DAVIDE NICOLINI

Practice Theory, Work, & Organization An Introduction

Practice Theory, Work, and Organization

OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES

Introduction

1.1 What is new? The affordance of practice theories

• Emphasizes that behind all the apparently durable features of our worldfrom queues to formal organizations-there is some type of productive and reproductive work. In so doing it transforms the way in which we conceive of social order and conceptualize the apparent stability of the social world (the nature of social structures, in sociological jargon, as a socio-material accomplishment).
• Forces us to rethink the role of agents and individuals; e.g. managers, the managed, etc.
• Foregrounds the importance of the body and objects in social affairs.
• Sheds new light on the nature of knowledge and discourse.
• Reaffirms the centrality of interests and power in everything we do.

• A practice-based approach suggests that the basic units of analysis for understanding organizational phenomena are practices, not practitioners. Practices thus come first, because it is only once we appreciate the set of practices involved in a scene of action that we can ask what sort of agency and ‘actor-ship’ is made possible by these specific conditions. Practice theories are thus an alternative to the (many) views which suggest that organizational phenomena stem from the more or less rational action of individual subjects (Cohen 2000). In other words, practice theories require a ‘Copernican revolution’ in addressing many of the seemingly familiar phenomena in organization and management studies.
  In so doing, however, they offer an opportunity to reinterpret all imaginable organizational phenomena, suggesting for example that the object of inquiry should be managerial and entrepreneurial activities, not managers and entrepreneurs; strategy making and sale practices, not strategists and sales persons; leadership practices, not leaders. Adopting a practice-based view thus opens a Pandora’s Box that holds a potential treasure trove for scholars.
• Practice theories do more than just describe what people do. Practices are, in fact, meaning-making, identity-forming, and order-producing activities (Chia and Holt 2008, Nicolini 2009b). Accordingly, practice-based approaches steer away from the misleading idea that by simply observing the activities of the world in more detail, one gets closer to ‘reality’ (what is known as naïve empiricism). Practice-based theories use a performative perspective to offer a new vista on the social world. As I discuss below and explain in depth in Chapter 9, practice theories are thus necessarily theorymethods packages that produce a shift in our understanding of social and organizational phenomena. The idea that social science is simply about capturing what people do is, in fact, still very much compatible with the positivist and rationalist project that practice theories try to overcome (Geiger 2009, p. 132).
• Practice-based approaches consider cognition and sense-making as emerging from the practices carried out in an organization (see, for example, Chapter 7). In this sense, a practice-based view is an alternative to cognitive perspectives that try to explain organizational conduct and phenomena as something stemming from the mind or brain of an individual.
• The practice view embraces the idea that organization emerges as the result of sense-making, but eschews the idea that sense-making constitutes an intangible mental process, a form of symbolic exchange, or an abstract processes of coordination based on some type of communicative processes (Weick 1979; Hutchins 1995). Sense-making and knowing are thus foregrounded, but they are located in the material and discursive activity, body, artefacts, habits, and preoccupations that populate the life of organizational members.
• Practice theories suggest that organizations and institutions are made and remade thanks to material and discursive work. In so doing, practice theories support a dynamic view of institutions and offer a set of concepts to further the understanding of promising but still rather vague and often individual notions such as ‘institutional work’ (Lawrence et al. 2009).
• Practice theories accept that discursive practices are central to the construction and reproduction of all organizational and social things, but resist the idea that language and discourse (understood as language in action) alone can explain all the features of organizational life. Practice approaches suggest that we need theories that take into account the heterogeneous nature of the world we live in, which includes an appreciation that objects and materials often bite back at us and resist our attempts to envelope them with our discourses.
• Practice theories depict the world in relational terms as being composed by, and transpiring through, a bundle or network of practices. In so doing they join forces with other relational sociologies and reject the idea that the world comes nicely divided into levels and factors, or that there is a fundamental distinction between micro and macro phenomena (Reckwitz 2002; Latour 2005). Practice theories conceive social investigation as the patient, evidence-based, bottom-up effort of understanding practices and untangling their relationships. They question how such practices are performed, and how connected practices make a difference; they ask why it is that the world that results from the coming together of several practices is the way it is, and how and why it is not different.
  Practice theories are thus complementary to all variants of realism (both naïve and critical) in that they ask how the apparent features of our daily world that realists and critical realists trade in, are brought into existence in the first place.

