The term CoP refers to groups of people informally bound by sharing the same expertise and passion for a domain of interest, learning and improving their shared practices through regular interactions (Lave & Wenger, 1991). The community was a central construct in early CoP research (Wenger, 1998) interested in ‘social learning’, related to various social dynamics: the legitimate peripheral participation (LPP) (Lave & Wenger, 1991), the situated curriculum (Gherardi *et al.*, 1998) and community continuity and regeneration (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Gherardi *et al.*, 1998; Mørk *et al.*, 2010). Similarly, social learning is not just about acquiring knowledge and developing competences in a certain domain of expertise, but also a process of enculturation (Lave, 1993) and learning to become a community member (Brown & Dunguid, 1991).

Over the decades, research has shifted focus on how CoPs are constructed and cultivated inside companies (Dupouët & Barlatier, 2011; Guérineau *et al.*, 2017) and subordinated to the achievement of managerial goals (e.g. knowledge sharing, value creation, organizational performance – see Probst & Borzillo, 2008; Corso *et al.*, 2009; Roberts, 2006). This has progressively shelved CoP’s interpretation as a social phenomenon (Harvey *et al.*, 2013) and deepened interest in the functional and technical learning in CoPs (Nicolini *et al.*, 2022). This functional aspect has been focal in CoP research even when it has referred to the importance of the symbolic and cultural inside communities, with these latter dimensions being mainly understood as means to share practice knowledge implicitly (Styhre *et al.*, 2006; Myers, 2022; Macpherson & Clark, 2009) and only briefly mentioned in relation to social dynamics (e.g. Gherardi & Perrotta, 2014). Yet, limiting the focus of social learning to what is technical (the domain of expertise) and useful (functional) for the company contrasts with the initial focus on “learning to be a member” and with the nature of most problematic issues for CoPs development within organizations related to participation, motivation and cultural barriers (Borzillo *et al.*, 2011; McDermott & O’Dell, 2001; Retna & Ng, 2011). Centering on the functional, thus, ultimately limits the understanding of CoP’s community dynamics.

With this paper we want to reconcile (see Nicolini *et al.*, 2022) extant literature with the notion of community referring both to symbolic and functional aspects (Cohen, 1985) while also interrogating the role of learning to be communal, i.e. learning to take part of any community and the abilities it requires. Thus, we ask: how does a CoP emerge, develop, and maintain through social symbolic learning (in addition to functional learning) and how does this social symbolic learning interact with the functional one?

To fill this gap, we introduce the cultural perspective and what it can offer to the comprehension of community dynamics in a CoP (Harvey *et al.*, 2013). This perspective, anchored in sociology and anthropology studies, has proven relevant to understand communal phenomena in marketing and organization research (Arnould & Thompson, 2005; Haveman & Wetts, 2019, a & b) unveiling how people’s attachment to shared symbols, such as rituals and totemic objects, equips them with the competencies to be communal (Cohen, 1985). Applying the cultural perspective to two CoPs spanning multiple organizations - financial analysts and physicians - this paper aims at unraveling how material and immaterial symbols’ mobilization at the individual and collective levels orients the emergence, development and maintenance of a CoP.

The paper continues with a literature review discussing CoP ’s research on social learning and its relations to community dynamics. It then takes up the cultural perspective on learning to be communal and highlights the body of symbols used to develop and maintain a community. Taken together, this provides a link between functional and symbolic learning in CoPs and a glimpse of their potential impact on community dynamics, especially in the context of professional and inter-organizational CoPs. In the methodology section, the whys and wherefores of reusing data from CoP cases are detailed. Finally, the findings illustrate how learning to be communal processes link with community dynamics and offer insights to further develop the cultural approach in CoPs studies and to gain relevant practical and managerial implications.
# Theoretical background

