One of the most important ideas that emerged in recent decades from studies of ‘situated learning’ in the area of the knowledge economy was the concept of ‘communities of practice’ (hereafter CoPs) and the associated notion of ‘legitimate peripheral participation’ [1], which have now drawn the attention of critical scholars like Bruno Latour [2] in his Actor Network Theory (ANT).  This idea and notion have transformed the beliefs and metaphors that underpinned the learning process, opened up new areas of investigation and research and invigorated the development of interdisciplinary exchanges of knowledge between the social sciences and the humanities. In addition, the concept of CoPs has been projected as an important tool and technique in the management of intellectual assets of private and public organizations like universities, government, enterprises, the legal sector, civil societies, religious institutions, petroleum industries, development institutions, etc, through open participation and collaborative sharing of knowledge and expertise. Three major authors wrote about CoPs from the viewpoint of Actor Network Theory, namely, Bruno Latour, Michel Callon, and John Law [2-4]. Law described ANT as: a disparate family of material-semiotic tools, sensibilities and methods of analysis that treat everything in the social and natural worlds as a continuously generated effect of the webs of relations within which they are located. It assumes that nothing has reality or form outside the enactment of those relations. Its studies explore and characterise the webs and the practices that carry them. 

This paper proposes to investigate the tacit environment that underpins the conceptual modeling of CoPs following Bruno Latour’s ANT in the changing knowledge economy contexts that African/Black writers have captured in their creative works of fiction. In this way, it is not simply an explicit or descriptive exposition of the phenomenon but also a critical assessment of the practice with due regard to tacit insights that determine and dictate the changing fortunes of CoPs in African and Black worlds. The technocratic concept of CoPs as a management strategy offers a very productive perspective from which one can comprehend organizations as a process and as outcomes rather than as merely products in themselves because it lays emphasis on social aspects of learning, knowledge production and exchange that are deconstructible by context. CoPs have the potential to revolutionize the information and communication technology (ICT) because they offer a forum  for   free exchange of ideas, creation of knowledge and development of new identities for members [5]. It is a neoliberal capitalist movement which promotes the circulation of knowledge and information across individuals of different origins spanning various community boundaries [6].

As a virtual community with open-source possibilities, CoPs have the potential to innovate and develop new products [7]. Organizations with this objective are challenged to either create their own CoPs or to look for existing ones and to take advantage of them. CoPs serve as unifying units of analysis to facilitate understanding of knowledge about organizations [8]. CoPs are very powerful instruments employed to promote innovation because they have the facility to overcome the constraints of hierarchy and formal organizational rules particularly when it comes to  the need to accelerate learning and creativity [9]. When new members are recruited into an organization, CoPs offer them a unique opportunity to integrate faster into its social fabric than would have been otherwise possible. Organizations can thus create their own intellectual assets from such a venue, by empowering their members and creating the right spirit of collaboration.   

However, in the rapidly changing climates and cultural contexts of continental and Black Africa, these potentials of CoPs emerged as either fads, exaggerations with expected benefits being ambiguous or in certain circumstances turn out to be predictable. Therefore, this paper maintains that a careful observation of the interactive patterns, processes and outcomes would be necessary to answer a number of research questions related to the shifting tacit environments and changing perspectives of CoPs in Africa. For example, what is the interface of CoPs and intentionality, historicity, class, gender, generation, race, etc? What is the place of politics, history, the ecology in ICTs and CoPs? How   do they impact on innovation, the role of hierarchies in this changing environment, and the cognitive frame of problems to be solved presented by leaders? Is the question of leadership in African nation states important in the CoPs movement and to what extent should discretion be practised in the context of practice? How about questions of leakage of knowledge in inter-organizational CoPs during the processes of interaction in African nation states? In short, is it possible to emerge with certain guidelines for the creation and effective functioning of CoPs in African nation states after these questions of tacit context have been satisfactorily answered?