1.2 There is no such a thing as a unified practice theory

1.3 Practice theories and the study of work and organization

1.3.1 RETURNING TO PRACTICE: A WEAK AND STRONG PROGRAMME?

1.4 The content and structure of the book

1.5 The rolling case study

1.5.1 WHAT IS TELEMEDICINE?

1.5.2 WHAT IS CHRONIC HEART FAILURE?

1.5.3 TELEMONITORING IN GARIBALDI

1.6 Words of thanks

NOTES

1. As early as 1984 Sherry Ortner was writing about the ‘growing interest’ in the concept of practice and suggested that this interest had been going on for ‘several years’ (Ortner 1984, p. 144).
2. See Cohen (2000) for an in-depth discussion. Norms and decisions are, in fact, carried by practices that the individual contributes to perpetuate but does not own. Moreover, following a practice has an inherently tacit dimension, as practical knowledge is inscribed in the body and in artefacts and, as such, is not subject to deliberation. Accordingly, actions can only take place as part of a practice and they cannot constitute the building block of sociality.
3. Or even worse, a dictionary definition. Another reason is that several authors such as Marx, Bourdieu, Heidegger, and also Garfinkel, do not provide a definition of practice.
4. The existence of different levels of engagement with practice theory has been also observed by Feldman and Orlikowski (2011) who distinguish between an empirical, a theoretical, and a philosophical focus on practice in organization theory (p. 1240); and Corradi et al. (2010) who differentiate between practice as a ‘way of seeing’ and ‘practice as an empirical object’ (p. 268).
5. The presence of these two different programmes is due in part to the bandwagon effect mentioned above. When new innovations start to be perceived as fashionable, members of a community tend to jump on the bandwagon (and are later forced to do so by peer pressures) in order to reap the practical and/or legitimization benefits afforded by the new approach (Erlingsdottir and Lindberg 2005). This, however, does not necessarily require full conversion to the new paradigm. Jumping on the bandwagon can also be achieved by adopting the new label while continuing to do what one was doing before (‘isonomism’ or putting a new label on an old bottle); or, vice versa, by adopting the new approach without changing the existing name (‘isopraxism’, as in the case of established approaches that join forces with the new fashion in order to reap some its benefits in terms of visibility and influence).
6. Significantly, the above quote continues as follows: ‘Particularly crucial are field studies that examine work practices and relations in situ. Students of work have repeatedly shown that work practices are highly situated…in fact people are likely to misreport with whom they interact during the course of the day… For this reason, ethnography, participant observation and other qualitative methods have continued to play a more prominent role in the sociology of work and occupations, and in industrial relations, than they have in organization studies’ (Barley and Kunda 2001, p. 85-6). Put more clearly, Barley and Kunda, who are two sophisticated ethnographers, provide support for a strong, not a weak practice approach.
7. To see how this can make a difference we can briefly compare weak and strong ways of examining the practice of strategy making, one of the areas where the practice idiom has been more successful (Johnson et al. 2007; Golsorkhi et al. 2010). Many of the contributions from the first generation of the so called strategy-as-practice approach would fall within the weak programme. This is because the original concern of these studies was with 'how managers actually “do strategy” (Whittington 1996, p. 732). In other words early strat-egy-as-practice studies focused mostly on examining in fine detail the day-to-day internal life of strategy processes by describing, often with a sense of awe and admiration, meetings, workshops, strategy making sessions, and other micro-activities of skilled individuals.
   The goal of these descriptions was to respond to questions such as ‘where and how is the work of strategizing and organizing actually done?’ and ‘who does this strategizing and organizing work, and with what skills and tools?’ (Whittington 2003, p. 119).

2

Praxis and Practice Theory: A Brief Historical Overview

2.1 The legacy of Greek classical thought and the demotion of practice in the Western tradition

2.1.1 PLATO'S INTELLECTUALIST LEGACY

2.1.2 ARISTOTLE ON PRAXIS

2.2 The demotion of practice in the Western tradition

2.3 The rediscovery of practice: Marx, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein

2.3.1 MARX

2.3.2 NIETZSCHE, HEIDEGGER, AND THE PRIMACY OF PRACTICE IN THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL TRADITION

2.3.3 WITTGENSTEIN: INTELLIGIBILITY AS PRACTICE

• Practices are a given in human life; they are the ‘regular ways of acting’ that articulate the characteristics of our forms of life.
• Practices have a day-to-day performance dimension as well as a long-term aspect. They imply an element of training and exercise and, similar to traditions and customs, they are something to which people find themselves conforming. They are therefore just carried out and generally require no reasons to justify them. In other words, at some point, we ‘follow rules blindly’ and ‘practice has to speak for itself’.
• Practices in their active and sensuous dimension play a central role in constituting signs as meaningful vehicles of human communication and hence,
• Practices constitute the bedrock of sociability.
• Practices indicate the fundamental contextual, albeit not arbitrary, character of sense-making. One and the same sentence can, in different contexts, express a quite different thing, although we cannot freely choose its meaning.

