In this chapter, Wenger focuses on identity in terms of three modes of belonging that do not directly involve engagement in practice: engagement, imagination, and alignment. Wenger's argument here is that our identity does not just exist within the confines of belonging to our community of practice ("I belong to the Alinsu claims processing group"), but that it extends to the broader social realm in which we exist ("I belong to the field of claims processing"). To feel belongingness at such a global level, members:

• are actively involved in a mutual process of negotiation of meaning
• extrapolate from their own experiences to imagine how their social world exists
• align their energy and activities to fit within this broader social world

More about each of these follows:

Engagement
Engagement is bounded by time and space, which is both a strength and a weakness. As a strength, engagement enables us to shape our identity by using our competence to contribute to enterprise. In other words, "because I do this, I am a part of the broader social context. I belong to the same space as other people who can do this."

Being able to make this leap-- to connecting oneself with the others in the world who belong in the same way-- requires imagination (discussed next).

On the other hand, Wenger says that competence can entrap us by being the main thrust in our involvement in a social realm. If it becomes the only focal point for shaping identity, it will not account for the history and other practices that have influenced our competency (and thus our identity).

 Imagination
Imagination creates community. It enables us to create links between each other. As a complement to engagement, it allows us to sense that there are others out there doing the same thing as us, and to hypothesize how we are similar to them in other ways. Unlike engagement, it is not bounded by time and space-- we do not need to physically see each other or do the same action at the same time to imagine it.

Our imagination enables us to define who we are and what we do. Even two people doing the same thing may imagine themselves in different ways because of this-- Wenger uses the example of stonecutters doing the same thing and being asked what they do: one says "I am cutting this stone in a perfectly square shape" while the other says "I am building a cathedral". They imagine themselves and their belongingness differently, even though they are doing the same thing.

Clearly, one downside to imagination is that it can lead to generalizations. By being able to project our experiences and extrapolate about others, we may assume incorrectly about others. This is where the tie to engagement is necessary in belongingness-- engagement gives us a reality in which to construct identity based on tangible ideas.

Alignment
Alignment refers to "do(ing) what it takes to play our part." Alignment may mean following directives handed down from the leaders of
the practice, or acting on a cause in which we feel strongly (such as
by making a donation to an organization that supports this cause). More broadly, it enables us to engage with others and care about how our engagement fits into the larger social context. It enables us to take action when we imagine other people like us that exist. It tells us how we fit. Using boundary practices and shreable artifacts, alignment enables us to coordinate and connect our actions, viewpoints, and competencies into the broader scope of practice. 

However, alignment can create blind adherence that takes away members' ability to engage and negotiate on their own.  Further, it can cause members to focus too much on literal translations of what it means to belong and participate, rather than enabling members to determine their method of defining belongingness.

Modes of belonging in geo-aware communities
The geo-aware communities I have studied this term involve people doing things that are rather peculiar-- visiting and tagging locations around the world, and sharing these locations with others. Anybody may hike through a park and look for interesting landmarks, but to say "I am a geocacher," to identify with this community, means something specific.

Through engagement, members of these communities exclaim their identity of belonging. A continual negotiation of meaning of what is a "cool" location enables them to visit and contribute places that are meaningful to the community. They form trajectories as they contribute to the history and future of the community.

They make use of imagination to gain a stronger understanding of what the community stands for-- what kinds of locations do other members like me want to visit? What kind of adventures do others like to go on? Just how many others like me are there in the world? As they trek through a busy city looking for the subtly placed yellow arrow, as they tromp through a wooded enclosure to find a treasure they can feel the presence of others who have taken the same steps, the presence of others who will take the same steps in the future.

They align their understanding of the value of contributions with the understanding that exists among other members. They seek out appropriate locations to contribute as they continue to participate in the negotiation of meaning ("what is a cool destination? what can I contribute?").

I want to think about cult groups, where their imaginations strengthen engagements, and engagements strengthen imaginations, and when the mode of belonging to such strengthened imaginations move its dominance to alignment mass suicide happens.

In the above case, it seems that the members' imaginations are so vulnerable to engagements. I wonder if the nexus of multimembership can help reduce excessive polarization of the imaginations formed in the community.

Overall, I liked the second part of the book better than the first part. And I definitely found the framework of belonging presented in this chapter useful for understanding different kinds of communities, how they are constituted, etc.

I believe we discussed engagement more than the others. Imagination is about finding out common links whereas alignment is about forming an alliance. Maybe we can discuss imagination more in the class, it is not as clear as alignment (to me at least).

