The Grounding of the ‘Practice-based Studies’ Label

The concept of practice has manifold sociological roots. Implicit reference to one or another of them brings out a different phenomenon of practice, so that the same term is used to shed light on different aspects. At the cost of excessive simplification, and referring the reader for more detailed treatment to Gherardi (2006, 2008), the main sociological theorizations of the concept of practice consist in phenomenological sociology (Schutz, 1962), symbolic interactionism (Mead, 1934; Strauss, 1991), ethnomethodology (Garfinkel, 1967), social praxeology (Bourdieu, 1972), and the theory of structuration (Giddens, 1984).

The phenomenological tradition in sociology concerns itself with the intersubjective production of sense and meaning through interaction and assembled knowledge. The world of everyday life is a province of meaning dominated and structured by what Schutz (1962) calls the ‘natural attitude’, so that the world is from the outset not the world of the private individual but an intersubjective world, shared by us all, and in which we have not a theoretical but eminently practical interest. The bulk of what an individual knows does not originate from his or her experience alone, but is knowledge of social origin that has been transmitted to the individual by social relations of all types. Schutz (1946) distinguishes three components of the stock of knowledge: (i) the reserve of experience that arises from reflection on past experiences (as toolboxes, recipes and practical or theoretical routines); (ii) knowledge of social derivation (the testimony of others); (iii) socially approved knowledge (the knowledge approved by the group of membership, or by other trusted authorities). The complementarity of individual bodies of knowledge explains cooperation among individuals, so that collective knowledge derives from an assemblage of different kinds of knowledge. Knowledge is therefore social, and it is assembled knowledge. The social interaction of actors is a crucial element in understanding the acts of meaning production by knowledgeable subjects, and it is this aspect which inspired the ‘practice turn’ in social theory (Chia and Holt, 2008; Rasche and Chia, 2009; Reckwitz, 2002).

Put briefly, intersubjectivity gives rise not to a matching of meanings, but to the assumption that meanings are shared or, as Garfinkel (1967) puts it, to an agreement on methods of understanding. Therefore, within ethnomethodology shared understanding is a collective activity and the result of local procedures and devices. The researcher should therefore pay constant attention to the competent display of members’ methods to accomplish ‘sense’ and ‘order.’ Members of any concrete setting acquire their sense or knowledge of it ‘only in the doing’ which is done ‘skilfully, reliably, uniformly (. . .) as an unaccountable matter’ (Garfinkel, 1967: 10). For members, ‘the hows of these accomplishments are unproblematic’ (Fox, 2006: 430), they are not the topic of competent remarks. Accordingly, the most significant innovation by ethnomethodology with respect to traditional sociology is its replacement of cognitive categories with the categories of action, and the consequent view of the creation and transmission of knowledge as a socially important practice.

This means that sociology, too, has taken up Austin’s assertion that ‘knowing is doing in everyday life, and it is doing society’ (Giglioli, 1990: 85). In ethnomethodological studies, in fact, the transmission of knowledge as a social practice has been the focus of studies on work (Garfinkel, 1986; Garfinkel and Sacks, 1970), and ethnomethodology and conversation analysis provide one way to access how people recognize and reproduce the organizational location of their actions in and through each successive action (Llewellyn and Hindmarsh, 2010).

The phenomenological and ethnomethodological tradition is particularly attentive to the details of ordinary work practices in naturally occurring interactions (Alby and Zucchermaglio, 2006; Heath and Luff, 2007; Llewellyn and Spence, 2009; Rawls, 2008). It assumes that order is the ongoing achievement of members’ methods for producing it. This tradition is therefore concerned to describe work practices in their becoming ‘a practice’ (Bjørkeng et al., 2009). The assumption, even if it is not always made explicit, is that knowing, learning, working, and innovating are not separate activities but are closely bound up with each other in their occurrence in time (Brown and Duguid, 1991; Orr, 1993; Cook and Yanow, 1993; Clegg et al., 2005). By contrast, the tradition of Bourdieu’s social praxeology and that of structuration theory work on oppositions.

Bourdieu’s methodological point of view can be defined as simultaneously ‘anti-functionalist, anti-empiricist and anti-subjectivist’ (Sulkunen, 1982: 103). He is profoundly convinced that it is impossible to grasp the deepest-lying logic of the social world without immersing oneself in the particularity of an empirical reality, historically situated and dated, even if only to construct it as a ‘particular case of the possible.’ On this view, the science of society is a two-dimensional system of power relations and meaning relations among groups. It therefore requires a twofold reading. The first treats society as a ‘social physics’: that is, as an objective structure grasped from outside, whose articulations can be observed, measured, and projected independently of the representations of those who live within it. This is the objectivist or structuralist point of view which analyzes society using statistical tools or formal models in order to bring out its regularities. Bourdieu believes that this is possible because people do not possess the totality of the meaning of their behavior, as if it were a given of consciousness, and because their actions always comprise more meanings than they realize.

However, a science of society must recognize that the awareness and interpretation of actors is also an essential component of analysis: individuals have practical knowledge about the world which they invest in their ordinary activities. It is by combining the two components of analysis that Bourdieu creates his ‘social praxeology,’ in which, however, the two components, although both necessary, are not of equal weight because epistemological priority is given to objectivist rather than subjectivist understanding.

