The Theoretical Contribution Made by the Study of Practices

We have seen that importing the concept of practice into organizational learning studies has given rise to a large body of literature on practice, thus confirming the intuition of Easterby-Smith et al. (2000) that the emergence of practice as a unit of analysis would be one of the most promising developments within organizational learning. Let us now see whether we can intuit the components of a practice theory of organizations.

An organizational theory is nothing other than a system of representations, and in this case it is based on the idea that ‘organizing’ derives from the practical modes in which the entanglement between doing and knowing finds its direction and purpose by anchoring itself in materiality and discursiveness.

The base components of a practice theory of organizing are given by defining practice as a collective knowledgeable doing which is socially sustained. The feature which distinguishes practice from action is its recurrent nature. The recursiveness of practices is what enables the reproduction of the organization in its everyday routine. Working practices, in fact, are the elements of shared meaning that allow us to go to work day after day without having to invent every morning what we must do, and without having to negotiate it with our colleagues. Just as society and social relationships must be reproduced day after day and meeting after meeting, so organizations are reproduced every day through the repetition of their relational and normative elements. If a practice were to cease owing to the various reasons for which it is practiced, it would no longer be a practice.

The idea that for a practice to be a practice it must be seen as such by its practitioners, and must therefore be socially sustained, comprises two notions: first that sustaining a practice requires the concurrence of action, so that it is recurrent; second, that it is recurrent because it is institutionalized, that is, sustained by values, beliefs, norms, habits, and discourses. In this process, materiality concurs in the coalescence of the practice through artifacts, the ‘equipped’ environment, the limitation of interpretative possibilities. We can accordingly say that practice also functions as a guide to action. Not only, therefore, does practice contain a concatenation of operations that make sense to practitioners; it also provides for its accountability in terms of good, correct, wrong, beautiful, and so on, practice.

Just as the everyday reproduction of an organization is driven by the recursiveness of practices, so the idea of change has a particular meaning. It should of course be specified that the idea of reproduction is more similar in its social meaning to the reproduction of the species than to mechanical reproduction by a photocopier. Consequently, intrinsic to the reproduction of practices is the idea of change as a continuous process, a ‘repetition without repetition’ (Bernstein, 1996; Clot, 2002a), a dynamic that follows the logic of transformation. Just as an orchestra never repeats its performance of a symphony in exactly the same way, so organizational practices are recurrent but never identical. In a certain sense, inherent to the concept of practice is the operation of a contingent logic, not an a priori rationality, in that the bravura of practitioners (like orchestra members) resides in their capacity to reproduce the ‘same’ performance in spite of the varying conditions in which they do so. This is the criticism that the concept of situatedness has brought against the logic of formal and rational prescription. The distinctive dynamic of change in practice, moreover, does not consist solely in the use of the resources ‘at hand’ to deal with variability and shortages, and thereby reproduce ‘the same’ amid the changeable. It also involves the social process whereby practitioners are attached to their practices. Hence, refining the object of the practice is to celebrate the ability of the practitioners, their self, and the feelings of care and pleasure that practicing produces. Put otherwise, practices are meaningful to practitioners, they can be objects of love or hate, and they indubitably constitute emotionally involving relations.

Finally, another theoretical contribution that may be forthcoming from a practice theory of organization consists in resolution of the dichotomy between organization and environment. Practices are more directly and closely interconnected, but every practice links with another one. We may therefore say that it is connection-in-action which weaves practices into a texture, or into a ‘seamless web,’ to use Star’s expression (1995). A practice does not stop at the boundaries of the organization; vice versa social practices extend into an organization, just as the knowledge involved in a practice does not stop at the boundaries among different professionals.

The way in which the concept of practice has been appropriated by organization studies has, I believe, the potential to develop a practice theory of organization of which we can see today only the first glimmerings. To buttress this opinion of mine, I shall now examine, even if briefly, the main substantive contributions made by PBS.