Practice Theory and Research

Exploring the dynamics of social life

Gert Spaargaren, Don Weenink, Machiel Lamers, Gert Spaargaren, Don Weenink, Machiel Lamers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317326441
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

There has been an upsurge in scholarship concerned with theories of social practices in various fields including sociology, geography and management studies. This book provides a systematic introduction and overview of recent formulations of practice theory organised around three important themes: the importance of analysing the role of the non-human alongside the human; the reflexive nature of social science research; and the dynamics of social change. Combining a rich variety of detailed empirical research examples with discussion of the relevance of practice theories for policy and social change, this book represents an excellent sourcebook for all academic and professional researchers interested in working with practice theory.

Part I

Theoretical and methodological contributions to practice theories

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Chapter 1

Introduction

Using practice theory to research social life

Gert Spaargaren, Machiel Lamers and Don Weenink

Not, then, men and their moments. Rather moments and their men

Erving Goffman, 1967, p. 3

Introduction

Why and how are you reading this book? Maybe you read a review of it in a social science journal. Perhaps you were advised to do so by your lecturer to prepare that paper on practice-based research. Maybe you noticed a new cover and interesting title during your monthly stroll through the local library and read for another two minutes before deciding to take it on loan. Or perhaps you are sitting behind your office-desk and just received the book that you ordered online after a ‘content alert’ from the publisher.

Whatever made you reading this text as part of your daily activities, it is you as a unique individual who knows what you are up to do next. You are familiar with the situation and you know how to go on in daily life, how to take the next step. But suppose you were asked to study the behaviours and motivations of people going through similar moments like you now. People who are about to read and study a book on practices. How would you, in this particular case, frame and organize your research, both theoretically and methodologically? Theoretically, by asking yourself what kind of ‘decisions’ are at stake, and which factors are assumed to influence the process. Do emotions play a role in this? Do you happen to know the authors? Did the title of the book seduce you? The theoretical lens you decide to use will influence what you see and how much emphasis you will give to particular items and factors. Methodologically, you might wonder what qualitative and quantitative methods are available for getting to the situation in such a way that you gain the knowledge needed to understand similar situations elsewhere.

The methodological approach which is often suggested in situations like this is that you develop a survey or interview topic list to ask people about their motivations, meanings, experiences and interests for reading books in the first place and for selecting this book on practices in particular. Your research-focus in that case could be on a set of more or less well-known background variables (education, income, job, discipline, gender) combined with some stated preferences and values of the individuals. They are combined methodologically in order to predict future behaviours or to understand their meanings. Maybe you will be able to show that for students income turns out to be a more decisive factor when compared with tenured staff.

There is however an alternative approach possible. One that is challenging the assumptions behind the conventional approaches to study human behaviour and social change. This alternative approach is the central theme of the present volume. Theoretically, it suggests shifting the research focus away from studying individuals, their motives and background features primarily, towards a more in-depth investigation of ‘context’, or the activities, the social practices, they engage in. For our example of reading this book, the classroom, the library and the office are now included in the enquiries, as are the time-slots and the reading time being available (or not) for actually reading the book. The projected activities of the reading – glancing through, reading-with-highlighting, studying-while-abstracting – are not just contextualized but also investigated for their functionality in relation to the wider projects or programmes in which the reading activities of individuals are embedded. For example, perhaps you aimed to share your findings with a group of fellow students in next week’s class or you intend to write a book review for the journal of which you are an associate editor. Methodologically, the alternative approach suggests to employ methods of data collection and techniques of data analysis that allow you to gain a rich and detailed understanding of the situation. This implies that you consider using a range of techniques that are particularly relevant for ‘praxeologizing’ the would-be readers and their contexts. Both the theoretical and the methodological aspects of the alternative approach will be introduced and enhanced in this volume, by presenting key characteristics of contemporary practice theories and by showing how they can be put to use in empirical research.

The idea of shifting the analytical emphasis from the individual to the situation however is not new at all. When the sociologist Erving Goffman developed his micro-sociological or interactionist approach in the early 1960s, he emphasized the impact of contextual factors on even our ‘smallest behaviors’. To understand how people ‘behave in public places’ (Goffman, 1963) and ‘present themselves in everyday life’ (Goffman, 1959), sociologists must investigate the particular situations or moments as contexts which co-constitute behaviour. Goffman showed that analysing situations is an indispensable tool for understanding why and how people act and talk the way they do. Together with their fellow actors, individuals create a social unit which cannot be reduced to the motives, intentions and meanings of single individuals. The situation represents more than the sum of its constituting elements. Therefore Goffman (1963: 3) suggests that social scientists better focus their attention to ‘moments and their men’, or – as in the case of this volume – on ‘practices and their participants’ instead of using isolated individuals as the privileged starting point for theorizing and doing empirical research on the social.

