practice theory

Works

A convergence rather than a canon, with one late statement that named it.

• Bourdieu's Outline of a Theory of Practice (1972) and The Logic of Practice (1980) supply habitus and the argument that practical logic is not the theorist's logic slowed down.
• Giddens's structuration supplies the duality of structure and the account of practical consciousness.
• Wenger and Lave's Situated Learning (1991) supplies communities of practice and legitimate peripheral participation — how a newcomer becomes competent by doing progressively less peripheral parts of the real work.
• Schatzki's The Site of the Social (2002) and the practice turn collection are where the convergence was named and given a common vocabulary.
• Science and technology studies supplies the empirical wing: laboratory work studied as work rather than as the execution of method.

Central ideas

Four, and the third is the one this work uses hardest.

• The practice is the unit: neither the individual act nor the structure but the organised, repeated, materially equipped doing. Structures exist in being enacted and individuals become competent by participating.
• Practical logic is not theoretical logic executed. It is fast, tolerant of contradiction, and adequate to situations that a formal account would have to disambiguate first — which is why reconstructing it as rule-following misdescribes it.
• Competence is participatory and largely unstated: a newcomer learns by doing peripheral portions of real work rather than by being told the rules, and much of what an expert knows is not available to them as description.
• Materiality: tools, arrangements and bodies are constitutive of a practice rather than props for it. Change the equipment and the practice is a different one.

Distinctive vocabulary

Three terms whose loose use erases the tradition's claim.

• Practice: an organised, repeated, materially equipped doing with standards internal to it. Not a habit, not an activity, and not practising.
• Community of practice: a group constituted by shared engagement in the same work, with peripheral participation as the route in. Not a team, a department, or an interest group, which is what the term now usually names.
• Tacit, in this tradition: known in doing and not available as statement. Not secret and not unarticulated-so-far.

Debates and disagreements

The tradition's strength is also its evidential problem.

• Whether taking practice as the unit explains anything or relocates the question. If structure exists in enactment and agency exists in competence, critics ask what work the middle term is doing beyond refusing two bad answers.
• Whether practices can be individuated. Where one practice ends and another begins is decided by the analyst, and the tradition has no agreed criterion for it.
• How change happens. An account built on reproduction through routine explains stability well and innovation poorly, which is the standing objection to habitus in particular.
• Whether communities of practice survived their own success: the concept was absorbed into management vocabulary and now names organisational units that have none of its defining features.

Intellectual relationships

It converges on a position several traditions were already approaching.

• The later Wittgenstein on rule-following and forms of life is the philosophical root: a rule does not determine its own application, so competence is prior to the rule rather than derived from it.
• Bourdieu and Giddens, both documented separately in this work, are the two major sociological sources, and they disagree about how much room a competent actor has.
• Heidegger's equipment analysis, also documented here, is the phenomenological parallel: what a tool is shows in its use and withdraws from notice while working.
• Polanyi's tacit knowing, also here, supplies the epistemology — attending from particulars to a target, with the particulars not focally available.
• Science and technology studies is where the claims were tested against actual work rather than argued in principle.

How it changes this reading

Practice theory carries eighteen placements here — fourteen claims and four through-lines.

• It supplies the reason this work's ethics is organised around practices rather than positions. An ethic stated as a belief has not been located anywhere; an ethic identified as a practice has a place, an equipment, a repetition and a standard someone could fail.
• The claim that competence is largely unstated is the sharpest borrowing and it cuts against the corpus. If what someone knows shows in doing and is not available to them as description, then their own account of their ethics is not the best evidence about it — and neither is a record made of accounts.
• Practical logic supplies the corrective to reading conduct as rule-application. A reconstruction that makes an action look like a decision procedure has usually added the procedure.
• They are not evidence about anyone's practices, competence, or participation.

Useful comparisons

Its main sources are documented separately here and disagree with each other.

• Pierre Bourdieu: habitus — durable, largely pre-reflective dispositions reproducing a position.
• Anthony Giddens: the duality of structure — knowledgeable agents who could have acted otherwise.
• Lave and Wenger: communities of practice — learning as increasing participation rather than as acquisition.
• Science and technology studies: practices observed empirically in laboratories and workplaces rather than reconstructed theoretically.

Where the ideas meet

The convergence is real even where the sources disagree.

• None treats a social order as either the sum of individual choices or a structure acting on people from outside.
• All hold that competence is demonstrated in doing rather than in stating.
• Each treats material equipment as part of what a practice is rather than as its setting.

Where they part

How much room a competent actor has is the tradition's internal argument.

• Bourdieu's dispositions are durable and largely below reflection; Giddens's agents are knowledgeable and could have acted otherwise. Both are practice-theoretic and they disagree about the size of the opening, which this work's separate entries for each record.
• The learning wing is optimistic about trajectories into competence; the reproduction wing explains why those trajectories are unevenly available.
• The empirical wing studies particular practices and generalises cautiously; the theoretical wing generalises first, and the two are frequently cited together as though they were one body of evidence.

Limits

What these placements can carry here is narrow, and one limit is self-defeating for documentation.

• Competence in this tradition is observed in doing. A written record contains accounts of doing, which the tradition specifically says are not the same thing and are produced by a different competence.
• Practices are individuated by an analyst; there is no criterion that makes any particular carving correct.

Criticisms

The objections are about explanatory content and about what became of the vocabulary.

• Taking practice as the unit may relocate the structure-and-agency problem rather than solve it, and critics hold the middle term does less work than its popularity suggests.
• The tradition explains stability far better than change, since an account built on routine reproduction has to import something else to get innovation.
• Practices cannot be individuated on any agreed criterion, which limits how comparative the research can be.
• Community of practice was absorbed into management vocabulary and now routinely names groups with none of the participation structure the concept required.

Common misreadings

Four uses these placements do not license.

• Using practice for any activity or habit, which drops the standards internal to it and the equipment that constitutes it.
• Using community of practice for a team or a department.
• Reading a person's account of what they do as evidence of their competence, which the tradition's own claim about unstated knowing rules out.
• Reconstructing an action as rule-following, which is the misdescription practical logic was formulated against.

What remains outside this idea

• It cannot establish anything about any person's practices or competence.
• It cannot recover from an account of doing what it says is available only in the doing.