The paper starts from the premise that Latour’s ANT paradigms are an explicit lens from which one may understand the objectivity of the phenomenon with a view to evaluate the tacit implications of these issues in sophisticating and changing environments such as contemporary imperial and postcolonial Africa and the Black world. Creative works of art are a helpful resource from which one can discern the patterns and dynamism of changing tacit contexts. It is well known that art is not created in a vacuum but is constructed by social experiences such as CoPs; therefore, art is an excrescence of (concerns with) failures of knowledge management technologies of society. It functions not only to entertain but also to teach. Its pedagogical role consists in explaining the tacit side of knowledge through narrative as opposed to the explicit side, which CoPs signify as metanarratives in Latour’s ANT. In the light of this analysis, this paper posits a space of in betweenness that integrates language, literature and historicism of the technocratic civilization. On the one hand, language is posited as the locus of explicit knowledge economy technologies like CoPs, and, on the other hand, creative art and society are hypothesized as locus of tacit knowledge difference, that is, the lieu of undecidabilities and unknow abilities (to cite the postmodernist Jacques Derrida).  At the level of the locus of language, the paper posits CoPs as an explicit form of knowledge economy technology with its own metanarratives and draws insights from Latour’s ANT to explain them. At the level of locus of creative art and critical society, the paper posits tacit forms of undecidable narratives. Overall, therefore, the paper is premised on the hypothesis that the shifts in reception of the technocratic civilization is the outcome of these palimpsest processes transitioning from explicit to tacit forms of knowledge/power and management of the economy. From this light, it conjectures a linguistic de Saussurian environment, a fluid continuum intersecting, at the explicit level, signifies of language, and, at the tacit level, signifiers of artistic discourse. The paper interfaces CoPs as explicit and artistic undecidabilities as tacit signifying systems respectively in order to account for crisis of leadership management of the knowledge economy in the changing contexts of CoPs. The desired outcome from this account is to emerge with a dialectical consultancy model of knowledge economy technologies in the area of CoPs, capable of identifying, capturing, codifying, storing, diffusing, disseminating, leveraging and applying knowledge in such flexible, informed, insightful and adaptable ways that it can minimize risk of susceptibilities to contextual narratives of impasse but also become productive and beneficial to the development of nation states in continental Africa. With the prospects of such a reflexive model taking shape, the reader’s attention is drawn to the reductive problematics of CoPs based chiefly on the scientific meta-narrative. 

In the linguistic locus of metanarratives of CoPs, Latour’s ANT explains that CoPs are driven by the agency of both humans and nonhumans. The notion of nonhumans alluded to in the Latourian paradigm refers to inanimate things like technology, institutions, resources, etc., which are placed on an equal pedestal with humans in the classical and explicit literature. However, this fundamental marker of CoPs opens up a very delicate and potential space of conflict because lurking behind the semantics of ‘agency’ is the meaning of ‘intentionality’ which are mis recognizable, interchangeable/hybridize able or constructible in unpredictable ways. In the classical literature of Latour’s ANT, ‘agency’ was explained as being different from ‘intentionality’ in the sense that ‘agency’ has a neutral connotation; so, the properties of intentionality basically distinguished human beings from inanimate things. In Latour’s ANT scholarship, ‘intentionality’ and its properties do not exist and ‘agency’ does not presuppose ‘intentionality’. But the idea of ‘intentionality’ is very close to ‘agency’ because it can be attributed to the aggregate outcomes and heterogeneous interactions, inter-relationships and associations of human and nonhuman actors in the African context where hierarchy is still a predominant patriarchal value, and, at the same time, new values of democratic autonomy are surging up from all directions. In the classical literature, there is no distinction made between human ‘subjects’ and non-human ‘objects,’ but in the patriarchal environment of Africa, even non-human ‘objects’ have ‘souls’ of their own and are subjected to human accountability and control. 

In the locus of the signifier, creative art is replete with rich details of how ‘agency’ inters positional with ‘intentionality’ rather than existing as an isolated isomorph on its own terms. It was Frederic Jameson who enlightened us some years back in his work entitled ‘Third world literature in the age of multinational capitalism’ by instructing that creative art in Africa should be read as national allegories because third world writers respond to the encounter with capitalism by addressing themselves to the communal circumstances of their postcolonial socio-economic existence.  Unlike the modernist writings of European authors such as Joyce or Proust, which explore the Jamesonian private libidinal investments based on the rationalist, profit-maximizing individual and utilitarian philosophy contained in CoPs and Latour’s ANT, African writers jettison such a hermeticism of the interior conflict in order to gesture toward the social logic of communalism. In many influential texts following the modernist canon of African writers from Chinua Achebe et al. [10-37] articulating the colonial and postcolonial encounter, the prevailing preoccupation is with how the ‘public’ sphere overrides the ‘private’ domain of unmitigated capital and self-interest. Drawing from this Jamesonian account, it is clear that African creative art, up to about the 1980s when globalization officially started, was invented to serve the purpose of counter-construction of all self-regulating and unregulated forms of late, liberal and neoliberal capitalism and the free market. This is the literary discourse that informed the tacit environment that was responsible for the relative slowdown in the agency of capital in the continent from the colonial epoch to the 1980s. 