## Learning to be social in CoPs research

From their inception, in the late Eighties, studies on CoPs have complemented traditional understanding of learning as an isolated activity of abstract knowledge transfer, with a view of learning as a process structured by the social context in which it happens (Lave 1988; Lave & Wenger 1991). The social view of learning emphasizes that knowledge cannot be disconnected from the practice it is used for (Lave & Wenger, 1991) and that the key competences related to the practice are continuously socially redefined (Lave, 1988; Wenger, 2000). Learning situated in a social context, therefore, does not only imply acquiring the competences defined by a social group, the CoP, but is also intrinsically linked to the experience that the individual has of the social world as a member of the group and beyond its boundaries (Wenger, 2000). Although other authors made similar reflections on knowledge “embedded in people” (Davenport & Prusak, 1998), the notion of CoP was initially not focused on organizational knowledge management, but on CoPs encompassing professionals from the same field operating in different organizations (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Contu & Willmott, 2003; Cox, 2005). This allowed to give more emphasis to the socio-cultural dimension in learning, defined as *“a process of enculturation”*whereby learners*“adopt the behaviors and belief system of new social groups.…observe and practice in situ the behaviors of members of a culture, people pick up relevant jargon, imitate behavior, start to act in accordance with its norms”*(Brown & Duguid, 1991, p. 305).

Within this perspective three main social dynamics appear related to individual and communal learning: the legitimate peripheral participation (LPP) (Lave & Wenger, 1991); the ‘situated curriculum’ (Gherardi *et al.* 1998); and community continuity and regeneration (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Gherardi *et al.*, 1998; Mørk *et al.*, 2010).

The LPP (Lave & Wenger, 1990) defines individual learning dependent on the access and acceptance of a novice as a member of a community. Only securing legitimate entrance in the community allows the novice to participate in its productive activities and therefore learn, allowing the individual to become a community insider and to acquire not only explicit, formal ‘expert knowledge’ but also the tacit and embodied ability of acting as a community member (Brown & Duguid, 1991).

The “situated curriculum” (Gherardi *et al.*, 1998) intervenes once novices are accepted as members of a community, indicating a pre-ordered path of tasks and interactions to follow. Novice’s performances on certain tasks and therefore the possibility to advance along the predefined situated curriculum depend on tacit learning happening through multiple social encounters and observations, in relation to contingent situations (e.g. specific practice needs within the community at a certain historical point in time) and through access to different technological artefacts.

While learning is the path of an individual who, participating in the cultural life of the CoP, gets a sense of its history and heritage, develops a legitimate skilled identity, and becomes an increasingly central CoP’s member, learning is also an issue of community continuity and regeneration (Gherardi *et al.*, 1998; Wenger & Snyder, 2000; Singh *et al.*, 2002). Through the replacement of former *“newcomers-become-old-timers”* with novices (Lave & Wenger, 1991, p. 114) the community can achieve continuity over generations, guaranteeing its reproduction, but can also transform itself.

Despite the strong connections between learning and the three types of dynamics depicted above, the way symbolic learning links to these social dynamics has been disregarded in CoP’s literature. The managerial turn in CoPs studies’ (Bolisani & Scarso, 2014) has emphasized the importance of learning as technical and functional for the company, even when learning happens through verbal and symbolic interaction (Styhre *et al.*, 2006), storytelling (Myers, 2002) or artifacts (Macpherson & Jones, 2008; Macpherson & Clark, 2009). Yet, the main factors hampering a successful thriving of CoPs inside organizations seem related to cultural factors (Borzillo *et al.*, 2011; McDermott & O’Dell, 2001; Retna & Ng, 2011) and some researchers still invite to consider community socio-cultural aspects such as shared symbols and objects (Thompson, 2005), subcultural routines and artifacts (Cohendet & Simon, 2016), or meaning and identity (Pyrko *et al.*, 2019) to foster participation and engagement in organizational CoPs.

To overcome the contradiction between managerial oriented literature focused on meeting organizational goals and the socio-cultural problems hampering the development of CoPs within organizations, some scholars have urged considering CoPs again as ‘a social phenomenon’ (Harvey *et al.*, 2013). Taking this invitation seriously, we argue, would mean enlarging the notion of learning considered in CoP’s studies from the functional learning alone, instrumental to organizational success, to also include a deeper investigation of ‘learning to be communal’ which was emphasized in early CoP’s conceptualization but has never been fully integrated in the notion of ‘social learning’.

