Abstract
Management researchers are paying considerable attention to communities of practice (CPs) as a means to better understand the creation, transfer, and embedding of knowledge in organizations. However, scant attention has been paid to understanding the structural dimensions of these organizational forms. Thus, this study's purpose is to conceptualize the structural properties of communities of practice. We draw on the social network literature and apply some of the extensively used network concepts and measures to develop five structural properties for CPs. We illustrate the usefulness of these properties through applying them to data from a complex construction project. Finally, we develop a series of propositions that link the structural properties of CPs to organizational performance before concluding with a discussion.