The Substantive Contribution Made by the Study of Practices

In focusing on the contribution of organization studies concerned with practice, and to outline the problems studied from this perspective, one must start from the fact that—at least within studies on learning and knowledge in organizations—the practice perspective has emerged as the third way between mentalism, on the one hand, and the commodification of knowledge on the other (Gherardi, 2000). Hence, the inseparability of knowing and doing is assumed, yet practice-based learning is elusive (Contu and Willmott, 2000).

The interest in working practices arises from the fact that they are opaque: new technologies are embedded in already-stabilized practices; new technological systems have spatially dispersed communities working together. It is therefore necessary to know work practices to design technology to support them. Working practices are also opaque to their practitioners. The practice perspective has proved very productive when it has been linked with action research understood in the broad sense as practice development. That is to say, the main beneficiaries from the description and discussion of working practices are the practitioners themselves. In this regard, there are numerous initiatives that can be mentioned. The Helsinki Center for Activity Theory and Developmental Work Research has a ‘Change Laboratory’ designed to arrange a space comprising a rich set of instruments for analyzing disturbances and for constructing new models for work practice (Engeström, 2000). Opportunities given to homogeneous groups of practitioners, or to groups with members from several departments or organizations, to discuss their working practices not only foster reflexive learning but also lay the bases for bringing tools of daily work and the tools of analysis and design closer together—in a new dialectic of instrumentalities.

To be emphasized from the methodological point of view is the potential of video-recordings made of working situations and then shown to practitioners. Video-recordings have been widely used by workplace researchers interested in the fine-grained analysis of the real-time organization of work practice (for a review see Hindmarsh and Heath, 2007). This approach encourages close consideration of the discursive, embodied, embedded, radically contingent, deeply interactional, and tacit production and organization of work practice (Borzeix and Cochoy, 2008).

We may say that whilst the Change Laboratory is concerned with the intersection between working practices and organizational practices, workplace studies are more attentive to the performance and the spatial and temporal details of work activities and cooperation organized through interaction. A more clinical concern is shown by the French ‘Clinique de l’Activitè’ group (Clot et al., 2002b). Here researchers attempt to create a framework that favors the development of professional experience for the group engaged in the co-analytical process aimed at increasing individual subjects’ power to act. The first stage is dedicated to the creation of a group for the co-analysis of work processes. The main idea is that of self-confrontations and crossed-self confrontations: subjects are confronted with their activity and then become involved in professional controversies. A cycle builds up around what the workers do, what they say about what they do, and ultimately what they do about what they say. A similar approach is adopted by a set of methods—which Shotter and Katz (1996; and Katz and Shotter, 1996) call ‘social poetics’—for use by a group of practitioners in achieving a more composite grasp of their own practices, and thus to develop them.

What is important in this methodology is less how a group of people involved in the joint conduct and discussion of a practice respond to each other’s different activities within it than how they are each ‘struck by’ certain fleeting moments within the ongoing conduct of the practice. The assumption is that these moments ‘gesture towards,’ ‘express,’ or ‘manifest’ something special in their shared lives together, and suggest connections and relations which were previously unnoticed.

My purpose in reporting these four initiatives in what we may call ‘developmental practice’ has been to underline how the representation of practice, by the researcher or with the researcher, is a stimulus for explicitation of that knowledge entangled in doing which may enable better verbal expression of what is known and is enacted in doing, and of which the individual may have scant awareness. At a collective level it is an opportunity for the explicitation and negotiation of the assumptions implicit in practice and which practitioners do not have opportunities to confront. Articulating practice discursively and collectively may become the situation where that part of practice which is obscure because it is not perceived or not recorded acquires an objectified existence and becomes a collective experience for the group (Blackler and Regan, 2009). This may engender a revision of the practices of organizing.

Finally, it must be pointed out that the methodological contribution to the study of practices has been an important factor in the development of PBS. But it should also be said that the representation of practices, although crucial, is not particularly advanced, with the exception of Nicolini’s (2009) study on projective techniques and of those by Mondada (2003) and Hindmarsh and Heath (2007) on the use of video-recordings for the study of practices.