## Learning to be communal from a cultural perspective

Especially in its early conceptualization, CoPs literature has insisted on the interlink between the social practice learning and “learning to be communal” or the social learning of a symbolic nature which enables everyone to become and remain an insider, a legitimate member of the community.

This kind of social symbolic learning is approached by the cultural perspective in organizational and/or professional or consumer communities (Arnould & Thompson, 2005; Haveman & Wetts, 2019, a & b) focusing on how *“an individual’s sense of belonging is inextricably entwined with the socially constructed practices and resources that shape community”* (Thomas *et al.*, 2013, p. 1012). Applying concepts originated mostly in anthropology and sociology research, the cultural perspective accounts for group practices involving the interaction between people and between people and things and illuminates how symbolic resources connected to the practice are mobilized by individuals and the community to structure their interactions.

Even outside the professional or organizational contexts, symbolic resources are necessary to engage in community practices. Communities are symbolically constructed (Cohen, 1985) and people acquire and develop the culture which will equip them to be communal through the attachment to*“a common body of symbols*” (Cohen, 1985, p. 16). This common body of symbols or “repertoire of symbolic devices” is specific to each community and includes: 1) material symbols *“in the forms of totems, football teams or war memorials”* (Cohen, 1985, p. 19); 2) immaterial symbols and, above all, rituals which *“occupy a prominent place in this repertoire”* (Cohen, 1985, p. 50). Either material or immaterial, symbolic markers allow the community to distinguish itself from other communities. The symbolization of community boundaries allows people to become aware of their community’s distinctiveness and the community to affirm and reinforce its confines: *“The symbolic repertoire of a community aggregates the individualities and other differences found within the community and provides the means for their expression, interpretation and containment”* (Cohen, 1985, p. 21).

The symbolic repertoire of a community provides the context within which individuality is recognizable. By their very nature, symbols are open to individuals’ interpretation and offer them scope for interpretive maneuver to use symbols considering their own conditions and experiences. What counts most for a community member is being able to interpret symbols and bring them into play in a proper way, depending on the circumstances. Learning to be communal consists in achieving this appropriate cultural mobilization of the group repertoire of symbols, including totems (material symbol) and rites (immaterial symbol).

### Totems

First studied in aboriginal culture organized in clans, the totem is the sacred object which identifies each clan (Durkheim, 2001). The powers attributed to the totem determined the behavior of community members, for example prohibiting marriage outside the clan. It is only through symbolism that human life can objectify its moral exigencies by superimposing them on nature (Durkheim, 2001). The totem is openly placed at the center of the community’s attention, the object of conscious cult, shared veneration, and fear. *“The totem attracts the gaze; it captures attention and embodies energetic charges”* (Schiermer, 2011, p. 86).

Totems and other totemic objects that are part of the sacred aspect of the community serve as boundary markers, distinguishing one community from another through difference, even opposition. *“A war memorial, for example, is not merely a symbol used by the community to signify the sacrifice made by the fallen, but is a representation of the community itself”* (Stratton & Northcote, 2016, p. 500) and of those who are or have been its opponents. Within a community, every celebration of a totemic object is an opportunity to develop a ritual that renews and reinforces collective beliefs and feelings.

Symbolization processes are at work amongst members of every community, and objects are their essential support (Fleming & Spicer, 2005). Without going back to the canonical examples of community objects mobilized in traditional tribal rituals (Knorr-Cetina, 1997), it is possible to find similar cases also in contemporary society: for instance, nowadays, the asthma community around the world represents itself and is represented by a totemic object, the Ventolin inhaler (Cova, 2022), which is both functionally and symbolically instrumental for its community members. The presence of such totemic objects are daily reminders of members’ connections with and obligations to their community.

The cultural approach shows that totems are necessary for individuals to learn to be communal and to interact with the outside world. The totem helps each member to accept their condition and learn to live appropriately within the scheme of communal things.