The Goffman-motto of starting from situations while bracketing the individual is one of the key assumptions which are broadly shared among theorists of practices. We will discuss key assumptions and characteristics of theories of social practices in the sections to follow. The core assumptions refer to the nature of social practices and how they should be defined (or not), to the role of material, both human-made and naturally occurring objects and human agents within social practices, and to the more general assumption that society, social life that is, should be conceived in terms of interconnected practices (and nothing else). These assumptions of course influence the research design and the use of concepts and methodologies for analysing the dynamics of society. Because practice theories are rather young and not yet mainstream in social science, their application in empirical research tends to raise a number of questions that need to be confronted in some detail. With this book, we aimed to select a set of relevant questions and to elaborate them in both theoretical and empirical contexts.

Aims of the book

The family of practice theories, the key ontological assumptions they represent, the methodological and epistemological issues involved in the application of practice theories in empirical research, and the relevance of practice-based research for understanding social change in contemporary societies, are the central topics discussed throughout this volume. This seems like a rather broad agenda, but we will show that it is one with a clear focus. The aims of the book are twofold:

1 to demonstrate how practice theories can be used for empirical analyses that aim to understand social reproduction and social change;

2 to outline the conceptual and methodological challenges related to the use of practice theories when applied to both small and large social phenomena.

To meet these objectives the book includes a number of theoretical chapters that discuss the foundations of practice theory, that propose ways to conceptualize agency and power and their role in social change, and that clarify some of the methodological principles and discussions. Together with this introductory chapter, these theoretical and methodological chapters form Part I of the volume. Next to these theoretical chapters, the book offers empirical chapters that show how practice theories can be put to use in a wide variety of social contexts, while also taking up and discussing the conceptual and methodological challenges of practice approaches along the way. The empirical chapters focus on the analysis and assessment of social change in the situated here and now of single practices or small phenomena, such as being violent, playing tennis and undergoing medical treatment (Part II), as well as on changes in large phenomena, e.g. in bundles of practices extending in a wider scope of time-space, such as conservation tourism partnerships and the sustainable management of forests (Part III).

In order to prepare the reader for what comes next, this introductory chapter aims to provide a brief discussion of central concepts and key assumptions in practice theories, the debate between practice approaches and transition theory approaches with regard to the analysis of social change, and some of the methodological and policy aspects of practice-based empirical research. We conclude this introductory chapter by outlining the subsequent chapters in this volume.

Practice theories: key concepts and assumptions

Since The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory (Schatzki et al., 2001) practice theories seem to be steadily on the rise within the social sciences. Despite their popularity however, practice theories have not yet been assigned the status of a distinct family or category of social thinking, such as post-structuralism or interpretive sociology. So far, they do not appear as separate sections in the social theory handbooks and introductions, which appear so regularly nowadays (Calhoun et al., 2012; Wallace and Wolf, 2006). Of course the authors associated with the emergence of the field of practice theory are discussed in these volumes, most notably Anthony Giddens and Pierre Bourdieu. They are considered the founders of a movement or approach that laid out the conceptualization of the agency-structure relation as one of the key themes in social theory (King, 2004). Giddens and Bourdieu are – together with Bruno Latour – also a source of inspiration for contemporary practice theorists, such as Davide Nicolini, Annemarie Mol, Andreas Reckwitz, Theodore Schatzki, Elizabeth Shove, Alan Warde, Robert Schmidt and many others. These contemporary scholars carry out their practice theory inspired research in a variety of fields, such as food and health, sustainable consumption, sports, work and organization, and urban provisioning of energy, water and food.

