The Becoming of a Practice and its Stabilization

A metaphor which aptly illustrates the way in which a practice emerges and is socially and materially sustained is that of climbing, as described by Hennion:

What climbing shows is not that the geological rock is a social construction, but that it is a reservoir of differences that can be brought into being. The climber makes the rock as the rock makes the climber. The differences are indeed in the rock, and not in the ‘gaze’ that is brought to it. But these are not brought to bear without the activity of the climb which makes them present. There is co-formation. Differences emerge, multiply and are projected. The ‘object’ is not an immobile mass against which our goals are thrown. It is in itself a deployment, a response, an infinite reservoir of differences that can be apprehended and brought into being.

Hennion (2007:100–1)

Hennion thus illustrates the relationship of co-formation between sociomateriality and identity, but he only alludes to the fact that the same relationship exists between the doing—climbing—and the knowing: that is, knowing how to read the rock, seeing the handholds that become such only at the moment when the climber sees them and makes them handholds for his or her next move. This knowing how to read the context as a ‘reservoir of differences,’ knowing how to identify the handholds for the next action, knowing what the next action will be (Garfinkel’s ‘what next,’ 1996), and possessing the vocabulary to talk competently about climbing, are things that are collectively learned, transmitted, and transformed during practice and as an effect of it.

We may imagine what can constitute a handhold for the development of practical knowledge by assembling an ideal toolbox that enables description of a practice while it is being practiced.

Professional vision

We may start with the image of the climber who looks at the rock with expert eyes and for a practical purpose. We may say that the climber possesses and develops by doing what Goodwin (1994: 606) has called ‘professional vision.’ He defines professional vision as ‘socially organized ways of seeing and understanding events that are answerable to the distinctive interests of a particular social group.’ All vision is perspectival and lodged within endogenous communities of practitioners. An archaeologist, a farmer, or a builder will see different things in the same patch of dirt because they look at it from different professional ‘visions.’ The skill of seeing (and looking) is gained through constant and situated use of directions and micro-explanations: the novice is taught how to see (Goodwin and Goodwin, 1996); the climber, while climbing, enacts his or her background knowledge of how to look in order to see. The ability to see a meaningful event is the effect of a socially situated activity accomplished through discursive practices which employ specific professional vocabularies. As we have seen, objects of knowledge emerge from the interplay between a domain of scrutiny and a set of discursive practices deployed within a specific activity.

Three activities shape a domain of occupational knowledge (Goodwin, 1994):

• coding, which transforms phenomena observed in a specific setting into the objects of knowledge that animate the discourse of an occupation;
• highlighting, which gives salience to specific phenomena in a complex perceptual field by marking them in some manner; and
• producing and articulating material representations, which embed and structure the knowledge produced and transfer it through space and time.

I shall interpret the term ‘professional vision’ in a broader sense in order to include both the physical act of seeing and its outcome, that is, a professional vision as a culture of practice. In fact, the same act of developing a professional vision comprises the two principles of stabilization of a practice, and its institutionalization. When material representations are codified and articulated, some ways of doing are inscribed in tools and artifacts (vocabularies as well); when ‘phenomena’ are highlighted, not only are they marked in order to distinguish them, but they are also marked according to an ethical and aesthetic code of practice. When Garfinkel says that members make settings accountable, that is ‘observable and reportable’, he means accountable rationally and morally. Moral order and social order are shown to be inseparably intertwined in-and-as the practical details of work interactions (Fox, 2008).

Aesthetic knowledge

Let us return briefly to the metaphor and the practice of climbing. Note that it has induced first Hennion and then us (via Goodwin) to use the metaphor of vision, but to neglect another form of knowledge embodied in the climber, namely touch. A handhold is one of the circumstances that aids the becoming of the action, but knowing how to see a handhold is not enough. For it to be a handhold, the fingers must have touched it and tested its firmness in relation to the climber’s physique and agility. This further elaboration of the initial metaphor serves to highlight that the activity of knowing is not only situated in a context that furnishes resources for action but is also a bodily activity that relies on sensible knowledge and that mobilizes the perceptual faculties of the five senses. Aesthetic knowledge is always involved whenever flesh-and-blood human beings act. Put otherwise, the study of practices gives visibility to that form of practical knowledge which is anchored in the body, in the sensory faculties, and which is developed in corporeal patterns and cultivated as aesthetic judgment and as the aesthetic code of a practice.

On the other hand, all this makes practice difficult to express verbally both for practitioners and for researchers, who have difficult access to this knowledge resource and a paucity of vocabulary with which to describe it. I shall return to the methodological aspect later. Here I wish to emphasize that practitioners are in no better position than researchers regarding their capacity to know in terms of objectified knowledge and to express in words a savoir faire, an embodied knowledge, and an ability that resides in the fingers, the eyes, the nose, or the ears. These abilities, which are apparently an individual ‘endowment,’ and seemingly reveal a particular talent, are in reality the effect of a social practice and a collective process of learning and knowledge transmission.

Discursive practices

To provide an example of how language and discursive practices constitute ‘handholds’ for practice, I refer to an article by Geneviève Teil (1998) which describes how she learned to develop taste during a course to train the sense of smell. This sense and the professional skills associated with it constitute a field of expertise in demand by both the food and perfume industries. This ability can be learned in the surprisingly short period of five days, but its maintenance requires constant practice. In order to study the transmission of this knowledge, Teil attended the course and conducted self-ethnography as well as participant observation.

