The highly symbolic transition from the term ‘knowledge’ to that of ‘knowing’ has opened the way for a view of knowledge as first a process and, subsequently, as a practical activity. In this way, the community of organizational learning and knowing scholars has appropriated the concept of practice to develop a practice theory of organization.
In the foregoing brief description of the developments brought and promises offered by the ‘practice turn,’ I have shown how ‘practice’ is a polysemous term with a long pedigree in sociology which ideally continues the sociological contribution to the study of organizational learning. The polysemy of the term may be an obstacle, but it is also a source of interpretative richness.
The richness of the term is evidenced by the proliferation of labels intended to unify and synthesize the approach, which by so doing have set the bandwagon of studies on practice in motion. We may therefore assume the expression ‘practice-based studies’ (PBS) as an umbrella-term which covers a host of practice-based studies. Within these studies two orientations are apparent: one which considers practices to be the object of empirical analysis (the site of learning and knowing) and one which assumes practice as epistemology.
In privileging the second of these meanings, I have highlighted that it subtends a relational vision and an ecological model of inquiry within which practice is regarded as a phenomenon emerging from the entanglement of knowing and doing. If we consider the becoming of a practice and its function as a guide for knowledgeable collective doing, we can show that the epistemology of practice enables appropriate exploration of sensible and tacit knowledge enacted in practice, together with the body as an active source of knowing, as well as materiality and sociomaterial relations.
I have then explored whether and how a practice theory of organizations could come about and the theoretical and substantive contribution that it could make. Further reflection should indicate directions for future analysis. But given the way in which this field is flourishing in such disorderly and haphazard manner, I would say that exploration in any direction is justified. When the one hundred flowers have given way to more mature theoretical inquiry, the problems and aspects that should be explored systematically will become clearer.
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