Community of practice: a flexible construct to identify SME networking roles in the Irish agri-farmhouse cheese sector

The aim of this paper is to examine the participation identities and networking roles in a Community of Practice (CoP) where members participate in horizontal peer networking in order to enable and facilitate knowledge creation amongst its members. A commonly occurring critique of the CoP literature is that insufficient attention has been paid to the effect of unequal power relations amongst its members, with power in this sense relating to members’ position in the social structure of the CoP. In order to address this research gap, our full population country level study which set in the Irish Agri-Farmhouse cheese sector adopted a two-stage research design consisting of social network analysis (SNA) and 51 in-depth qualitative interviews. Our findings not only provide a deeper nuanced understanding and extension of different forms of participation but also of the power dynamics within a CoP. In this particular CoP, we find that membership is not negotiated in a uniform manner and that differences in participation can be identified and categorised by a focus on the intersection of ownermanagers’ participation identity and firm network positions. Building on this, we develop an original role typology depicting five distinct networking roles and how these different network identities relate to firm network positions and roles. It is posited that this typology can act as a sense-making tool for researchers and practitioners by which to diagnose and understand variation in small firm horizontal peer networking behaviour, particularly within the agri-food sector