2.3.4 THE RETURN OF PRACTICE IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIAL THOUGHT

• The relationship(s) between human action and a different phenomenon called ‘the system’. The new practice-oriented sensitivity meant that this traditional issue is treated in a novel way in the sense that the relationships and the determination can go either way; that is, the system has an impact on practices and practices have an impact on the system. In fact, as we shall see in a moment when discussing the work of Giddens, for many authors the two are inextricably linked and can be understood as two ways of looking at the same phenomenon. Seeing the system as instantiated by practices implies, moreover, that it cannot be broken into units or levels. The system is in fact a ‘relatively seamless whole’ (Ortner 1984, p.
  148) in which, however, not all dimensions and practices have the same significance: ‘at the core of the system are the specific realities of asymmetry, inequality and domination’ (ibid.) Therefore, unlike, for example, in the symbolic interactionist tradition, practices always have political implications so that the study of practice is after all the study of all forms of human action, but from a particular political-angle (ibid.).
• What people actually do. Our attention is drawn towards understanding how and under what conditions action is actually carried out. The object of inquiry becomes the capacity of humans to perform actions in a competent way, the temporal organization of such action, and the resources that make this possible. Nowhere is this more visible that in the work of Harold Garfinkel (1967) who took as the main topic for his investigations the study of practical reason and practical reasoning and the accomplishment of practical tasks in specific and ‘real’ situations, court rooms, police stations, and social science institutions.
• The role of the agent in the process of production and reproduction. One of the main attractions of the emerging practice approach was the possibility to make room for both an informed and intelligible agent and an organized context for action that constitutes a field of possibilities and impossibilities for the doing of that agent. Against the excesses of methodological individualism and the (premature) ‘death of the individual’ announced by French structuralists, practice theory opens the possibility of making sense of individuals as the main ‘carriers’ of the system. As Giddens put it: ‘the pressing task facing social theory today is not to further the conceptual elimination of the subject, but on the contrary to promote a recovery of the subject without lapsing into subjectivism. Such recovery, I wish to argue, involves a grasp of what cannot be said (or thought) as practice’ (1979, p. 44). Practice theory therefore tended to dissolve the distinction between
  micro and macro, and to institute continuities that help explain both how the ‘system’ can be reproduced in practice and, at the same time, how practice can become the locus of variation, innovation, and change.

NOTES

1. 'In the Republic Plato argues that the best life for human beings is the life of the philosopher, a life devoted to learning and the contemplation of truth. The Republic also argues that the best life is a life “ruled” by reason, in which reason evaluates, ranks, and orders alternative pursuits (Nussbaum 1986, p. 138).
2. One notes that a poietic or praxis approach correspond to two deeply different paradigmatic perspectives on the organization phenomenon, one focused on organizations as entities set up to generating some output, as e.g. in the open systems tradition, the other one interested to explore organizations as entities that once established aim at self-perpetuation by any means, of which producing an output is just one. For an in-depth and comprehensive discussion see Eikeland (2008).

3 Praxeology and the Work of Giddens and Bourdieu

3.1 Giddens: practice as the basic domain of study of the social sciences

3.1.1 GIDDENS' VIEW OF PRACTICE

3.1.2 GIDDENS AT WORK

3.2 Bourdieu's praxeology: an overview

3.2.1 ON HABITUS

3.2.2 HOW HABITUS PRODUCES PRACTICE

3.2.3 THEORIZING PRACTICE

3.2.4 BOURDIEU'S PRAXEOLOGY AND THE STUDY OF WORK AND ORGANIZATION

Rolling case study: Telemedicine and the nursing habitus ${}^{34}$${}^{34}$^(34){ }^{34}