### Rituals

According to the cultural perspective, every social group needs rites to affirm and reaffirm its existence and the belonging of its members (Turner, 1969). Without rites, no community can endure, whether composed of workers (Smith & Stewart, 2011) or consumers (Sreekumar *et al.*, 2023). Amongst the most powerful rituals observed in aboriginal tribes are the rites of passage whereby the elders chose a few pairs to go in seclusion for several days and nights, performing special rituals and learning the highest secrets of the clan. Rituals renew and invigorate adherence to beliefs, have a psychologically soothing function, and help integrate the individual into the community (Bell, 1992). Rituals are a community’s expression of shared beliefs and social belonging.

Rituals are generally defined as *“a fixed sequence of actions that convey symbolic, rather than functional, meaning, and are formal and repetitive in nature”* (Ratcliffe *et al.*, 2019, p. 87). Every ritual has its recurring temporalities, its models (those recited throughout history), and its spatial partitions (the stage on which it is performed). The entire process is overflowing with meaning, yet participants remain largely or entirely unaware of the theatrical roles they are being asked to play, the values and purposes the ritual conveys, the real and symbolic means at its disposal, or the coded systems it uses to communicate (Bell, 1992; Turner, 1969). The power of a ritual is measured in part by the emotions it evokes, emotions that are sustained by the attention they require from the masters of ceremony, the audience, and the participants who communicate in this way.

Participation in a community often takes the form of rituals, which may be macro-rituals, such as ceremonies, or micro-rituals, such as daily routines. Belonging to the community can be seen as a function of repeated engagement with the communal culture, where emotional proximity to material objects, and by extension members, is usually concentric with the level of individual personal involvement. In today’s societies, where individuals are constantly on the move, rituals involving them guarantee the permanence and solidity of the community.

Rituals can be classified in four main categories, all of which refer to time:

Mauss (1925) has shown that the ritual mechanism is not static but also creative and conflictual. New social connections can be established by extending rituals to new participants; and those excluded by rituals from group structures can fight their way into membership.

The cultural approach highlights that rituals are necessary for individuals to reinforce their sense of belonging to the community and to learn navigating within it. They are necessary to the collective to define the community’s place in the world and to perpetuate it.

Learning how to perform rituals and mobilize totemic objects within a community contributes to the community dynamics. It is through the use and transformation of these symbols that members build, develop, and maintain the community (Belk & Tumbat, 2005; Cova & Cova, 2002; Morgan & Ogbonna, 2008; Stratton & Northcote, 2016). They make it possible to clearly define the boundaries of the community as opposed to what is not part of the community (totemic objects and rituals from another community) and to foster the sense of “we-ness” or belonging (Cova & Cova, 2002). The totemic object is not only the symbol of the community, but also its founding principle (Stratton & Northcote, 2016). Any change in the totemic object has an impact on the dynamics of the community. The rituals are based on the founding practices of the community. Their evolution reflects a change in practices. The mobilization of the same objects and rituals keeps the community together and prevents fragmentation (Morgan & Ogbonna, 2008). However, a community is always on the move. Its members seek to extend it through ‘evangelizing’ processes (Belk & Tumbat, 2005), which enable them to recruit new members. Evangelizing often leads to the adaptation of rituals and totemic objects to a new population. The cultural perspective highlights that the symbolic is not only important to convey tacit knowledge about a practice but also has crucial importance to convey socio-cultural knowledge interconnected with community dynamics.

