The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory

Karin Knorr Cetina, Theodore R. Schatzki, Eike von Savigny, Karin Knorr Cetina, Theodore R. Schatzki, Eike von Savigny

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134586288
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This book provides an exciting and diverse philosophical exploration of the role of practice and practices in human activity. It contains original essays and critiques of this philosophical and sociological attempt to move beyond current problematic ways of thinking in the humanities and social sciences. It will be useful across many disciplines, including philosophy, sociology, science, cultural theory, history and anthropology.

Part I

Practices and social orders

1
Practice as collective action

Barry Barnes

References to shared practices or to agreement in practice have long figured in the discourse of sociologists, but in recent years they have taken on an enhanced importance. Social systems have been characterized as ongoing, self-reproducing arrays of shared practices, and structured dispositions to generate such practices have been made central to the understanding of social and cultural phenomena of every kind. In extreme extensions of approaches of this kind, it may even be argued that as far as the sociologist is concerned practice is all there is to study and describe. An unkind account of this development might regard ‘practice’ as part of the debris produced by the disintegration of Marxism, a concept carried by refugee theorists who have found new homes in various ‘post-Marxist’ forms of sociology and social theory. But a much kinder account of the basis of the current interest in practice can be given, and should indeed be accepted. Accounts of societies as practices may be regarded as attempts to remedy the technical deficiencies of the idealist forms of theory that hitherto were dominant in this context.

One of the central tasks of theory in the social sciences is to specify what distinguishes the members of a culture or a collective from outsiders, and on what basis they sustain orderly activities and relationships amongst themSelves. Often this is seen as equivalent to identifying what members have in common, or what they share with each other and not outsiders. One approach is to describe the shared theories, ideas, beliefs or abstractly specified rules or norms that allegedly ‘govern’ their behavior. Two major difficulties are routinely associated with this approach. One is that ideas, beliefs, norms, and so forth are conceived of as being internal to individuals, and hence as invisible entities, all descriptions of which are bound to be highly conjectural. The second is the fact that these entities almost invariably serve as the basis of questionable passive actor theories of order and agreement: the entities are presumed to have fixed and definite implications, which those who cleave to them are obliged to enact. In contrast, to insist that the bedrock of all order and agreement is agreement in practice is to cite something public and visible, something that is manifest in what members do. Moreover, accounts of order and agreement that refer to practice presume not passive actors but active members, members who reconstitute the system of shared practices by drawing upon it as a set of resources in the course of living their lives. It is now generally recognized that accounts of this kind are more satisfactory empirically than passive actor theories.¹

I am myself in sympathy with the turn to ‘practice’ I have just described, and in particular with the implied reaction against idealism. But for all its merits the relevant literature remains unsatisfactory, even in the most elementary respects. It fails to make clear just what social practices are. And its vision of the scope and power of ‘theories of practice’ is nowhere adequately justified. Mindful that this is the first contribution to the volume, the argument here will focus on these elementary issues. It will seek to set out just what a shared practice consists in. It will emphasize that no ‘theory of practice’ can be a sufficient basis for an understanding of human behavior, or even that part of it which is orderly and routine. But it will conclude by showing that a correct understanding of the nature of shared practices is necessary notwithstanding, if that is our goal.

Examples of practices

The overall argument of this paper leads to clear recommendations concerning how shared practices should be understood and defined. But people may agree to differ on matters of verbal definition, when nothing substantial has been shown to be at stake. Hence it is best to begin not with definitions but with examples, with exemplary instances that almost everyone is likely to accept as instances of practices. Consider then, as a first example, vegetarianism. This particular example nicely points up the difficulties that arise from treating shared activity as ‘governed’ by ideas or theories. Vegetarians do not employ scientific experts or modern laboratory techniques to separate the animal and the vegetable. Nor does one vegetarian community necessarily follow the same dietary prohibitions as another. Nor is it possible to provide an algorithm for vegetarianism, as it is expressed in any particular vegetarian community: vegetarianism is not a matter of behaving in ways that can be exhaustively specified by abstract verbal rules. Nonetheless vegetarianism is routinely recognizable as coherent social activity; we encounter it as custom and practice, and acknowledge that membership of a specific vegetarian community will involve acceptance of its distinctive customs and shared practices.

