Practice perspectives are inscribed mainly within a sociological approach to organizational learning and knowing that considers knowledge as something that people do together. Knowing and doing are therefore inextricably entangled.
While psychological approaches are better known and have founded, for better or worse, the interpretative model of organizational learning (see the critique of Weick, 1991; and Chapter 1 in this Handbook) sociological perspectives have been slower to establish themselves. The sociological contribution to the study of organizational learning (Gherardi and Nicolini, 2001) can be summarized in the terms of an invitation to view organizational learning from a cultural perspective as a metaphor (derived from the juxtaposition of the two terms ‘learning’ and ‘organization’) that makes it possible to develop a system of representation (a theory) with which to interpret organizing as if it were a learning process. Therefore, identifiable within studies on organizational learning are various narratives concerning what constitutes that relationship and how it can be understood. The sociological concepts that have contributed most to the understanding of organizational learning have been first that of learning as participation, then of reflexivity as a dynamic of social reproduction, and, more recently, that of practice. And it is on this last concept that I shall concentrate in what follows.
Studies on organizational learning and knowing have re-appropriated the concept of practice since the late 1990s and the early 2000s. This has enabled a shift from knowledge to knowing—and therefore from an epistemology of possession (Cook and Brown, 1999) to one of practice—that is, to a conception of knowing as a practical activity. The ‘practice turn’ (Schatzki et al., 2001) began within studies on organizational learning and knowledge simultaneously with rediscovery of the concept of practice by other communities of scholars, such as those concerned with social studies on science and technology, feminist studies, researchers on strategy, workplace studies, and studies on activity systems. There are obviously different ways to use the term ‘practice,’ also because its polysemy allows its polymorphous exploration. Nevertheless, widely used in organization studies is the expression ‘practice-based studies’ (PBS henceforth), which is a general label for a multiplicity of diverse studies whose shared feature is an interest in the study of social practices.
In the sections that follow I shall explore the potential of the sociology of practice by reviewing the intellectual tradition that can be considered the basis for PBS. I shall then return to the polysemy of the term to draw a distinction between considering practice as an empirical object and considering it as a relational epistemology with which knowledge can be produced on the basis of an ecological model of relations, primarily that between knowing and doing. I shall then use this model to show how a practice can be analyzed during its recursive unfolding, and how it develops within an equipped environment and interactions in a texture of practices. Finally, I will organize the discussion on the potential of the sociology of practice by analyzing its theoretical and substantive contribution to organizational learning.