NOTES

1. The term ‘social praxeology’ was firstly used by Loic Wacquant for giving emphasis to the central role of practice in Bourdieu and Giddens’ work (see Wacquant, 1992). The term was also used for describing the methodology of the Austrian school of economics associated with the work of Von Ludwig Mises (see in particular von Mises 1949). Von Mises’ economic theory was strongly action-based and centred on the assumption that human action is always a conscious aiming toward one or more chosen goals.
2. ‘The basic domain of study of the social sciences . . . is neither the experience of the individual actor, nor the existence of any form of social totality, but social practices ordered across space and time’ (Giddens 1984, p. 2).
3. The following somewhat long paragraph from the Constitution of Society (Giddens 1984) is probably the best summary of Giddens’ theory of structuration:
   Structure, as recursively organised sets of rules and resources, is out of time and space, save in its instantiation and coordination as memory traces, and is marked by an “absence of the subject”. The social system in which structure is recursively implicated, on the contrary, comprises the situated activities of human agents, reproduced across space and time. Analysing the structuration of social systems means studying the modes in which such systems, grounded in knowledgeable activities of situated actors who draw upon rules and resources in the diversity of action contexts, are produced and reproduced in interaction. Crucial to the idea of structuration is the notion of duality of structure … The constitution of agents and structures are not two independently given sets of phenomena, a dualism, but represents a duality.
   According to the notion of the duality of structures, the structural properties of social systems are both the medium and outcome of the properties they recursively organise. Structure is not “external” to individuals…structure is not to be equated with constraints abut always both constraining and enabling (p. 25).
4. ‘This book [The Constitution of Society], indeed, might be accurately described as an extended reflection upon a celebrated and oft-quoted phrase to be found in Marx. Marx
   comments that “Men [let us immediately say human beings] make history, but not in circumstances of their own choosing”. Well, so they do. But what a diversity of complex problems of social analysis this apparently innocuous pronouncement turns out to disclose!’ (Giddens 1984, pp. xx-xxi).
5. The example is from Callinicos (1985).
6. According to Giddens, in a scenario typical of what he calls ‘cold societies’, traditions operate as a mechanism that prevents routines from becoming the object of reflexive monitoring. Changes of major routines only happen as a consequence of external influences such as environmental changes, disasters, or the establishing of relations of dependence or conflict with other different social groups. In this case, certain traditional practices are simply replaced by others without altering the basic mechanism. Things became quite different, however, with the introduction of mass literacy and wide access to writing and, more recently, to the media. When tradition is thematized as such, it ceases to be pure social reproduction and becomes subject to interpretation; this implies the necessary emergence of divergent interpretations of established norms and hence their de-routinization.
   This in turn requires the adoption of an array of strategies of mending and restoration both at the level of discursive practices and social structures corresponding to what Bauman calls the rise of intellectuals as legislators (1992). This phenomenon has become particularly acute in what Giddens went on to define as the Western ‘reflexive society’, connoted by a systematic and progressive disavowal of all forms of legitimization, starting with tradition and ending with rationality, that undermines at the very root not only the routine-based texture of the everyday but also the associated sense of ontological safety.
7. Besides the accumulation of variation derived from imperfect reproduction and the consequent incremental drift of practices, Giddens identifies de-routinization as a second source of change.
8. Schatzki (1997), p. 290.
9. See for example Mestrovic (1998).
10. The quote is from Storper (1985, p. 419). For an analysis of Giddens from a critical perspective, see for example Willmott (1999) and Craig (1992).
11. See Gregson (1989) for an extensive discussion.
12. See Jones and Karsten (2003) and Pozzebon and Poisonneault (2005).
13. Quoted in Callinicos (1985), p. 144.
14. See Orlikowski (2000).
15. The expression is taken from Whittington (1992). For an extensive review of the influence of structurationism on strategic management research see Pozzebon (2004).
16. See Schatzki $(1996;1997)$$(1996;1997)$(1996;1997)(1996 ; 1997) for an in-depth discussion of this weakness of Giddens’ work.
17. Le Sens Pratique, the title of the French edition of Bourdieu (1990) has been translated in English as The Logic of Practice; this expression however captures only in part the many nuances of the term that ‘sens’ has acquired in all in neo-Latin languages (‘senso’ in Italian and Spanish, ‘sensu’ in Portuguese). ‘Sens’ means in fact at the same time, direction (of a road or journey), sense (as faculty of sensation and feeling), sensation, and meaning (as in ‘it makes sense’, it is sensible).
18. While in his early work on practice (Bourdieu 1977), subjectivism is made to include phenomenological and ethno-methodological approaches (the latter considered as the currently active school of the former, see p. 3), the target of latter work is more extreme positions like Sartre’s ‘imaginary anthropology’. Although Bourdieu does not provide explanations for this change of heart, one may speculate that, being the reflective and dynamic author that he is, he hasn’t remained indifferent to comments such as those made in Francois Heràn’s (1987),
    who clearly demonstrated the continuities between the work of Bourdieu and that of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty.
19. For an extended discussion of the historical genealogy of the idea of habit and habitus, see Heràn, 1987.
20. See Di Maggio (1979), p. 64 and ff.
21. For an extended discussion of the similarities and differences between Bourdieu, Husserl, and Merleau-Ponty, see Heràn (1987) and Crossley (2001).
22. See Bourdieu (1984), p. 101.
23. Bourdieu cautions against taking the formula too seriously. In fact, it is a very poor depiction of his complex and rich theory. For one thing, for example, the formula doesn’t convey the idea of the recursive nature of all the processes under scrutiny and hence it would require at a minimum a few re-entrant paths to indicate a feedback loop between practices and field, practice and social capital, and practice and habitus.
24. See Harker et al. (1990), p. 7.
25. For an in-depth examination of this point, see Lau (2004), pp. 378-9.
26. Bourdieu doesn’t exclude the possibility that agents make explicit their modus operandi, especially when automatism breaks down. However, this form of reflexivity and the subsequent use of representation of practice in practise always remains subordinate to the pursuit of a practical result, in such a way that the practical pursuit bestows meaning on the representation-something that is not available to un-engaged scholars (see Bourdieu 1990, p. 91).
27. Bourdieu is aware of his tendency to intellectualism: see Bourdieu (1977), p. 117.
28. See Dreyfus and Rabinow (1993) for a discussion.
29. ‘A scientific practice that fails to question itself does not, properly speaking, know what it does’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, p. 236).
30. ‘The goal of sociology is to uncover the most deeply buried structures of the different social worlds that make up the social universe, as well as the “mechanisms” that tend to ensure their reproduction or transformation’ (Bourdieu 1996, p. 1).
31. My calculation is based on Golsorskhi and Huault’s (2006) statements that between 2000 and 2005 Bourdieu was cited in about sixty articles in organization and management journals. A rapid check on one of the available journal databases reveal that there are almost 1000 articles using the concept of tacit knowledge (while habitus generates less than fifty hits). My figure is thus very conservative but telling nonetheless.
32. Cordon bleu cooks were studied by Gomez et al. (2003); Wainwright, Williams, and Turner (2007) used habitus to explore ballet as both a bodily performance and an institutionalized genre; publicans and public sector workers were investigated respectively by McDounough (2006) and Mutch (2003).
33. See for example Lounsbury (2003; 2008); Lounsbury and Ventresca (2003); Battilana (2006); Lawrence and Suddaby (2006); Lawrence et al. (2009). The affordances of habitus as a meso level concept is discussed in some detail in Özbilgin and Tatli (2005).
34. Background information on the practice of telemedicine is provided in the Introduction.

