What is practice
From Project-as-practice
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Contents |
The practice turn
Research on practice has gained interest in several fields. Common to practice approaches within philosophy, cultural theory, sociology and management is, however, an attempt to go beyond objectified or reified interpretations of social processes, to move beyond the structure - individual dualism, and to "re-invent" actions and activity as a main area of investigation.
In short, a practice approach would be primarily interested in "what is going on". It would oppose much of the explanations offered by systems theory or network analysis. It would, furthermore, oppose all kind of explanations where human activity is seen as a residual of structure.
The practice approch and its foundations is presented in The practice turn in contemporary theory, edited by T.R. Schatzki (2001). He points out that independently of theoretical area (socilogy, management, philosophy) there are some issues that seem to be common ingredients in the practice turn.
- Practice is conceived of as activities or sets of activities. How these are demarceted, labeled and analyzed may vary. Activities have to be defined in a meaningful way, where the labels make sense for the people or the practice being analyzed. Activities are embedded in practice.
- Activities are built on knowledge, skills or competences of those performing the activities or of the community in which the activities are performed. Knowledge may be expressed in ways of communicatings, in routines or procedures applied or in the patters through which the world is made sense of.
- Practice involve humans. It is people performing activities, utilizing or using and creating knowledge. People are of highest importance. Without them it would only be empty houses left. Machines may still be there performing some activities but, still, for the community to last there need to be some humans involved.
The (social) ontology on which practice research is based is a belief that actions, activities and humans are embedded in practice. That is to say that humans are constituted within a practice. Social structures and institutions are results of practice. This contradicts ontological assumptions made by system theory or in structuralist apporaches.
However, prior to analyzing how a human or an activity is embedded in practice, it is necessary to define the field of practice in which the analyze is to be founded. Actually, fields of practice is a key word in the understanding of a practice approach. And, not surprisingly, there are many and also to some extent conflicting approaches to understand the field concept. Schatzki (2001) is already on the second page saying that
"The field of practice is the total nexus of interconnected human practices. The 'practice approach' can thus be demarcated as all analyses that (1) develop an account of practices, either the field of practices of some subdomain thereof (e.g. science), or (2) treat the field of practice as the place to study the nature and transformation of their subject matter."
Of course there are a number of differencies, or even controversies, between different practice oriented researchers and research streams. It is by no means a unified field. There are several different disciplines where practice approaches can be found and there are various ways of defining research topics within a practice perspective.
Communities of practice
One field of research is the work done on communities of practice where knowledge and skills, action/activities and actors are tied together in a community.
... to be continued
Actor network theory
Within (posthumanist approach) ANT it is claimed that not only humans may be the core of activities. Non humans, such as machines, may be equally strong in terms of activities performed.
... to be continued
Strategy as practice
... to be continued