The idea of ‘community’ embedded in CoPs and signified in ANT is articulated as though it were an ahistorical phenomenon that has nothing to do with the history of capitalism in different contexts. However, in modern African literature, the idea of ‘communities of practice’ is re-signified as a narrative of political historicization. In Dubem Okafor’s [38] Meditations on African literature, David Lloyd articulates the mission of literature as being one of tracing out the history of a community’s commonality and difference. For example, he explains that during the 1930s, early African writings on various ethnic communities were created in local languages to celebrate their history and culture. When Paul Mboya published Luo Kitgi gi Timbegi (Luo customs and culture), his artistic book focused on the fourteen commandments of the Luo community in terms of the synthesis between Christianity and the Luo ethnic culture (Ibid).  Similarly, when Samuel Ayany published Kar chakruok Mar Luo , the work traced out the history of the Luo from their arrival in Nyanza to the colonial epoch. When Vassanji authored a novel entitled as the book of secrets, he narrated the evolution of the Indo-African community as a migrant population that settled in East Africa from 1913 to 1988. Community members like Pipa are portrayed as struggling to eke out sense from the geo-politics of colonial and post-colonial Africa and from the dynamics of socio-cultural change. 

The networks of CoPs are depicted in Latour’s ANT as an amoral setup, that is, as a form of interaction by itself and for itself without a specific purpose. From this light, by disembodying moral and political prescriptions about CoPs in ANT, the impression one gets from this style of enforcing the technocracy of knowledge management is that it is a powerful ‘engine’ without a driver. The driver of this machinery called CoPs is not responsible for the damages that his apparatus may cause and he does not care whether it inflicts injury because it is an automaton. It is well then if, for the sake of efficiency, productivity and utilitarianism, it causes damages and then repairs them later on. Concerns over collateral damage should emerge only after and not before the taking of risk. In US Black literature, the idea of ‘community’ which underpins CoPs is portrayed as an entity that rejects immoral individualism and the excessive quest for materialism. In the dramatic piece of one of America’s most celebrated Black poets and playwrights, Langston Hughes’s The play that may be true, the playwright narrates a communal ethic of generosity and trust in the context of the Black child reader. In this way, through the domestic home of the Black child, the committed literature of Langston Hughes became an instrument of conscientization to transform the young generation of Black children into a community alliance for public action. Black writers offered models of community life that were designed to fight injustice, individuality and poverty in a capitalist society, not to celebrate these values as emphasized by the Latourian version of CoPs.

Unlike the pre-1980s when the emphasis was on the public rather than the private discourse, the post-1980s epoch emerged with a significant reversal of this ideology. A new kind of intellectualism encroached the continent as a result of the ideological conflict between the superpowers and African writers were a part of these international relations of capitalism and communism that threatened the old sense of ‘community’ in the continent. The conflict that ensued from here constructed a tacit environment which staged the comeback of capital as an individualistic ‘community of practice’. Jameson’s rather over-deterministic account of modern African art on socialism was drawn from a Marxist register based on historicism as a reductive succession of modes of production from primitive nomadism to chieftaincy rule, feudalism, capitalism, socialism and communism. One may say it was an over-deterministic account because, contra Jameson, creative art in Africa was not marked by a positively permanent and hard-wired logic of economistic foundationalism. When Aijaz Ahmad contested this account of Frederic Jameson, he argued convincingly that African (written) literature does not have a unique theory of its own because its categories of meaning are derived from both western and indigenous critical institutions. The writers had not only been concerned with articulating the ‘public’ sphere against the ‘private’ domain of the material; the reverse was also narrated by feminist authors such as Flora Nwopa, Bessie Head, Calixte Beyala, etc. These writers also articulated ‘private’ metanarratives of emancipation and of concern against a patriarchal ‘community’ culture. Thus, even before the 1980s, there was a rising register of narratives that challenged, for example, the phallogocentric oppressions linked to male members of the primitive capitalist ‘community of practice’. 