4 Practice as Tradition and Community

4.1 Practice, tradition, and learning

4.2 Practice and community

• Mutual engagement: ‘practice resides in a community of people and relations of mutual engagement by which they can do whatever they do’ (ibid., p. 73).
• Joint enterprise negotiated by the community: ‘the enterprise is joint not in that everybody believes the same thing or agrees with everything, but in that it is communally negotiated’ (ibid., p. 78).
• Shared repertoire, which constitutes a major ‘source of coherence’: ‘I call a community’s set of shared resources a repertoire to emphasise its rehearsed character and its availability for further engagement in practice . . . it reflects a history of mutual engagement and remains inherently ambiguous’ (ibid., p. 83).
• Shared histories of learning: ‘learning in practice includes . . . evolving forms of mutual engagement, understanding and tuning the enterprise…developing their repertoire, styles, and discourses […] Learning is the engine of practice, and practice is the history of that learning’ (ibid., pp. 95-6).

4.3 Withdrawing the phrase 'community of practice'?

Rolling case study: Becoming part of the practice of telemedicine ${}^{18}$${}^{18}$^(18){ }^{18}

• After you report to work and before going to the telemedicine room you should pass by the nurses’ office. You need to check to see if there are any messages for you (some patients may have called during the night) or any other news. You then collect the list of patients to be discharged over the next few days who have been placed on the telemedicine list. You chat briefly with other ward colleagues, ask who the doctors on duty are, who is doing what that day (e.g. exercise tests, echocardiographs), and who did the night shift. In this way you find out who to ask in case of need and which doctors to avoid because they are in a bad mood.
• Once you get to the telemedicine room, check the faxes to see whether your patients’ test results have come in. Your patients know that before the scheduled phone calls, they have to do tests and send the results via fax. If they are there, you put them on a pile of records in the room.
• The first thing to do is reply to urgent requests. If the patients have called during the night you must call them immediately. For routine contacts it is
  pointless to call too soon because many of the patients still have to get up from bed, or measure their blood pressure, weight, etc. Many others will be out shopping or with their doctor. Since it is summer, you will be aware that the patients prefer to go out when it is cooler.

Nurse: (reading from her therapy sheet) ‘I spoke with $M{s}^{\ast \ast \ast \ast }\dots$$M{s}^{\ast \ast \ast \ast }\dots$Ms^(********)dotsM s^{* * * *} \ldots she talked about Lasix with her family doctor . . . now she takes it all very early in the morning because her doctor told her that what matters is the dosage…’
Cardiologist: ‘What?!? Absolutely not, no way!’
Nurse: ‘That’s what she has been told (opening her arms, an Italian gesture of discouragement)…she also told me that she is not using the sticking plaster because it makes her dizzy…’
Cardiologist: ‘What dizziness! She must not change her own therapy… and ensure that she’s using the plaster.’