The work of belonging

Most of what we do involves a combination of engagement, imagination, and alignment. Various proportions result in communities with distinct qualities.

The work of engagement – authentic access to participative and reificative aspects is necessary.

Highlights from the kind of work engagement entails:
-    negotiated definition of a common enterprise
-    the accumulation of a history of shared experiences
-    the production of  a local regime of competence
-    a sense of interacting trajectories
-    the opening of peripheries for various degrees of engagement

The work of imagination – dislocate participation and reification to create novel situations of learning.

Highlights from the kind of work imagination entails:
-    being in someone else's shoes
-    locating our engagement in broader systems in time and space
-    opening access to distant practices through excusions: visiting, talking, observing, meeting
-    creating reifications (models, patterns, etc.)
-    using reifications (assume meaningful)

The work of alignment – requires coordination of perspectives and actions in order to focus on a common purpose.

Highlights from the kind of work alignment entails:
-    imposing one’s view via power and authority
-    convincing, inspiring, uniting
-    defining broad visions and aspirations
-    devising procedures and control structures (usable across boundaries)
-    spanning boundaries, creating boundary practices

Once again the author mentions that participation and reification should travel together across time and space.

Connections

I got the sense that Wenger's discussion of imagination and alignment connects to some social science/identity/confirmity theories we discussed earlier (e.g. SIDE, Republic.com).

P.S. application to 43T is on the way.

Since Nika has done a good job of summarizing the chapter, I will explain the modes of belongining in the Fighting 44s.  In engagement, the Fighting 44s participate in discussion of various topics.  In fact, one of the discussion threads in the Introduction section is entitled "What made you a Fighting 44?"  This thread is devoted to people sharing their experiences and why they decided to participate in the F44 community.  For imagination, the Fighting 44s do several things.  The first is they have galleries for photos and art that members can rate and provide feedback on (as Wenger would put it, "assuming the meaningfulness of foreign artifacts."  Also in the discussion area, there are specific areas to share stories and experiences.  There are specific areas to discuss the Fighting 44 community, content, and other areas in the feedback to articles threads and in the Wetwork section.  As for alignment, this actually affects both the Fighting 44s and the greater North Asian American community identity that is part of the joint enterprise.  

As Wenger says, "Alignment also creates a kind of community.  Allegiance to a creed, a movement, the environment, a nation....can rally the energies of unlikely bedfellows."  As I have mentioned before, the Fighting 44s hopes to align the the various seperate Asian communities (Chinese, Korean, Japanese,  etc) into one community of action to help all Asian Americans prosper.  This belief is evident in the name and in many of the posts by the site founders.   Unfortunately, the Fighting 44s have not had the best success aligning their own community.  Going back to last week's dicussion on identity, many in the community want to exclude out certain identity groups such as Asian females who marry white males and in some cases, whole ethnicities such as Filipinos who some on the board accuse of being backward and ignorant. 

Summary and Critique 

Imagination and alignment make contrasting use of participation and reification.  Imagination requires openness; you should be able to open to new interpretation of identities, histories, and reification. So a direction may not be pre-decided. On the other hand, it seems that a direction is often pre-decided for alignment so that a group can concentrate their energy on a common purpose.  However, imagination and alignment can coexist, and a mode can be seen differently depending on a perspective.  For instance, the leaders in 19 century tried to achieve nationalism (alignment) by appealing to imagination of people.  People could not have been able to go to the mode of alignment right away without going through the mode of imagination.  It was because the ideals of leaders were against/beyond their natural communities (i.g. engagement)  so they first needed to get out of their mode they were in through imagination.  While inviduals were in the mode of imagination; however, what drew their imagination was alignment leaders intended.  In other wors, the alignment qualified the space for the imagination.  Wenger also took a ritual as an example where engagement, imagination, and alignment coexist and bolster each other (p 183).  It seems that a leader or a coordinator of alignment should have a deep understanding abouth the phyche and desires of the group she or he tries to influence on.  Without a public acceptance, the leader or the coordinator may not acquire alignment he or she intended (the failure may be good though).

One interesting finding in this chapter is reification plays critical roles in imagination and alignment.  You freely explore reification in the mode of imagination while you carefully coordinate the use of reification for alignment.  I will think about the connection of this concept to the use of real names.