It is here that the gap with ethnomethodology emerges, in that Bourdieu has the actor’s point of view depend upon the place that he or she occupies in the objective social space. Whilst this is an idea rooted in the structuralist tradition, Bourdieu introduces two new concepts to explain the importance of relations: (i) the concept of ‘field’ as constituted by a set of objective and historical relations among positions anchored in specific forms of power or capital; (ii) the ‘habitus’, defined as a set of historical relations deposited in the bodies of individuals in the form of mental and corporeal schemes of perception, evaluation, and action. Both these concepts—field and habitus—are relational in the sense that they function completely only in relation to each other, so that a field exists only if the actors in it ‘play with or against the other.’ This signifies for Bourdieu that there is action, history, and the conservation or transformation of structures constituting a specific type of field only because there are agents ‘in action’; and that these agents, in their turn, are efficacious only because they have not been reduced to the simple notion of ‘individual’ but are viewed as socialized organisms endowed with a set of dispositions which imply both the propensity and the ability to ‘play the game’ (Wacquant, 1992: 19–21).

Practices are collectively orchestrated without their being the outcome of the organizing action of an orchestra conductor (Bourdieu, 1972: 207). It means that we find certain games interesting because they have been imported into and imposed upon our minds and bodies in the form of what Bourdieu calls the ‘sense of’ or the ‘feel for’ the game. The practical sense—which is not weighed down by rules or principles, even less by calculations and deductions—is what makes it possible to grasp the meaning of a situation instantaneously, and to produce the appropriate responses at the same time. Only this type of acquired knowledge, in that it functions with the automatic reliability of an instinct, can furnish instantaneous responses to all the uncertain and ambiguous situations of practice.

Like Bourdieu, Giddens maintains that the prime concern of the social sciences should be neither the experience of the individual actor nor the existence of some or other form of ‘social totality’, but rather a set of social practices ordered in space and time. Like certain self-reproducing phenomena in nature, human social activities are recursive. They are not brought into being by social actors but are constantly recreated by the same means whereby they express themselves as actors (Giddens, 1990: 4). The concept of recursiveness is central to Giddens’ thought. His theory of structuration views the production of social life as a ‘skilled performance,’ so that social practices are construed as procedures, methods, or practical techniques appropriately performed by social agents—a definition, for that matter, which derives from ethnomethodological theory.

In his attempt to reconcile and connect the concept of action with those of structure and institution, Giddens proposes the replacement of that dualism with the notion of ‘duality of structure,’ where the latter is viewed both as a medium and as a result of recursively organized human action: ‘a medium because it is through its use that social conduct is produced, and an outcome because it is through the production of this conduct that rules and resources are reproduced in time and space’(Mouzelis, 1989: 615). The theory of structuration is therefore an attempt to analyze both structure and action within a single and coherent theoretical framework that yields an account of social life as a series of social activities and practices performed by individuals and by means of which, at the same time, those individuals reproduce social institutions and structures.

The influence of structuration theory is particularly evident in the study of technology and technological practices, and especially in the work of Wanda Orlikowski and the group at MIT which employs the concept of practice. Inspired by Giddens’ practice theory, Orlikowski (2000; Orlikowski and Iacono, 2001) suggests an analytical distinction between the technological artifact (i.e. in IT its software and hardware components) and technology-in-use, (i.e. what agents do with the technological artifacts in their situated practices). A simple type of office software, for instance, acquires different meanings for different professions, because different professionals (secretaries, accountants, consultants) develop distinct uses of the same artifact. Through their practices of the technology, people reshape IT-in-use in a situated way. Orlikowski (2002) expressly uses the term ‘knowing in practice’ to suggest that knowing is not a static, embedded capability or stable disposition of actors, but rather an ongoing social accomplishment constituted and reconstituted as actors engage the world in practice. The competence of the individual in knowing how to get things done is both collective and distributed, grounded in the everyday practices of organizational members.

Social interactionism, ethnomethodology, social praxeology, and structuration theory have furnished the sociological background for the linkage between knowing and acting. In general, the term ‘practice’ has generated in organization studies a ‘bandwagon’ dynamic (Fujimura, 1988) whereby various denominations—none of which has prevailed—have been proposed in order to institutionalize PBS as a field of inquiry with many elements in common. The metaphor of the bandwagon calls to mind the idea of a collective ‘journey.’ The concept expresses an involving activity able to bring together a heterogeneous group of subjects in pursuit of the same goal. In chronological order, the following labels have been proposed (Corradi, Gherardi, and Verzelloni, 2010): practice-based standpoint (Brown and Duguid, 1991); science as practice (Pickering, 1992); strategy as practice (Whittington, 1996); practice-based learning (Raelin, 1997, 2007); practice lens and practice-oriented research (Orlikowski, 2000); knowing-in-practice (Gherardi, 2000); work-based learning (Billett, 2001); practice-based perspective (Sole and Edmondson, 2002); practice-based approach (Carlile, 2002); practice-based approaches (Yanow, 2004).

The label ‘practice-based studies’ may serve as an umbrella-term to denote a shared problematic without forcing the numerous differences that it covers into a single category. In fact, as Miettinen et al. (2009: 1313) write in the introduction of a special issue devoted to the ‘re-turn to practice,’ ‘a new organizing buzzword must be imprecise and open enough to allow people from different traditions to join without renouncing their respective worldview.’

For that matter, this plurality of theoretical origins is not surprising if one considers that organization studies constitute a multidisciplinary—and at times also interdisciplinary—field of study which also comprises a variety of eclectic approaches.

How can one find one’s bearings among such a diversified array of theories developed amid the ambiguity and the polysemy of the term ‘practice’ (Strati, 2007; Geiger, 2009)? Ambiguity is an asset and a resource with which to develop plural interpretations. Let us therefore explore it.