The 1980s which have been recognized as the official commencement of the age of globalization came with a major paradox between capitalism and Russian communism and this conflict was articulated by modern African writers. In 1966, Major General Hendrick van den Bergh, the then head of the South African Security Service declared that communism was the highest form of capitalism. At the time, this oxymoron was not taken seriously probably because it was coming from a military technician rather than from a seasoned specialist of international affairs; but it resonated with wisdom in the decades that followed the Cold War. The writers captured the spirit of this emerging order of Africa as a site that reflected the contradictions between   capitalism and communism. After the events in Eastern Europe in 1989 resulting in the collapse of the Berlin Wall, Africa became the continent with one of the highest number of nation states functioning like privately owned enterprises and this was very akin to communist polities. On the other hand, Africa contained a new class of elites who now defended western interests and ideologies. While it was true that African nation states were created thanks to the combatant ideologies of Marxist Leninism against colonial rule, once they became independent, these same nation states started to embrace capitalism, while pretending to be the bastions of socialism and communism. This was one of the reasons that was utilized to justify why socialist forces in the continent such as Kwame Nkrumah, Patrice Lumumba, Thomas Sankara, Nelson Mandela and Tom Mboya should be either eliminated, ousted from power or incarcerated. These events created contradictions in the continent because the positions of the nation states and the Leftist/Rightist intellectuals did not quite match with those of the Eastern or the Western blocs which they   claimed   to be representing. 

Nadine Gordimer [39] gave a lecture entitled as ‘Living in the Interregnum’ to the Institute for the Humanities in New York under the theme the ‘Interregnum’, which was borrowed from Antonio Gramsci (who, like Nelson Mandela, was also imprisoned in Mussolini’s Italy). During the lecture, she complained that Africa was living through an epoch when ‘the old’ was dying away but ‘the new’ could not be born. She complained about the failures of capitalism and communism to emancipate man as evidenced by the excessive policies of Stalinist Russia and the repressive regime of Mussolini’s fascism against intellectuals like Antonio Gramsci.  Nevertheless, Nadine Gordimer [39] cited Leftist intellectuals in America such as Susan Sontag in order to establish an intellectual link with the west and this was justified by Gordimer who maintained that communism had failed to a greater degree than capitalism. Consequently, from the 1980s, Gordimer had virtually erected a symbolic highway for traffic between actants of Latour’s CoPs and the African continent. The capitalist communities in CoPs were replicated in the continent as they started to behave in ways which were consistent with classical models in ANT by considering themselves as of equal importance as the state, the laws, culture, etc. The Latourian classical model holds that the network in ANT does not account for any pre-existing institutions or structures of power (as opposed to the Foucauldian model), but rather considers these structures as effects of actions posed by actors within the network as the structures of power feel threatened and attempt to align themselves in pursuit and defense of their own interests. If one were to rely on recent social and economic history, it would appear as though networks of communities in the continent are into a course of convergence with the classical model portrayed in ANT because the history attempts to re-introduce social Di embeddedness into the management of Africa’s affairs. In this recent history, where ethnicities assert their right to a fair share of the national products, the female gender appropriates its emancipation from male phallogocentric, traditional rulers are challenged or de-throned, state, school and parental authority is compromised, and so forth, the myth of the lonely successful entrepreneurial hero was concretized. From this analysis, one may infer that the model in ANT is a fair representation of Africa’s recent history marked by neoliberal practices of disincarnated managerialism so that a free rein was given to the rationalist, profit maximizing, and utilitarian individual constructing the national space for the free market.  

The rationalist basis on which the paradigms of ANT are grounded, describes CoPs as though they were a clinical phenomenon void of social consequences. In CoPs à la ANT, all actants are important within a network and are free to do what they desire. In this managerial model, which is very similar to New Criticism as an approach to literary criticism, there is no ‘outside’ of the network' of CoPs. This explains why the Actor-Network model in Africa is entering into an endless series of chains of disembodied associations. Various associations which are formed today, namely, associations for youth entrepreneurs, the unemployed, ethnic groups, the disabled, nationalist groups, lawyers, etc function like colonies of ANTS motivated chiefly by their self-interests than by the collectivism of old in the sense that, today, they can align themselves with a political party, an ideology, a religious leader, a policy, and the following day, they decamp with an alternative ideology or move on to the next following.  In the post-1980 years, CoPs as prescribed by Actor-Network Theory (ANT) has become very popular phenomenon in Africa because it is promoting a sociological perspective in management and organization studies that lacks substantive political orientation. And yet, there is a dialectical relationship between activities of the online community of practice such as youth scammers who are in Skyrim, tweeting, Facebook, the Internet, Foursquare, etc and their offline existence in Africa ‘out there’ in terms of political debates about the conceptual, ontological and hermeneutic upshots, political acts like opportunities for free speech as opposed to single party politics, job opportunities for the Android generation online as opposed to the natural ‘deserts’ of employment opportunities, etc. The Africa existing ‘out there’ has a historical relationship with digital ICTs and technology. Technology either augmented reality or transformed Africans into victims of e-waste, influencing their behavior into revolt whenever it was felt that TV programs like films were liberal or pornographic and corrupted the minds of children. For yet others in the community of TV and media watchers, the discourse this was different and opened up new waves of comportment and ways of seeing, emphasizing that this was the prize to pay for acquiring freedom of speech, freedom of the press and freedom of associations. 

