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In contrast, community has a rather good name in other quarters. The social capital literature argues that bonds between people, based on such things as trust, and underpinning social networks or associational life, have positive effects on social and economic development. Communities are held to encourage participation, generate forms of reciprocity that bind individuals to the wider society, and generally promote compromise and dampen conflict. Associational ‘Putnam communities’ are hence considered to be different from interest-based, rent-seeking ‘Olson communities’(Olson 1965; Putnam 2000; Knack 2003). Overall, the mainstream economist’s ‘blocking’view of community stands in stark opposition to this theory of communities with effects of ‘empowering and efficient exchange’. A third view of community, developed in economic sociology, is more agnostic in outlook than either of the above. Actor-networks are, simply, unavoidable in many economic processes (Granovetter 1973, 1985). 3 The effects may be negative or positive, but in any case market exchange is underpinned by non-market group mechanisms. Some actor-networks are welded together through trust, interpersonal relationships, and reputations, all of which can substantially lower transaction costs and hence improve the efficiency of economic coordination, but some reinforce special interests and privileged access to resources. One particular type of actor-network that has been the object of intense interest recently are ‘communities of practice’(henceforth, CoPs), where the action shared in the network is some type of shared practice. One probable reason that there is so …