NOTES

1. See Eisenstadt (1973) and Turner (1994) for an in-depth discussion.
2. For example, says Michael Polanyi: ‘By watching the master emulating and his efforts in the presence of his example, the apprentice unconsciously picks up the rules of the art, including those which are not explicitly known to the master himself’ (Polanyi 1958, p. 53).
3. The main target of Turner’s criticism is the notion of practices as hidden collective objects that exert some form of causal power over the behaviour of individuals. Having locked himself into a language of psychological causality that necessarily requires ‘something’ capable of exerting such influence, he argues that practices as shared presupposition can hardly play such a role because persistence, sameness in time, and sharedness become very difficult to account for. His proposed solution is therefore to drop the transindividual dimension of practices (‘practices without sharing’) and to revert to individual habits (1994) and more recently to connectionism (2001) to explain why people do very similar things all the time.
   Responding to his criticisms, Joseph Rouse (2001) argues that Turner’s otherwise flawed argument has the merit of revealing the fundamental ambiguity in the use of the notion of practices between practices as simple regularities and a stronger, normative view of practices. I would add that, by the same token, Turner also highlights some of the difficulties inherent in the association between practice and community.
4. The role of socialization in the reproduction of social order and related inequalities is also a central theme in the work of Bernstein (1975) and Bourdieu and Passeron (1990).
5. Imitation requires that the ‘source’ is recognized as authoritative for the mechanism to work. As Polanyi put it ‘[The] hidden rules [of an art] can be assimilated only by a person who surrenders himself (sic) to that extent uncritically to the imitation of another’ (Polanyi 1958, p. 53). It is worth reiterating that historically apprenticeship has always been a very authoritarian and exploitative social practice. For centuries apprentices were often reduced to the role of semi-slaves and subject to all sort of harassment-often reduced to beg to survive.
6. See Lave 1988; Lave and Wenger 1991; Chaiklin and Lave 1993.
7. I have discussed these themes in detail elsewhere. See for example Gherardi et al., 1998; Gherardi and Nicolini 2002.
8. Moscovici argued for the existence of socially determined universes which operate at both the cognitive and behavioural level (Moscovici 1969; Farr and Moscovici 1984). He called such constructs, reminiscent of Durkheim’s collective representations, social representations. Social representations are cognitive systems with a logic and language allowing the members of a community to organize the conditions and contexts of their interactions. On
   the one hand, social representations allow individuals and groups to construct a coherent vision of reality which they use to orient their behaviour. On the other, they are the outcome of mental activity modulated by the features of the social situation in which they are produced.
9. Please note that, for MacIntyre, agriculture and architecture are practices, while planting turnips and laying bricks are not (MacIntyre 1981, Ch. 13).
10. For an illustration of this aspect, see Gherardi and Nicolini 2002a, in which we describe that, to become a site manager in the construction industry, one has to learn to fear and not fear certain aspects of the practice.
11. Studies on organizational cultures have developed the similar concept of the occupational community (Van Maanen and Barley 1984; Kunda 1992; Barley 1986), focusing on the growth of local cultures, the socialization of their members, and the ‘organization’ as resulting from negotiation within communities and between the communities external and internal to a given organization.
12. Morineau (1983), quoted in Bauman (1999) p. xxxi.
13. In his essay, significantly titled ‘Who needs identity’ Hall suggests that [The concept] of identity does not signal that stable core of the self, unfolding from the beginning to end through all the vicissitudes of history without change . . . Identities are never unified and, in late modern times, increasingly fragmented and fractured: never singular but multiple, constructed across different, often intersecting and antagonistic, discourses, practices and positions: (Hall 1996, pp. 3-4; see also Bauman 1999 for a discussion).
14. It must be noted that when the concept of community of practice loses its critical and postfunctionalist flavour, it also forfeits much of its theoretical appeal. A non-processual version of community of practice becomes in fact very similar to other, better established and better developed concepts, such as that of profession and semi-profession, two notions with a long and robust legacy in the sociological tradition. For example, many of the more functionalist notions of community of practice circulating in the literature closely resemble Goode’s defining characteristics of professions. Consider, for example, the following definition of community of practice:
    [a COP is] a group of people who are informally bound to one another by exposure to a common class of problem. Most of us belong to more than one, and not just on the job: the management team; the engineers, some in your company and some not (Steward 1996).