As a second example let us turn to an esoteric technical activity. Acupuncture is now routinely employed in Western countries as a way of achieving anesthesia, in dentistry for example. Consider that dentists may share the practice of acupuncture, pass it on to trainees as a skill, and yet have no elaborated verbal theory of what it is or how it works. Here is a nice example for those who would define practice in contrast with theory, seen as no more than a rationalizing gloss laid upon it, as it were. In its move from the context of its development into Western medicine, acupuncture lost its theoretical baggage and acquired a different overlay of glosses. Or so they might wish to say. For there is an alternative conception, according to which acupuncture is now two different practices, two different bundles of practical activity and linguistic activity, one Western one Eastern, each of which may now develop and grow in different directions.

Finally let us take an example from a military context. Consider the members of a company of cavalry. They too might be said to be the possessors of a shared practice: manifest in their riding, in their use of weapons, and generally in the business of mounted combat. Such practices may be acquired through an extended military training and sustained and developed as part of a military culture transmitted from generation to generation. The reason for the choice of this example will become clear later. For the moment, simply note that to master the practice of mounted combat in a cavalry company is to participate in something done by a group.

I shall rely heavily on these examples in what follows, but whilst ostension will remain my favored method of addressing practices it may be worth supplementing it with a rough and ready verbal statement. Let practices be socially recognized forms of activity, done on the basis of what members learn from others, and capable of being done well or badly, correctly or incorrectly. This is a very broad description, but it nonetheless fails to encompass many ways of understanding practices encountered in the literature and it may prove useful for just that reason.

On the scope of theories of practice

If we move on now, and use the examples to explore what accounts of practice can and cannot do, we shall at the same time become more familiar with practices and with the problems involved in describing them adequately. As Ted Schatzki has remarked (this volume), practice is now frequently identified as ‘the primary generic social thing.’ Indeed it is sometimes said to be the only social thing. And there are ‘theories of practice’ wherein this assertion plays an essential role, and its oxymoronic character seems to go wholly unremarked. Perhaps it is typical of newly introduced theories that exaggerated claims are made for their scope. In any event, it is important to recognize that exaggeration is involved here, and that a more modest account of the scope of ‘theories of practice’ must be accepted. In particular, it must be recognized that: (a) no simple either/or contrast can be made between ‘theory’ and ‘practice’; (b) no indefeasible distinction can be established between visible external practices and invisible, internal states; (c) any attempt to give a satisfactory description of social life must make reference to much else besides practice; and (d) practice does not account for its own production and reproduction.

Let us take the four points in order. The acupuncture example is a good basis for dealing with the first point. It beautifully illustrates the flaw in any view which places theory prior to practice and sees the latter as somehow ‘implied by’ the former. But whilst it is indeed important that the sticking-in of needles is not seen purely as the expression of a theory of the body, as an effort to balance ying and yang in the patient for example, it is equally wrong to invert the relationship. The practice of acupuncture is not the sticking-in of needles without thought. The practice should be treated as involving thought and action together, and in so far as this is the case, embodied theory, as it were, is a part of practice itself. This, of course, is a standard point, but it is an important one. Indeed, if the practice of acupuncture is understood in this way it will serve also as a reminder of the way that agreement in practice characterizes collectives in many other esoteric technical fields, including even the ‘pure’ natural sciences. Thomas Kuhn’s identification of scientific paradigms as the crucial foci of agreement in scientific communities is consistent with this. Paradigms are not theories but practices, ‘accepted examples of actual scientific practice—examples which include law, theory, application and instrumentation together; they are examples selected as model achievements, ways of solving problems known to work in one case and available to guide practice in other cases’ (Kuhn 1970:10). In operating on the basis of a shared paradigm scientists in a given field agree in their practice. It is perfectly possible for them to press forward cooperatively on the basis of this agreement, whilst being in radical disagreement with each other at the level of ‘philosophy’ or in their abstract theoretical ideas.

With regard to the second point, it is a great virtue of accounts of social practices that they are based on something observable. But it is important not to be tempted into a positivist or phenomenalist or behaviorist justification of them. Practices are forms of action, and all the familiar arguments about the difference between action and behavior are relevant here. Descriptions of social life as practice are, in the last analysis, as ‘theory laden’ as any other descriptions. It is worth pointing out also, indeed it is probably the more important point, that ordinary members take a theoretical perspective in orienting to each other’s practice. When one member successfully engages in a practice, what this invariably betokens to others is the possession of a competence or a power. The inference from performance to capacity is made. Thus, the membership as a whole conies to know itself not as a performing membership but as a membership with the power to perform—as, that is, a set of competent members. And the use of these two last words indicates that many social theorists themselves see social life in much the same way, not merely as members doing things but as members able to do a range of things. In the last analysis, talk of practices is talk of powers—and all the difficulties associated by theories of social power have to be faced by accounts of practices.²