In chapter 8, Wenger tells us to turn our heads to the bigger community - the world. He's saying that it is the next step to think about oneself in a big picture of history that flows from the past to the future and also in a  mechanism of  inter-influential nature of the multimembership.

Wenger explains this idea in detail with three concepts of beloning; engagement, imagination, and alignement. Based on engagement that facilitates us to see the boundaries and to define our competence, we can begin to imagine the different types of our relations to the world. And through the process of alignment, we can bridge the time and space from previous history to borader enterprise of present day so that participants can get connected through their practices, and this will promise a better future for us. (this meets with what was said in chapter 6; "With less past, there is less history to take into consideration. With less future, there is less urgency to reconsider history. (p. 157)"

So, I think the 'learning' that Wenger mention is the 'maturation of identiy', and the essence of thie chapter is melted in a sentence in page 176 ; "My use of the concept of imagination refers to a process of expanding our self by transcending our time and space and creating new images of the world and ourselves."

The last section of this chatper that talks about 'the work of alignment' made me think about the qualification of policy makes of a society (including e-communities). According to Wenger (p186), alignment requires the ability to coordinate perspectives and actions in order to direct energies to a common purpose. What kind of person in what kind of communities is capable of making this kind of decision? 

An important thing about imagination is that it is done socially, and in this regard, should be subject to the same interplay of participation and reification. Wenger stresses its applications to learning – the pianist playing scales who imagines a concert hall was a powerful image for me.  I was also reminded of collective imagining surrounding ideas like the ‘good life’, and the stories my friends and I tell as we “see through” our current studies and trials. For reifications of this, look no further than RnB videos.

I liked Wenger’s example of the distinction between alignment and imagination among the claim processors.  They had trouble imagining what their higherups were like, and did very little to “situate” themselves in the context to their higherups of their own accord.  But, they would dress up and clean their desks when a visit was announced – this was alignment with the expectations of their employer, and made them part of something bigger than their own community of practice.  

But why don't the claims processors imagine the lifes of the higherups?  Certainly, rumors of an impending visit would  create break-room talk, which should fuel collective imagination over the community the bosses belong to.  This has been my experience at internships and the like.  To think about this, we can turn to ideas from Wenger’s previous chapters.  The claims processors are on a trajectory that emphasizes non-participation as a significant aspect of their participation within the company.  This non-participation probably extends to taking the time to think about others within the firm, and what their positions, roles and practices are like.  In contrast, if being a claim processor was a step toward becoming a big boss – which would put this group on an inward trajectory, they would be peripheral instead of marginal participants in this context – then we might see a lot more imagination.

Nika and David both posted nice summaries and applications, but don't forget trade-offs!

• For engagement, we may become so competent in our practice that we lose the ability to see other viewpoints, or recognize when it is worthwhile to step outside of/change the direction of our practice.
• For imagination, we may become ineffectual and disconnected -- basically too off-topic.
• For alignment, we may become autocratic, performing practice in lockstep and becoming disempowered in the process.

Much as in Wenger's example of the two train passengers reading the same newspaper, imagination can offer wiki citizens a sense of community and belonging perhaps from the simple disclosure of statistical trends in their wiki-editing habits. This may "not involve the joint development of a shared practice," but in a wiki it certainly could (Wenger 182).

Similarly, alignment could interact well with WikiStats. On a corporate wiki, if there is an expectation of certain types of editing behavior, then members of the CoP may exert some effort to bring their statistical patterns into alignment with that social norm.

Engagement, imagination, and alignment

Ren et al's common bond/common identity framework is basically an imagination form of belonging (in Wenger's terms). To imagine the set of people all having a certain set of characteristics with things in common.

Alignment means you take actions with others to advance the interests of the collective. You are aligned with a particular agenda (a task force?) but may not think of having common characteristics.

"The work of..." sections starting on p. 184 as a good place to clear up the confusion of the chapter. How does the work of creating identity through belonging (through identity and alignment) appear in Cool Running?

Implications for Cool Running

Explore in final paper:

• CR as primarily a community of engagement and imagination
• Stated differently: engagement and imagination as the primary reasons to belong to CR
• "Common purpose creates the we" (Paul's quote)

To me, what Wenger describes as "modes" of belonging seem to be more like "modes" of thought. 

Engagement represents the "now" mode where the member is fully engaged

Imagination represents the "future" mode where the member is free to think about which trajectory to take and what possible new trajectories he could form.

Alighnment represents the glue that bonds imagination with engagement to ensure that the community could work together towards a common enterprise.

The word "belonging" sounds funny.