Practice theories form a lively field of debates, conceptual innovation and research. They represent a contemporary social theory that inspires and appeals to many (PhD) students, since they expect the theory to offer them guidance on how to organize social science research. When using the lens of practice theories, researchers show particular sensitivities and preferences, while being keen on avoiding well-known pitfalls. The preferences often mentioned are to approach the social world as open, contingent, transitory and horizontal. Practice theories appeal to researchers’ intuitions as they seem to match well with the dynamics of the current horizontal, fluid and global network society (Castells, 1996, 2009; Urry, 2000). The pitfalls that practice-based researchers are keen to avoid refer to two forms of reductionism. The first are individualistic accounts of the social and the second are system perspectives of all kinds that emphasize order, systemic principles, structures and hierarchies. Research based on practice theories seeks to find the middle ground between voluntarist or subjectivist (society as the result of actions, values and preferences of sovereign individuals) and structural or objectivist (society as made up by structures which ‘govern’ the grand totality behind the backs of human actors) accounts of the social.

This book has been developed to comment on the present state of affairs in the field of practice theories and to make visible the kind of contributions practice theories can make to empirical research on social change. It draws upon different streams of practice theories and their authors, and shows the application of their concepts and ideas to a wide variety of social themes and contexts. With the book we do not claim to represent ‘the’ practice approach. We contend that practice theory should be seen as a family of theories, consisting, among others, of the above mentioned authors and their critics. Their ideas and contributions inspire us and are discussed in different chapters of the book. In this section, we share with the reader some of the conceptual issues and debates that are prominent among practice theorists. For each topic we indicate how we intend to deal with them in the context of the present volume.

Defining social practices?

All practice theorists claim that the study of social life should start with social practices. But what exactly is a ‘social practice’? A quick scan of the literature will tell you that there is not a single best definition of social practices around. Some authors even suggest not trying to provide one, since such a definition would run counter to the style of thinking and working represented by the open-ended practices ontology (Nicolini, 2012). We nevertheless selected a few definitions to develop a feel for the game.

Andreas Reckwitz regards practices as ‘routines of moving the body, of understanding and wanting, of using things, interconnected in a practice’ (Reckwitz, 2002a: 255). So there are elements which interconnect or organize social practices. Taking practices as the unit of analysis implies looking into the properties or elements that go together in human activity and that do not appear when studying human individuals or institutions at large. But what exactly are the components or elements? Practice theorists seem to agree on what they are, but they use different concepts to refer to them and provide different explanations for how they contribute to the organizing of practices. For example, with Shove et al. (2012) practices are constituted by combining (only) three main components: materials (e.g. bodies, things, technologies and tangible physical entities), competences (e.g. skills, know-how, techniques) and meanings (e.g. symbolic meanings, ideas and aspirations). It is through recurrent enactments (i.e. practices-as-performances) that a distinct and recognizable conjunction of these elements is established over time, with social practices then becoming visible as entities (practices-as-entities) which are embedded in broader nexuses or bundles of practices. As Shove et al. indicate themselves, although working with only three components or elements might be helpful when organizing empirical research on social change, it is at the expense of simplifying what social practices are about (Shove et al., 2012: 15).

A more elaborate description of elements of social practices is provided by Schatzki (2002, 2010) who argues that they consist of doings and sayings and material arrangements that hang together, organized by practical understanding, general understanding, rules and teleo-affective structures. A similar, even more elaborate definition of a practice is provided by (again) Reckwitz:

a routinized type of behaviour which consist of several elements, interconnected to one other: forms of bodily activities, forms of mental activities, ‘things’ and their use, a background knowledge in the form of understanding, know-how, states of emotion and motivational knowledge.

(Reckwitz, 2002a: 249)

This definition is among the most cited and used ones. Both his and Schatzki’s definitions are very helpful with regard to theoretical clarification and debate, but rather difficult to operationalize into designs for empirical research on social change.

Instead of going for the most adequate definition, we would argue with Nicolini (2012) that practice researchers profit from taking into account the different formulations of the concept of social practices currently in use, using them to shape the research design in a way that fits best the theoretical or empirical tasks at hand. When quickly mapping practices for their key components, elements or dimensions, researchers can create room for more in-depth analyses of specific elements, their hanging together in practices and their dynamics of change. As we will show in the empirical chapters of the book, just mapping designated practices for their (for example three, with Shove et al., 2012) components, will not do when the aim is to arrive at a convincing analysis of the dynamics of change in society. For a more in-depth understanding of social change, the rules and teleo-affective structures that organize practices, the emotions at stake and the ways in wh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• List of abbreviations
• Part I Theoretical and methodological contributions to practice theories
• Part II Zooming in on practices as performances
• Part III Zooming out on practices as embedded entities
• Index