Limits to Communities of Practice in an Open Air Market - The Case of the Alaba-Suru Market, Lagos, Nigeria

Abstract
Since its introduction into the literature over ten years ago, the concept of the
community of practice has been prolifically employed in a range of dierent
disciplines. A community of practice is regarded as denoting a set of relations
through which a group of actors mutually learn and share knowledge in order to
produce innovative outcomes in a particular activity. Many authors who have adopted
the term have however primarily restricted evidence of such communities to very
formally organised contexts that are characterised by relatively homogenous and
collaborative events. This thesis therefore examines the activities among market
traders in an open-air market and seeks to understand whether evidence of a
community of practice can be found in settings that are characterised by actors
involved in self-employment and competitive contexts as opposed to the previous
contexts that have shaped evidence of the community of practice.
From a qualitative ethnographic study of the Alaba-Suru market in Lagos, the thesis
proposes a multiscalar representation of the practice of market traders that considers
practices of traders as being much more than certain shared and communal ties
that permit market trade to be conducted in the midst of intense competition. The
thesis uncovers how competing everyday activities of buying and selling displayed
by individual traders, their organisation and interactions with other traders, customers
and suppliers are further linked with wider systems of regulations operating
through cultural, economic and other political linkages which are continually being
reordered, contested and renegotiated in ways that defy easy categorisation into a
community of practice.
The thesis acknowledges that concepts such as the community of practice are
potentially useful for understanding how a heterogeneous set of market traders, in
competition, are able to accommodate one another in conflictual cooperation. It
however is made apparent in the thesis that the scales at which practice is occurring
in and through traders in a market, require a flexible and more open relational
approach to conceiving the community of practice. The thesis concludes from a
geographical perspective that the continued application of the community of practice
must accommodate and incorporate the changing structure of events in space and
time.