There’s a growing interest in understanding how people and organizations learn to perform in a better way their daily activities. Researchers and practioners discuss if organizational learning would merely be the sum of acquired knowledge by its workers or if the combination of individual knowledge mediated by the practice would promote a potentiation of organizational knowledge. In this context emerges the concept of communities of practice, which are social groups that spontaneously appear into the organization and carry the group learning history in their work practices. This paper aims to discuss the concept of communities of practice according to Lave & Wenger (1991) and the following authors who proposed arguments to argue it. The papers were collected in databases like brazilian Capes, Scielo and Ebsco. The text categorizes arguments about communities of practice according to their definition, delimitation and dimensions, to understand how learning takes place within these social communities and what’s the role of masters and apprentices in this process.