5 Practice as Activity

5.1 The Marxian roots of cultural historical activity theory

5.2 The central tenets of cultural and historical activity theory

5.2.1 THE CENTRAL ROLE OF MEDIATION

5.2.2 THE ACTIVITY SYSTEM AS THE BASIC UNIT OF ANALYSIS

The characteristic triangular picture emphasizes the dimension of ‘systemness’ and suggests that each element performs a specific mediating function between the other two. Take, for example, the relation between the subject of work and the community. The picture suggests that this relation is mediated by the existence of a set of rules, expectations, conventions, and constraints. These are partly externalized in artefacts such as organizational charts and written codes, and partly internalized in the form of tacit codes of conduct. The picture thus indicates that the coexistence of a subject and a community depend on the presence of these mediating artefacts. It also suggests that the nature of these mediating artifacts is involved in determining the shape and form of the community and what/who counts as a subject. Finally, the picture also implies that a change or shift in any of these three poles is likely to reverberate on the other two. A change in the community (say, a new expert

5.2.3 THERE IS NO SUCH A THING AS AN OBJECT-LESS ACTVITY

5.2.4 THE CONFLICTUAL AND EXPANDING NATURE OF ACTIVITY SYSTEMS

5.2.5 THE INTERVENTIONIST NATURE OF CHAT

5.3 The weaknesses of a strong theory

Rolling case study: Telemedicine as an activity system

The attempt at stretching in time and space the existing traditional ways of caring for CHF patients soon encountered difficulties that could be interpreted as a major contradiction. The expansive effort conflicted, in fact, with one of the most entrenched, and hence seldom-noted principles of traditional medicine. Medical work is, in fact, still mostly organized around the convention of

Introducing distance between provider and client in medical encounters was, therefore, bound to problematize certain conventional assumptions of this well-established arrangement and upset some deeply entrenched practices. Two main problems soon became evident to the group of Garibaldi’s practitioners who tried to establish the new practice of telemonitoring. First, they discovered that the construction of the history of the patients-a necessary step for monitoring their condition-was obtained in practice through the combination of actions and artefacts, some of which had remained almost invisible. Not only did constructing a history of the evolution of a patient’s state implying recording in writing certain measurements such as changes in temperature and blood pressure, but building a patient’s history also depended on the mainly discursive practice of ‘handing over cases’ to personnel on the next shift.
This is a critical passage that determines whether a patient’s local trajectory is constructed or not, as it is impossible for staff on the wards to write absolutely everything down. By taking co-location away, so to speak, telemedicine had made visible one of the tacit principles of the existing practice but also created a rupture that needed repairing.

Please note that it was not only the identity of the nurse that shifted. One of the defining characteristics (and challenges) of healthcare work is that the patient is both the object and a subject in the activity. What it means to be a patient also radically changes within the context of the new activity. Telemedicine, in fact, depends on the active and knowledgeable work of the patients to succeed. In order for telemedicine to happen the patients need, among other things, to weigh

For years, the clinic at Z used telemedicine practices to look after its recently discharged patients who had gone through open heart surgery. The practice established at Z applied a form of ‘hybrid’ telemonitoring, partly face-to-face and partly distance monitoring. From its inception, the clinic at Z , unlike Garibaldi, sent nurses on housecalls at set times. The clinic thus aligned similar elements to Garibaldi in a different way. The result was to have nurses who were experts at handling patients face to face but not over the phone, and

Figure 5.6 The network of interactive activity systems behind the telemedicine at Z

Figure 5.7 The network of interactive activity systems behind the telemedicine at Garibaldi