## The challenges of inter-organizational CoPs

Our aim is to highlight the combination of functional and symbolic learning in CoPs and its impact on community dynamics. To do this, we go back to the pioneering contributions in CoP studies which focused on professional communities (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Contu & Willmott, 2003; Cox, 2005), which are *“groups of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting (with each other) on an ongoing basis”* (Wenger *et al.*, 2002, p. 4). Professional communities, also named occupational communities (Nicolini *et al.*, 2022), are inter-organizational CoPs not created on purpose to fulfil a specific organization’s goal but emerged spanning multiple organizational affiliations to tackle an issue concerning an entire group of professionals engaged in the same practice to facilitate learning across boundaries. While with time two different academic traditions have distinguished CoPs from occupational communities and have focused on different issues, the two concepts have several historical and conceptual overlaps, with some social groups holding properties typical of the two concepts (Nicolini *et al.*, 2022). Because of their inter-organizational nature and self-organizing character, professional CoPs face different challenges. In contrast with the much-studied intra-organizational communities, inter-organizational CoPs include relatively independent professionals (e.g. doctors, nurses, notaries, lawyers, tax advisors, consultants and others), requiring consistent efforts to reconcile various identities spanning across multiple organizational and epistemic boundaries (Ivcovici *et al.*, 2022) and sometimes adopting different approaches towards the same practice (Pyrko *et al.*, 2017). Moreover, within such broad and non-hierarchical communities (Crespin-Mazet *et al.*, 2017), contrasting interests and different levels of seniority ask for self-organization and the establishment of membership and functioning regulation to avoid CoP’s development stagnation due to unsolvable tensions or strong anchorage into binding traditions (Gonçalves & Guimarães, 2020; Roberts, 2006). What is more, with the possibility of extending beyond the physical world through the internet, these communities potentially increase their impact including more members, but they also risk to disperse and dilute loosing significant interactions. Thus, constant effort is required to revitalize members’ interest to ensure community’s longevity which may imply assign centrality to new CoP’s sub-groups or to modify rules, values, structures and even focus (Brown & Stokes, 2021). The main challenges of professional CoPs are therefore related to social interactions and relationship dynamics within them, which aligns with scholarly positions insisting to interpret CoPs again as a social phenomenon (Harvey *et al.*, 2013) and with highlighting the relevance of symbolic learning along with functional learning.

Yet currently few studies on CoPs professional communities acknowledge symbolic learning and its resources. Exceptions are Brown and Stokes (2021), who emphasize the importance of social events for event professionals and Ivcovici *et al.* (2022, p. 772) noting the importance *“of social events as a means of keeping up to date with peers”* for veteran clinicians’ communitarian identity. Since CoP literature does not provide a precise understanding of professional inter-organizational communities and collectives’ functioning (Crespin-Mazet *et al.*, 2017), these latter provide fertile terrain for elucidating the power of the cultural perspective and how the entwinement of functional and symbolic learning affects the social dynamics of such dispersed communities of practice. The following sections will aim at: 1) illustrating how the mobilization of symbolic meanings in CoPs entwine technical learning about the practice with learning to be communal; 2) examine the impact of this entwinement on the understanding of community social dynamics identified in CoPs.
# Methodology

Adopting the cultural perspective, we examine how social ties are formed and maintained in professional inter-organizational CoPs, social groupings that intercept the workplace, entrepreneurial ventures, and professional identities. To address these anthropological and cultural dimensions, the most appropriate method is long-term participant observation within the community (Denny & Sunderland, 2016). However, participant observation in this context is difficult and impractical because inter-organizational CoPs are multi-sited, with members situated in many online and offline locations around the world (Van Duijn, 2020). One possible pathway toward an anthropological and cultural understanding of multi-sited inter-organizational CoPs is data reuse: *“now considered a key benefit for the wider research community”*(Van de Sandt *et al.*, 2019, p. 1). Far from being a novelty, since this method with a philological flavor was already advocated by Marcel Mauss over a century ago to describe and explain a complex phenomenon (Dubar, 1969), data reuse has been rediscovered over the last decade. It maintains research continuity and exposes data to new tools, methods, and approaches (Sherif, 2018). Researchers can apply new research questions to their own data, access data collected by other scientists and descriptive studies to answer specific questions. Researchers may even have direct access to those who conducted the original research, where *“the increased access may provide the qualitative reuse researchers with a “‘close proximity’ advantage”* (Poth, 2019, p. 3). Careful examination and assessment of preexisting qualitative data increase the validity and reliability of data reuse (Sherif, 2018). The recognized expertise of the researchers who produced the qualitative data that will be re-used is an important factor for the validity of the method.