How, therefore, does one become a taster? Teil describes how learning produced changes in tastes and in olfactory practices during the training course, and how this brought about a change in the relationship between the novice and the object through:

• learning how to manage one’s body and brain, so that the ‘olfactory tool’ is circumscribed within the body;
• learning how to use it in accordance with collective norms; and above all
• learning how to check its operation in a suitable way.

The trajectory of learning therefore proceeds through (a) feeling (perception of sensory impressions which delimit a context and an olfactory measure, and control over the brain’s interpretations), (b) describing (development of a classificatory language with which to categorize sensations and to communicate, abandonment of the hedonism of feeling oneself naive, acquisition of an expert aesthetics to judge sensations), (c) using (to stabilize the link between the odor and its olfactory descriptor, gaining control over application of the metrological criteria that enable measurement of the relationship between describer and odor, and relying on the network of practitioners in order to heighten the performance of the olfactory tool).

From Teil’s theoretical analysis we learn not only that the learning of sensory knowledge develops through stages extending from the mundane knowledge of the novice to the mastery of expert knowledge within a professional community, but also how participation in the community is contextual to the learning of an expert language with which to express aesthetic judgments.

Discursive practices, as in the community studied by Teil, also support the formation of aesthetic judgments and their negotiation within a particular occupational community. But all occupational communities comprise the collective process of taste-making (Gherardi, 2009) that lays down the aesthetic canons for judgment of what must be considered a beautiful practice or an ugly one, a correct but inelegant practice, and so on. This reference serves, on the one hand, to emphasize how a certain mode of practicing is sustained by aesthetic (and ethical) criteria intrinsic to the activity itself and formulated during its performance, and, on the other, how situated discursive practices are intrinsically reflexive, that is, provide their own accountability.

To be noted is that, contrary to a widespread tendency to overestimate the role of sharing (shared understanding, shared signification, shared values) in collective action, it is non-sharing—or better minimal and partial sharing—that is a circumstance for both the action of looking for signification, and a driver of constant change in practice which comes about through negotiation on meanings and the ethical (Clegg et al., 2007) and aesthetic criteria of that practice. In other words, to use a musical metaphor, it is dissonance and not the canon which produces new music (Gherardi and Nicolini, 2002).

The equipped environment

Returning once again to the metaphor of the climber and the co-production of handholds during a climb, we may ask what happens to the interpretation if the material environment, besides addressing the subject and being in a certain sense ‘active’ in the interaction, is somehow equipped to facilitate the climb if the climber regularly returns to the rock face or leaves pegs to help other climbers, or, again, sets up a rock climbing gym. What I want to show with this shift of perspective is that when a practice becomes such—that is, it has become recurrent and coalesced into habits—the context of the practice is very probably an equipped context in which the main handholds for regular performance of the practice are known; they have been made familiar by repetition of the practice; they have been equipped so as to elicit their habitual use. It is now that artifacts, tools, objects, and technologies come into play, and therefore the relationship with materiality (Svabo, 2009) which anchors relations and meanings and ‘suggests actions.’ Numerous concepts have been proposed to express this interpretative shift from the context as a ‘container’ more or less neutral and indifferent to the actions that develop within it to the context as a resource (Lave’s ‘arena’ and ‘setting’): the idea of in-strumentation (Rabardel, 1995) as an arrangement to have a relationship of instrumentality (i.e. that instruments are not such in themselves but become so in the relation with the action that they serve); the affordance (Gibson, 1979) of materiality that suggests its use to support a utilization; the intra-action of Barad (2003) which co-articulates meanings and materialities; the concept of ‘jigging’ (Kirsh, 1995: 37) as a way to prepare and structure the environment. The more completely prepared the environment is, the easier it becomes to accomplish one’s task.

In other words, the recursiveness of practices establishes a relationship of co-production with the environment in which not only are the handholds for action discovered in the course of that action, but delegated to these handholds is the execution of certain operations of the same practice or certain functions, such as reminding (Grosjean and Bonneville, 2009), where helping not to forget is anchored in the materiality of signaling artifacts and technologies.

Finally, embedded in the theme of the equipped environment that anchors activities by suggesting to practitioners ‘what next’ in performance of the practice is a metaphor which conveys the sense of how humans and artifacts intertwine for the fluid performance of a practice. This concerns the idea of improvised choreography proposed by Whalen et al. (2002) when describing the arrangement of the objects and the gestures, as well as the body, of a call center operator. Just as choreography is a matter of space and time, so the operator conveys to the caller that the latter’s request is being handled fluidly—without impeding the interaction and therefore with competence—by skilful management of an equipped environment and with a cadence that does not leave gaps in the interaction.

Recursiveness as stabilization and legitimation

In my use of climbing as a metaphor for seeing organizational learning as the becoming of a discursive and material practice, situated in the relationship between knowing and doing, I have tried to highlight both the dynamics of becoming—as a sequential discovery of handholds for doing—and the dynamic which stabilizes relations for a recursive and knowledgeable doing. I shall now dwell on this latter dynamic to synthesize how stabilization of a practice—that is, acting on the circumstances in the expectation that they will re-occur and therefore form a historical and cultural knowledge which supports the practice—is founded as much upon social elements as material ones. Stabilization in materiality takes place through anchorings in discursive and technological practices, in the artifacts of the practice, but these are not unconnected from the cultural process that a practice institutionalizes by attributing ethical and aesthetic values to the modes of doing and stabilizes them as a normative system (creating further artifacts of the practice such as codes, norms, auditing systems, laws). Finally the practice is further stabilized by being embedded in a texture of practice that the action connects and recalls.