In everyday language the term ‘practice’ has different meanings. For example, it expresses something ‘concrete’ or ‘real,’ often in opposition to something ‘abstract’ or ‘theoretical.’ The theory/practice dichotomy expresses the tension or the gap between decontextualized and universal knowledge and knowledge that is situated, pragmatic, and used in a temporally defined context of action. I shall not enter into the debate on this matter here. Instead, I merely point out that use of the term ‘practice’ in this sense has recently spread within management studies, provoking the accusation that the interests of practitioners are neglected. The theory/practice gap has led to this charge being brought especially against Critical Management Studies, followers of which have responded by studying the practices of middle managers and redefining them in terms of the ‘negotiation across interfaces of multiple rationalities’ (Hotho and Pollard, 2007: 599). However, the view of practice as antithetical to theory is not one which contributes greatly to knowledge about practice, although it may subvert the symbolic relationship which sets value on theory rather than practice and conceals a gender subtext in the devaluing of situated, local, and non-theorized knowledge (Gherardi, 2010). At least three further significations are comprised in the commonplace meaning of the term ‘practice.’
1. Practice as a learning method. People learn by ‘doing’ through constant repetition of their activities and discussions on the canons of their collective doing. To quote a proverb commonplace in numerous languages: ‘Practice makes perfect’.
2. Practice as an occupation or field of activity. ‘Practice’ is a word able to express the field of activity in which an individual works and the body of knowledge that grounds its knowledge. Every work setting is in fact an arena of interconnected practices in continuous becoming: medical or legal practice, for example.
3. Practice as the way something is done. Practice is a processual concept able to represent the ‘logic of the situation’ of a context. The study of practice, or better ‘practicing,’ yields important insights into how practitioners recognize, produce, and formulate the scenes and regulations of everyday affairs.
It is not easy to reconcile the idea of practice as an empirical object (a working practice within legal practice, i.e. body of professional knowledge), particularly repeated and rehearsed action (as in practicing a distraint), with the fact that the practice in question is sustained by a specific mode of practicing that may vary from one legal firm to another. In other words, the usual act of distraint responds to criteria of good or bad practice within that community of practitioners. Practice may therefore be an object of doing, a time of doing, and a socially sustained way of doing. And in all three cases knowledge is present in the form of learning intrinsic to the doing—a knowledgeable doing—and knowledgeable doing sustained by social norms appreciative of the doing of things well, beautifully, usefully, etc. The complexity of these three senses can coexist without having to resort to a definition of practice which restricts it to the activities or operations internal to the practice, or to only the processual dimension of practice that develops through time and according to the specific modes of that doing, or only to the institutionalization of the social canons of good or bad practice. We may say with the words of Llewellyn and Spence (2009: 1420) that ‘practice is reproduced through ordinary activity, but at the same time practice is a resource that enables people to recognize and assemble situated activities.’
The polysemy of the term ‘practice’ is apparent in everyday language (Antonacopoulou and Pesqueux, 2010). When the term is transferred to academic settings not only does it not disappear but it acquires a further element which, ironically, refers precisely to the everyday life and to that knowledge which is difficult to articulate. Generally, when the concept of practice enters academic settings, it is associated with the following elements: (i) intentional and goal-seeking actions that also have a habitual character and follow certain general principles of procedure (Turner, 1994: 8); (ii) the kind of practical and ‘hidden’ knowledge that supports them (see Tsoukas’ chapter in this Handbook; and Tsoukas, 1998).
In this regard, a tension arises in the literature because—as Joseph Rouse (2001: 191) maintains—there are two fundamentally different conceptions of practices:
1. Practices identified with regularities or commonalities in the performances or presuppositions of some community of human agents.
2. Practices characterized in terms of normative accountability of various performances.
According to the first definition, practices are ‘arrays of activities’ that constitute models, or bundles of activities; while in the second definition, practices can instead be viewed as ‘ways of doing things together.’ Those who adopt the first definition are interested in knowing and describing ‘the what question’ (inside a practice), while those who choose the second are interested in ‘the how question’ (a practice is practiced).