We reuse data primarily from the ethnographic studies of two inter-organizational CoPs of financial analysts and physicians:

To study these multi-sited CoPs, we supplemented the above data with:

The corpus of books, articles, and archives consists mainly of written texts and some photographs: the writings on the financial analysts’ CoP comprise about 85,000 words, and on the physicians’ CoP more than 50,000 words. This wealth of material provides information about life in these CoPs in different countries and between different countries. This allowed us to provide two ethnographic accounts (Denny & Sunderland, 2016) not aimed at summarizing everything that happens in these CoPs, but at highlighting the non-functional, non-utilitarian, and sometimes seemingly futile aspects of community life using the aforementioned symbolic categories (rituals, totems). Through these aspects community members recognize themselves and feel that they belong to a whole. Our interpretive approach aims to understand how they meaningfully shaped the life of the CoP.

The key focus of the analysis I on the symbolization of community participation. Based on our prior knowledge of the cultural perspective to communities, we have used totemic objects and rituals as guiding themes for the analysis. We have then recombined these themes with social symbolic learning and the way it interacts with functional learning. The material has been subsequently sorted and arranged to be presented in the form of ethnographic accounts (Van Maanen, 2011) organized according to the learning process of a new member of a CoPs. As a consequence, we have focused on part of the story of each CoPs, the one related to the process of learning to be communal. We have mobilized the portions of the material that corresponded with such aim. We have not sought to decode the ethnographic writings we mobilized as if they contained a single truth, a single message, which our analysis should reveal. On the contrary, we have considered the writings and verbatims they contained to be sincere and faithful to lived reality.
# Discussion

Our research focuses on a type of learning in CoPs which has been often silenced, that is not ‘practice learning’ but ‘communal learning’ or getting to know the ropes of the community to progress within it. ‘Learning to be communal’ has been simply mentioned in early CoPs studies (Brown & Dunguid, 1991), but never examined in detail as the research focus has shifted to the management of practical and functional knowledge (Roberts, 2006). As from our table 1, our findings illustrate the way ‘learning to be communal’ unfolds, mobilizing cultural material and immaterial symbols, throughout the individual and collective learning social dynamics well established in CoPs literature (i.e. LPP, situated curriculum, community continuity and regeneration). The two major contributions of our research to the study of CoPs are: 1) the core role of the symbolic in building, developing and maintaining a CoP; 2) the entwinement between ‘learning to be communal’ at the individual and at the community level and its consequences for fostering participation and engagement.

We answer our research question – ‘how does a CoP emerge, develop, and maintain through social symbolic learning (in addition to functional learning) and how does this social symbolic learning interact with the functional one?’ – by showing that the symbolic embedded in CoP’s totems and rituals can convey two types of knowledge: practice knowledge useful to improve and advance CoP’s domain of expertise but also community knowledge to define belongingness and strengthen engagement, ultimately both contributing to the social dynamics inside CoPs. This adds to extant literature on CoPs, which has mainly considered the symbolic as a potential source of functional knowledge development for the community (Styhre *et al.*, 2006; Myers, 2022; Macpherson & Clark, 2009). Our cases, instead, illustrating the attachment and emotional power exerted by totems and rituals, prove that the symbolic is also at the core of community sociality, members’ cohesion, and individual engagement in the CoP. Studying totems and rituals and understanding their role would therefore contribute to the research which has suggested that CoPs cannot be created (Thompson, 2005; Harvey *et al.*, 2013; Pyrko *et al.*, 2019), but that their development can be facilitated through the dissemination of “seeding structures” (Thompson, 2005), that are elements in CoP’s communal repertoire of the nature we have described. In addition, while we conceptually distinguish communal learning from social practice learning, our findings confirm and illustrate what posited in CoPs studies, that they intertwine one another (Lave, 1993): learning to be communal facilitates access to relevant practice and technical learning as well as practice learning reinforces or modifies a predefined mode of social interaction within a community. This is visible in our cases whereby misunderstanding the social norms of the community (e.g. wearing inappropriately the white coat) can interrogate peers or an incident violating an expected routine (e.g. missing the HP12C at an appointment) impedes the effective unfolding of the practice. At the same time our cases show that a change in practice (e.g. with or without auscultation through the stethoscope) would have impact on community interactions (e.g. patient contact and dialog, master-novice relation, sub-community membership recognition).

