This paper advances anthropological insight into the modern notion of "communities of practice": groups of people bound together by common education, interests, and professional practices, with special attention to scientific communities as examples. One of the case studies mentioned describes the community of scientific programmers who develop software for high performance computers that perform computational tasks at the leading edge of what's possible.
Susan Squires and Michael L. Van De Vanter, "Communities of Practice", in A Companion to Organizational Anthropology, D. Douglas Caulkins and Ann T. Jordan (editors), Wiley-Blackwell, December 3, 2012. (book)