Rouse criticizes the former conception and argues that the accountability which binds a practice together need not involve any underlying regularity, nor even presuppose an uncontested formulation of norms. Of interest is the footnote where he argues in favor of the second conception by citing Davidson (1984: 445) to draw an analogy with understanding and using a natural language, which ‘involves no learnable common core of consistent behaviour, no shared grammar or rules, and no portable interpreting machine set to grind out the meaning of an arbitrary utterance.’ This analogy with the use of a language and the concept of accountability highlights the crucial role played by language, which by means of discursive practices produces not only intelligibility but also moral order. The concept of accountability enables us to view reason not as an innate mental faculty but as a practical accomplishment. The social dimension is the key to understanding the reasons that induce a group of actors to practice continuously and repetitively, adjusting their activities to ongoing changes and molding their ‘doing’ to the situational rationality of the context in which they interact. Paradoxically, the term ‘practice’ has the connotation of being something transferable, teachable, transmittable, or reproducible (Turner, 1994), but at the same time practices are difficult to access, observe, measure, or represent because they are hidden, tacit, and often linguistically inexpressible in propositional terms.
To conclude this section on the polysemy of the term, and therefore on the difficulty of understanding what we are talking about when the term ‘practice’ is used, I shall now itemize the different linguistic uses made of it. I have already mentioned its oppositional theory-versus-practice use which subtends analysis of practice as concrete action in contrast with an abstract theory. A second use is analogical: a certain phenomenon is studied ‘as practice.’ In this case, there are two well-known strands of analysis that have developed on the basis of analogical use of the term: science as practice, and strategy as practice. The former arose in the 1990s with the laboratory studies that focused on the practices that produce science, and therefore described the manufacture of science (Knorr-Cetina, 1981). Their purpose was to criticize science as discovery and to dethrone rationalism and positivism. They were consequently interested in the working practices whose subject matter was knowledge and in interpretation of how epistemic objects and epistemic communities are formed. The second strand—strategy as practice—assumes the term ‘practice’ to study strategy as a doing and as a process (strategizing). It has little interest in practice, and its intention is not to contribute to a theory of practical knowledge, but rather to criticize prescriptive and top-down models of strategy.
A further use of ‘practice’ is topological. Practice is the place where knowledge and learning come about, are preserved, transmitted, and changed. The metaphor of practice as a container is the most accredited in the literature since its beginnings with the concept of community of practice and identification of specific working practices in which practical knowledge can be studied as knowledgeable collective competence and capacity for action. Hence, practice is the site of knowing and also the site of organizing (Brown and Duguid, 1991). With regard to this ontological meaning of practice as the site of knowing and organizing, it is interesting to note how it objectifies practices as empirical objects and the building blocks of an organization, while at the same time blurring the boundaries between working and organizing. The terms ‘working practice’ and ‘organizational practice’ are often interchangeable. Having identified a specific practice, the researcher is concerned to describe the activities that constitute it. Studies of this kind have been conducted on flute making (Yanow, 2003), the construction of safety (Gherardi and Nicolini, 2000; Styhre, 2009), bridge-building (Suchman, 2000), animal qualification practices (Labatut et. al, 2009), and making of nanoreactors (Olsen, 2009).
A final meaning of the term ‘practice’ is transformative, and it refers to the fact that knowledge transforms itself through its use: a process which can be studied and described in light of the circuits which reproduce practices and networks of practices (Brown and Duguid, 2001) or of the texture of practice (Gherardi, 2006). In this sense, practice constitutes an epistemology of the relationship between knowing and acting. The question of the true value of knowledge and of the manner in which it is acquired is replaced by questions concerning how knowledge circulates, how it is transformed by being transferred, and how it is produced in contexts of practices. Epistemology usually concerns itself with the conditions for the validity of knowledge (logic of verification) or, as in pragmatism, with the conditions for the production of knowledge (logic of discovery). What is still beyond its reach is study of the epistemological conditions for the circulation of knowledge, or, in other words, how knowledge transforms itself through its use; what I term a ‘logic of transformation.’
A logic of transformation implies a relationship of equivalence or of non-difference between knowing and practicing. The expression designates a relational epistemology in that the two terms are ontologically inseparable from the outset (1987), but are instead performed in the course of specific material-discursive practices. Let us see in detail what adopting a relational epistemology entails, and how practice as epistemology can contribute both theoretically and substantively to looking at organizational learning as a situated activity.