<table><caption>Table 1 — Synthesis of the 4 CoPs dynamics</caption><tr><td>CoPs DynamicsFinancial Analysts CoPPhysicians CoPIndividual level 1:
						Becoming a “x” (a financial analyst, a physician)Initiations to the use of
						the totemic object (financial calculator) as rituals“I think someone gave it
						to me as a gift in the business. I think it was the guy who taught me how to
						use it. He nurtured me in the business and it was a kind of congratulatory
						gift.”The “grueling ritual” (+100 hours per week) of working hard during the
						reporting seasonAuscultations with the totemic object (stethoscope) as
						full-fledged initiation rituals“The first time I came in I didn’t know
						anything. I didn’t know what were the heart sounds, I was just listening and
						thinking Oh my God”The White Coat Ceremony (WCC) as an important initiation
						ritual Individual level 2: Becoming a member of the community “y”In
						commensal rituals, the individual learns to be a member of a social group,
						to act and behave like others through a process of imitation“Analysts do not
						necessarily have to drink alcohol in large quantities to become accepted,
						but if they get drunk with a number of other analysts, the team is likely to
						accept them sooner”Becoming a doctor means being “good team players” and
						supportive of colleagues in actions taken in front of the patients, which
						implies learning to behave united in front of them“You have to go along
						withsome things…in front of the patient. For teams it wouldn’t be good to
						have the ranks arguing amongst themselves about the best approach for
						patient care”Communal level 1: (Re)defining the community and its
						boundariesSymbolic distance from the rest of humanity is mainly expressed in
						the use of a technical and magical device: the financial calculator“Usually,
						people who aren’t familiar with it, when you pull it out, they say, ‘Gosh,
						how can you use that?’. They’re impressed. They don’t know that I don’t know
						how to use 90% of the functions! They think you know a lot about finance”As
						the stethoscope symbolizes the exclusive “listening expertise”, carrying and
						displaying it in many everyday diagnostic practices helps physicians remind
						those around them about their specific competence.“The ‘proper’ way to wear
						a stethoscope varies by medical specialty and local tradition, and is
						learned not in the classroom, but by the example of senior personnel and via
						warnings from peers not to risk humiliation by wearing it
						incorrectly”Communal level 2: Contesting traditional views or resisting
						changeTime and again, it has been heard that the financial calculator HP12C
						would be replaced by another calculator, by software on the computer and,
						more recently, by an app on the smartphone, but nothing has changed“Keeping
						this totemic object alive is a guarantee of stability and difference for the
						community. The community doesn’t want to see it evolve”With innovations and
						the rise of artificial intelligence, the stethoscope has almost become
						obsolete and “died” for some experts. However, counterclaims also emerge
						defending the stethoscope as more important than ever nowadays.“It has come
						to stand for the doctor at the bedside talking and listening to the patient.
						It represents a human and humane type of medicine, which some perceive to be
						under threat”</td></tr></table>

In our analysis, the examination of the symbolic in CoPs provides insights on the entwinement between ‘learning to be communal’ at the individual and at the community level. At the individual level, access to totems and rituals allows the novice to learn how to pertinently mobilize or perform them and to learn about the community, its values, rules, social structure, and roles, what it means being a member and how to behave as a member while also linking this learning to emotions and corporeal sensations. At the same time, rituals and totems serve the community to reinforce its borders and perpetuate its social structure and values, while also being important spaces for contesting the current order and transforming the community. This completes the understanding of the entwinement between the individual and community learning already pointed out by ‘social learning’ research (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Gherardi *et al.*, 1998). As such, our results may help foster participation and engagement in organizational CoPs. On the one hand, the categorization of rituals (initiation - cyclical - commemorative - occasional) can serve as a basis for CoPs’ facilitators to create moments of sociality that are less functional and more emotional than meetings, workshops and other exchanges of practices, and that involve the members to a greater extent. On the other hand, the fact that the totemic objects used in the rituals are, like the calculator or the stethoscope, functional objects that have become cult objects, opens the door to a ritual reinforcement of the use of these objects. Within the CoPs studied, the object and the ritual are usually inseparable. This can be effective to strengthen the engagement within inter-organizational CoPs (Gonçalves & Guimarães, 2020; Pyrko *et al.*, 2019), but also within intra-organizational CoPs (Thompson, 2005; Harvey *et al.*, 2013) such as a financial analyst’s firms or hospitals. In these cases, the mobilization of totemic objects in corporate rituals can be used to reinforce the sense of belongingness to the intra-organizational CoPs.
# Conclusion

