising that policy is still evolving, we argue that so far at least there is a mismatch between the 'rhetoric' and 'policies' of local growth and its limitations in practice, due to inconsistencies in the way that different economic ideas have been adopted in practice. As a result, the paper highlights six key disconnects and limitations of the economics behind the move to LEPs. In particular, it argues that the resulting 'bottom up' configuration of LEPs can be criticised -just as Regional Development Agencies were -as having inappropriate boundaries and scales.Moreover, quite how the 'duty to cooperate' is to be enforced is far from clear: just how will stronger places be incentive to cooperate with weaker places? Overall, how far the government goes in addressing issues of powers, resources and governance arrangements will to a large extent determine to what extent the policy 'base' is actually place-based in practice.

This paper examines the implications of a place-based economic strategy in the context of the UK Coalition government's framework for achieving local growth and the creation of Local Economic Partnerships in England. It draws on the international literature to outline the basic foundations of place-based policy approaches. It explores two key features, particularly as they relate to governance institutions and to the role of knowledge. After examining key concepts in the place-based policy literature, such as 'communities of interest' and 'capital city' and 'local elites', it shows how they might be interpreted in an English policy context. The paper then discusses a place-based approach towards an understanding of the role of knowledge, linked to debates around smart specialisation. In doing so, it shows why there is an important 'missing space' in local growth between the 'national' and the 'local' and how that space might be filled through appropriate governance institutions and policy responses. Overall, the paper outlines what a place-based approach might mean in particular for Central Government, in adapting its approach towards sub-national places and for local places, in seeking to realise their own potential. Furthermore, it outlines what the 'missing space' is and how it might be filled, and therefore what a place-based sub-national economic strategy might address.