This chapter concludes the volume as a whole; however, it amounts to much more than the mere sum of its parts. Its purpose is to draw together the salient points of the preceding chapters and present the professional learning of English language teachers as a sociocultural process. The chapter then situates professional teachers in communities of practice. However, because traditional communities of practice do not fully meet their needs, professional development communities for English language teaching (ELT) practitioners are proposed. A principled approach to building such communities is put forward, and exemplars of professional development communities in action in diverse ELT contexts are presented. At the very end, the chapter highlights avenues for the future exploration of teacher professionalism, both conceptual and empirical, and offers recommendations for teacher education and professional development, as well as educational research. Regarding ways forward, professional ELT should be viewed in terms of three meta-dimensions: lifelong learning, classroom ethnography, and educational leadership.

Communities of guitarists have existed and evolved in parallel with the instrument’s long and varied historical development. Technological progress in the twentieth century saw two major milestones for the guitar: the invention of the electric guitar, and the birth of the internet. This chapter explores the shift of guitar-based communities to virtual spaces starting with email groups, internet forums, and chat rooms. These communities serve similar functions as real-world communities by sharing knowledge and resources as well as providing spaces for discussions and performances. Peer-to-peer file sharing regenerated an old form of guitar-specific written notation: tablature. Then along came social media, which changed the entire music industry, including online guitar communities. Many of the world’s largest and most visited websites, Facebook, YouTube, X, and Instagram, are havens for guitar communities no longer defined by geographical boundaries. This has had enormous consequences as cultural and aesthetic expressions, particularly in the form of guitar performance practices, are now freely transmitted globally and instantaneously via virtual networks.

Contestations about the contents and validity of laws and legal principles are fundamental to the (international) legal profession. After all, when engaging with legal norms, disagreements about their meaning and validity a central part of the day-to-day work of legal professionals specialising in international law, including legal counsel representing governments, international judges, legal officers working for international organisations and non-governmental organisations, and legal academics. We propose a practice-oriented approach to empirically research such interpretive legal contestations by groups of legal professionals. Using an interdisciplinary perspective, we contribute to IR norms research by drawing on not only IR practice theory, but also Bourdieu-inspired research within the Sociology of International Law and ongoing discussions on legal realism in International Legal Theory, including what we have called European New Legal Realism. After outlining how to implement our approach using either a Bourdieusian perspective or the concept of communities of practice, we use normative contestations in and around climate change law to illustrate its added value. Such an approach not only promises to make interpretive legal contestations visible empirically, but also emphasises how interpretive legal contestations matter as they reflect underlying power dynamics and may result in normative legal change in practice.

This chapter presents a self-contained ethnography of twenty-seven girls at a high school in Bolton, in the north-west of England. The setting of the school, Midlan High, is contextualised socially and geographically and the social groups within the school are described. The ethnography identifies four communities of practice in the school and these are described in detail. The communities of practice include the elitist and trendy pro-school Eden Village clique; the sensible, pragmatic and pro-school Geeks; the independent, cool, and somewhat anti-school Populars; and the most rebellious and anti-school group, the Townies. In articulating the process of ethnography, the chapter also reflects upon the fieldwork process, providing a frank and honest account of the intricacies of doing ethnography within an educational context.

This chapter formulates some relatively new lines of enquiry for research in historical orthography, which stem from the concept of a community of practice. The authors propose the idea that communities of practice represent a key bridge across material which inevitably stimulates divergent research interests in the field. They suggest that communities of book producers in England and the Low Countries were not self-standing entities, but were engaged in more or less loose, professional and social interactions, forming networks of practice. The respective histories of English and Dutch had some fundamental similarities with reference to early book production and local organization, and there were links existing even between those working on manuscripts and printed material. This chapter provides useful background information on early book production and large-scale professional networks, with a view to inspiring future researchers to explore the intricate correlation between professional organization, culture and society in the complex framework of early modern Europe.