With this research we show that the cultural perspective can offer a valuable theoretical perspective to examine the role of the symbolic inside CoPs and how it can impact learning and social dynamics within them. However, our analysis of the symbolic in this work is not without limitations, and we acknowledge that further studies would be needed to fully take advantage of the insights the cultural perspective may offer.

First, while our study shows that artifacts can both convey functional and symbolic meaning, we are aware that we observe this statically in objects whose meanings are already crystallized as the result of a long process of meaning cumulation which we could not examine through our research. Therefore, we suggest that future research could investigate how the symbolic appropriation of functional artifacts dynamically happens in time, to gain insights which could help stimulate similar processes in established communities.

Second, while we propose to include totems and rituals as part of the shared communal repertoire, we are also aware of the fact that other symbolic material and immaterial elements could be included amongst them. Future studies adopting the cultural perspective could attempt to identify other symbolic elements and enlarge the definition of the symbolic repertoire.

Moreover, we observe in our cases that even in knowledge-intensive communities, based on the scientific method, the magic comes back through reference to the shaman. This confirms studies (Latour & Woolgar, 1996) highlighting that the symbolic and mythical have a strong influence even on the practice and meaning developed within the scientific community. While our examination does not allow to delve into the details of the way this “magic” is mobilized, it offers indications of alternative and relevant entry points to further examine power-relations inside CoPs.

To conclude, while our study focuses on professional inter-organizational CoPs, it still shows that the debates and controversies permeating these vast communities affect also tensions and controversies developed inside organizations and educating institutions, therefore fostering broader debates for future research related to CoPs. First, despite the unifying and smoothening power of cultural symbols, our results show that totems and rituals are not necessarily and always unifying. Indeed, the practices and interactions of new individuals inside the community can also transform the scope and definition of the practice as well as the rules governing social interactions within the community and the way meanings are attributed to symbols. On the one side, the cultural perspective may pave the way to a new strand of CoP research which can reconcile it with the notion of community and interpret CoPs as a social phenomenon (Harvey *et al.*, 2013). On the other side, however, we find particularly important to signal that this does not mean to forget the controversies and contrasts inside communities, quite the opposite (Thomas *et al.*, 2013) the cultural approach offers an alternative to the power relations perspective (Mørk *et al.*, 2010) to study tensions inside CoPs. Second, it emerges from our research that the context is important: the same symbols can be submitted to contestation (or not) depending on the context where they are mobilized. Indeed, our cases suggest that great differences exist between Western and poorer countries, as in these latter traditional meanings associated to totems and rituals are still relevant and not contested. Also, we realize that the CoPs analyzed in this research may be specific in that these are professional CoPs. We argue that focusing on these communities, neglected in recent research but at the core of the pioneering contributions in CoP studies, may help to put into dialogue studies on occupational communities and CoPs (Nicolini *et al.*, 2022). Notwithstanding, the professional communities investigated are both highly knowledge-intensive and related to a strong occupational culture in contrast with others such as construction CoPs (Gherardi *et al.*, 1998; Styhre *et al.*, 2006), for instance. While research has illustrated that the symbolic may be equally important also within scientific communities (Latour & Woolgar, 1979), still the cultural perspective could help gain deeper understanding of how symbols differently work in various types of CoPs.

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