CoPs according to Latour’s ANT dismissed other basic social factors such as race, class, gender, and the possibilities of postcolonialism; as a result, it could not challenge the power of racism, oligarchy, patriarchy, or Eurocentrism, respectively. ANT’s vocabulary and analytical tools upon which CoPs depend do not challenge power structures, perhaps because, as Latour claims in Reassembling the social: “We have never been modern… we are Cyborgs…” This amodernist characterization of man confirmed by Sayes [40] may be emerging today in Africa where communities are now, unlike in the past, adorning behaviours and attitudes which are indifferent to acts of horrendous crime, injustice and suffering.  However, the Latourian perspective in ANT fail to explain CoPs as historically contingent; it fails to provide a general account of how humans, nonhumans, and their associations could have changed over time and could vary across geographical space. By itself, it is unable to expose structures of domination and control, to define political and moral components of nonhumans, etc.

The knowledge economy vocabulary of Latour’s version of CoPs is not merely about breaking from a metaphysically problematical past, it is also about gaining efficiency through the least control. Consequently, there is very little in terms of Latour’s oeuvre about disaster, toxic chemical exposure, lack of corporate social responsibilities, or even the possibility of its activities triggering wars as captured by continental African creative and critical writings. In this understanding, beyond the extraordinary quantities of data in CoPs, are developing narratives of frustration, ignorance, the surveillance of the dying nation state [41], the quest for progress, the prospect of new class struggles, poverty and so forth, as evidence in the critical and creative continental writings [18,28,36,42-65].

In conclusion, this paper has argued that moments of ‘gaps’, slips or ‘lacks’ in the liminary and migratory space intersect ionizing knowledge economy technologies like CoPs and social discursivity are not merely distortions in the structuralist sense of the term, but also represent post-structuralist instances of embeddedness of explicit knowledge systematicity in knowledge reflexivity. This palimpsest locationality has afforded us precious insights into a dialectical consultancy model for CoPs capable of illuminating new directions and re-theorizations. The light that emerges from this interpositionality is that all forms of Cop determinism, rationalism, utilitarianism, ontologism, foundationalism, positivism and reductionism, are constantly prone to tacit complexifying and deferring sites of Otherness in society and in literature. The Foucauldian theorization that society is not a transparent entity that one can see through according to New Criticism scholars, it is a discourse, applies here. Secondly, Latour’s paradigms are productive because they enable us to explore the shifting relationships between explicit and tacit types of the knowledge economy in CoPs, the structuration of knowledge types over time, the quarrels between knowledge systems, the evolutionary epistemology of knowledge and the economic conditions under which CoPs can be continuously useful and relevant in changing contexts. From these insights, a few ‘guidelines and points to consider emerge for organizations setting up CoPs. For example, before establishing CoPs, it would be necessary to first of all map out CoPs that are already functioning either officially or unofficially. Although the classical literature assumes that all potential members of CoPs are rational, profit-maximizing and utilitarian in their attitudes, tacit insights from fiction and sociological ‘writings’ point to the need to identify leaders who can weather tension and stress in their running of CoPs. But to avoid trouble, they should be discreet [66] or may face charges of manipulation. The classical literature assumes that CoPs are autopoetic in their self-regulation, autonomy, design and agency. However, contextual and critical literary evidence suggests that managers should be proactive by promoting CoPs with enough and appropriate resources in order to trigger especially the formative stage, making face to face contacts as well as interactive contacts through ICTs (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Whatsapp, etc), and checking out the possibility of leakages of intellectual property from one organization to another. International and national policy makers should support the formation of inter-organizational CoPs while the leaders and managers should be alert and check out for risks as earlier pointed out [67-84].

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