This chapter begins to answer the book’s second question: how should international practitioners act and adapt. It serves as a bridge between the theoretical discussion in Part I and the empirical analysis in Part II. The chapter identifies a ‘Pragmatic Constructivist’ approach to IR and discusses how it can be operationalized. That approach focuses on problems that are immanent within, and emerge from, actual international practice. A problem occurs when a practice fails to keep pace with material change, when lived experiences suffer and when epistemic doubt emerges. The chapter illustrates this with a discussion of how John Dewey and Jane Addams were influenced by the material transformations of their time and how those processes ‘eclipsed’ the public interest. The chapter draws parallels between the emerging ‘associations’ and ‘publics’ that early Pragmatists wrote about and the ‘communities of practice’ that contemporary constructivists identify as the ‘software’ of global governance. It extends IR research by arguing that Pragmatic Constructivists can assess how well communities of practice learn to ameliorate lived experiences in the face of contemporary global challenges. That assessment is based on two tests: the extent to which communities of practice are characterized by inclusive reflexivity and deliberative practical judgement.

The chapter ’Virtual Furever Homes’ shows the background of digital spaces and community building by using examples from cat-related digital spaces. The evolution of participatory culture and the development of technology have influenced the way we form online networks and communicate with each other. The chapter explains the concepts of virtual communities, communities of practice, light communities, and affinity spaces. As digital spaces form around narratives, it uses the shared story of the mediated narrative approach to categorise the types of cat accounts that make up the cat-related digital spaces.

Chapter 2 positions the book within the interdisciplinary literature on international law and develops its theoretical framework and the concept of intersubjective legalism, borrowing insights from ‘practice’ studies. The research framework builds upon the works of Kratochwil, Brunnée and Toope, and Johnstone, situating the meaning of legal rules within the ‘community of practice’ of international law, which enforces a set of shared understandings about what constitutes sound legal reasoning. Next, Chapter 2 integrates insights from critical legal studies and sociological studies of the juridical field to elucidate the power inequalities shaping interactions inside the community of legal practice. The centrality of expert knowledge as a source of power inside the juridical field suggests a reordering of the traditional perception of international politics: Inside the community of international legal practice states lose their central position, and actors such as judges, legal scholars, and non-governmental organizations gain leverage. The framework presented in Chapter 2 enables the investigation of the politics of the legal field, which take the form of competition over the authority to determine the meaning of legal rules. Finally, this chapter discusses the methods of analysis, namely discourse analysis and interviews.

In this chapter we discuss case studies from research on Arabic which employed various methods of social stratification. These include class-based socio-economic stratification, social network analysis, regionality, life-mode, and the community of practice construct.

The epistemic community research programme, which in the last generation helped frame International Relations understandings of the relationship between knowledge and power, rested on the influence of scientists and experts on policymaking through framing, persuasion, and socialization. In this chapter, we argue that while pioneering, the epistemic-community research programme was incomplete, since it neglected the relationship between knowledge, power, and practice. Because practices are at the core of what epistemic communities are, do, and aim to achieve, we suggest a pragmatist practice-based approach, according to which knowing requires active participation in social communities and knowledge is not a product but is bound with action. We, therefore, explain the political adoption of knowledge-generated practices by the very nature of practicing and joining communities of practice. With this purpose in mind, we propose understanding epistemic communities as epistemic communities of practice. By identifying epistemic communities as a special and heuristically important case of communities of practice, we will open new and exciting avenues of theory-making and empirical research. We illustrate our approach by examining the establishment of nuclear arms control verification practices during the Cold War and the recent spread of a populist ‘post-truth’ epistemic community of practice.

This chapter provides an overview of how Adler’s social theory of cognitive evolution helps us study international orders. First, we compare and contrast world ordering theory with its main alternatives in International Relations, starting with Ikenberry’s. Second, we elaborate on the key building blocks of cognitive evolution theory, including evolution and process, communities of practice, creativity and learning, social order and bounded progress. Third and finally, we raise a number of critical questions about Adler’s theory, in order to chart new avenues for future research. We ask about the role of material forces, the interaction of multiple orders, the conceptualization of power and agency, the place of communication and the normative extensions that the theory suggests. We conclude by presenting the following chapters in the book.