To engage in a practice is to exercise a power. This equivalence is worth bearing in mind in considering the third point made above. Powers are exercised at need by active agents; they are, as it were, switched on and off as expediency or inclination or whatever else requires. Practices are enacted in the same way. Or rather, what is called the active exercise of a power may equally be called the enactment of a practice. But a whole range of further sociologically interesting factors are material to understanding the exercise of powers. A cavalry charge is a fearful unleashing of powers. It may unfold as a practiced routine, a manifestation of a shared social practice, but the target of the charge and the signal that unleashes it are further features of equal sociological interest. Both these things are extrinsic to the ‘shared practice’ itself, and need to be understood by reference to ‘members’ knowledge’ in a broader sense. The company of cavalry knows that it should charge on the signal of its commanders.³ The commander selects the target of the charge mindful partly of the lie of the land and the enemy dispositions, partly of an accepted and authoritative body of knowledge of military strategy, partly of memories of past charges. Notice too how the company of cavalry may stand fast and not charge at all, and even conceivably decide the course of the battle by standing fast, by its latent powers being taken into account in the calculations of the commanders of other military formations and thereby affecting their strategies. This indeed is a nice symbol of the necessity of references to knowledge and experience in making sense of social activities.

A charge of cavalry must be understood not as the mere enactment of a practice, but as its knowledgeable, informed and goal-directed enactment. It is necessary to make reference to more than practice itself in order to understand it. It is true that idealist writers have sometimes overlooked the role of practice altogether in contexts like this, and described military engagements purely by reference to the ratiocination of generals (and their outcomes by reference to the ‘genius’ of one and the ‘stupidity’ of another). But to react against excesses of this kind by giving attention exclusively to the role of practice is merely to indulge in another form of excess. It amounts to an ungrounded prejudice in favor of know-how at the expense of know-that, in favor of skill and competence at the expense of information and representation. In the vocabulary of psychology, wherein valuable empirical studies of both exist, it amounts to an exclusive concentration on procedural memory and a corresponding neglect of descriptive memory. Both of these forms of memory need to be taken into account; both are socially structured and both are implicated in social action.

The same example will serve as the basis for the discussion of the fourth and final point. Practices are often cited in order to explain things, including notably their own enactment. It may be said, for example, that something is done because it is traditionally done, or routinely done, or done because it is part of the practice of the collective. The problem of why human beings should enact the practice is thereby completely glossed over. It is as if the cavalry has to charge, twice a week perhaps, simply because it can charge, as if there is something automatic and compelling about the enactment of practices which makes it unnecessary to consider what moves or inspires the human beings involved.⁴

What are shared practices?

Practices are enacted by people, and simply because of this they are an insufficient basis for an understanding of the ongoing pattern of social life that they constitute. It is always necessary to ask what disposes people to enact the practices they do, how and when they do; and their aims, their lived experience and their inherited knowledge will surely figure amongst the factors of interest here. But it is not just a matter of asking what contingencies incline people to enact, or not to enact, practices, as if they exist like tools in a toolbox and it is merely a matter of explaining when and why one or another is picked out. The relationship of practices and people is far more intimate and profound than this. The next part of the discussion is concerned precisely with this relationship, but to appreciate what it involves it is necessary first to probe more deeply into the nature of shared practices.

An extended and detailed analysis by Stephen Turner (1994) has highlighted the difficulties that have to be faced in this context. If there are shared practices, then what is it that is shared? Turner confronts us with the horns of a dilemma: is a shared practice a single object (an essence, it is tempting to say, although Turner does not), when the problem of how the object/essence is transmitted and disseminated pure and unchanged must be faced; or is shared practice merely an aggregate of separate individual elements, when reference to practice ceases to have any fundamental theoretical interest? Turner notes that sociological theorists are especially prone to treat shared practice as a unity, a single object. They explain other things by reference to a shared practice conceived of as a real collective entity. Durkheim and Sumner are cited as examples here, and Turner emphatically rejects their collectivist approach, which speaks of ‘society’ or ‘custom’ or ‘the mores’ as a single object with causal powers. There is neither ground nor evidence for belief in the ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Practice Theory
• Part I: Practices and Social Orders
• Part II: Inside Practices
• Part III: Posthumanist Challenges
• Bibliography