I am writing this as my Dodge Grand Caravan gallops its way down the left hand lane of the Parkway, just past Exit 137. I am returning from a Parent’s Weekend trip to Providence College in Rhode Island. I am topping off this trip with a 200-mile engagement with Etienne Wenger’s Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. Three hundred miles of broken white lines tends to free up the mind for associative thinking. It occurs to me that the Parkway itself is a community of practice. If reification is “the process of giving form to our experience by producing objects that congeal this experience into ‘thingness,’ ” (pg. 58), then the signs are everywhere.
“Bridge speed 45 MPH,” “Cash must keep right,” “Lane ends merge left.” Such concrete manifestations of abstractness are what Wenger is talking about when she points out that “writing down a law, creating a procedure, or producing a tool is a similar process. A certain understanding is given form” (54-59).
As a community of practice, I note that the drivers’ participation in this practice has much to do with this reification. The duality of participation and reification is everywhere around me. I glance at the speedometer on the dashboard and it reads 72 mph. The sign outside posts the speed limit at 65mph. It seems that while the concept of a safe speed limit has been written as law and posted, the members participating in the community have altered its reality, revealing “the inherent limitations of reification” (64).