NOTES

1. See for example Blackler 1993; Holt and Morris 1993; Blackler 1995; Engeström et al. 1996; Blackler et al. 2000; Engeström 2000, 2001; Blackler 1993; Miettinen and Virkkunen 2005; Engeström and Blackler 2005. Other areas where activity theory made significant inroads include human-computer interaction and information system design (Nardi 1996; Kaptelinin and Nardi 2006), education (Daniels 2001; Hedegaard 2001) and of course ‘western’ psychology (Cole and Engeström 1993; Cole 1996; Wertsch 1998).
2. Marx, Das Kapital, Book 1, chapter VII, section 1.
3. Leont’ev famously illustrates his thesis using the example of the practice of hunting; ‘A beater, for example, taking part in a primeval collective hunt, was stimulated by a need for food or, perhaps, a need for clothing, which the skin of the dead animal would meet for him. At what, however, was his activity directly aimed? It may have been directed, for example, at frightening a herd of animals and sending them toward other hunters, hiding in an ambush. That, properly speaking, is what should be the result of the activity of this man. And the
   activity of this individual member of the hunt ends with that. The rest is completed by the other members (…) What unites the direct result of (his) activity with the final outcome? Nothing other than his relation with the other members of the group. This relation is realised through the activity of other people . . . the connection between the motive and the object of an action reflects objective social relations, rather than natural ones’ (Leont’ev 1981, p. 210, quoted in Engeström, 1987, p. 54).
4. In Leont’ev words: ‘This result, i.e., the frightening of game, etc., understandably does not in itself, and may not, lead to satisfaction of the beater’s need for food, or the skin of the animal. What the processes of his activity were directed to did not, consequently, coincide with what stimulated them, i.e. did not coincide with a motive of his activity; the two are divided from one another in this instance. Processes, the object and motive of which do not coincide with one another, we shall call “actions”. We can say, for example, that the beater’s activity is the hunt, and the frightening of the game his action’ (Leont’ev 1981, p. 210, quoted in Engeström 1987, p. 56).
5. A similar process also applies between the level of action and activity. An activity that loses its motive and object can become an action.
6. ‘Our research did not aim to produce analytical academic reports only. It aimed to grasp developmental potentials and dynamics by initiating, supporting, and recording qualitative changes in the practical work activity itself. That is why this approach is called developmental work research.’ (Engeström 1990, p. 72).
7. CHAT intellectuals, of all people, should be aware that the conceptual artefacts they use in their practice of theorizing are bound to change the theory, not simply to represent and communicate it!
8. ‘Praxis denotes the moments of real human activity that occur only once . . . which distinguishes it from the notion of practice, which is used to denote a patterned form of action, inherently a theoretical signified’ (Roth and Lee 2007, p. 190).

6 Practice as Accomplishment

6.1 Ethno-methodology's view of everyday activity

6.1.1 ACCOUNTABILITY

6.1.2 REFLEXIVITY

6.1.3 INDEXICALITY

6.1.4 MEMBERSHIP

6.2 The implication of ethno-methodology for the study of (work) practices

6.3 The new generation of EM-orientated studies of work and organization

• EM’s praxeological accounts are necessarily data-driven. ${}^{13}$${}^{13}$^(13){ }^{13} For EM authors, the formal and recurrent features of practice need to be made visible and recognizable in and through the data. EM accounts, therefore, traditionally start from, or rotate around, a report on a piece of empirical research which is taken both as an illustration of the phenomenon at hand and the object of the subsequent analytical work. Practice is first exhibited for everyone to see, and then it is patiently and thoroughly dissected in search of the micro procedures, processes, and moves that make it the way it is. EM’s literary genre is often inspired by the natural sciences rather than other brands of social theory (Heritage 1984).
• EM’s praxeological accounts do not require specific sociological techniques to be employed. The rendering of practices is carried out using members’ natural language which, as I have shown above, already embodies the vernacular understanding of what is going on.
• Such accounts need to capture both the concerted and time dimensions inherent in lived practices. Courses of action develop in time, and such an emergence needs to be captured by describing in some way the sequential order of activities.
• Talk is, of course, a central feature of organizational life, and it needs to figure prominently in accounts of practices. In fact, EM as a programme shows that talk and practice are two different aspects of the same phenomenon and cannot be separated, not even for analytic purposes. Instead, how discursive and non-discursive practices co-exist in the pursuit of situated practical concerns becomes an empirical issue to be thematized in the research. On the other hand, however, EM also warns that attending to talk alone, as for example in certain linguistic interpretations of organizational phenomena (see e.g. Westwood and Linstead 2001), is insufficient for understanding practices: any account which doesn’t also pay attention to bodily movements, interactional choreographies, material landscapes, spaces, and tools cannot but provide a sensorially deprived and scarcelyrecognizable rendering of practices.
  To the extent that the architectures, machineries, and bodily techniques such as those identified by Foucault make up coherent order of practices, these need to be taken into account in the description.
• There is a need to assemble entire scenes. Lynch (1993) and Cicourel (1981) noted that practices cannot be understood by extracting a small segment out of a larger meaningful segment in that this contradicts the basic notion of indexicality according to which all practices are both context-dependent and context-renewing.

6.4 An unfinished task

Rolling case study: Accomplishing monitoring ${}^{16}$${}^{16}$^(16){ }^{16}

6.5.1 How to tell if a call is urgent before you hear what the patient has to say

6.5.2 Monitoring as a bodily choreography

NOTES

1. The expression is taken from Psathas 1980, p. 15.
2. I find the following definition by George Psathas particularly illuminating: ‘The topics of ethnomethological study thus become the methods contained within the ordinary activities of members which: (a) make practical actions and circumstances, commonsense knowledge of social structures, and practical sociological reasoning, analyzeable; and which (2) enable the discovery of the formal properties of practical actions themselves as ongoing accomplishments viewed “from within”, i.e. from members’ perspectives’ (Psathas 1980, p. 4).
3. Reflexivity features prominently in what is commonly taken as the canonical, albeit somewhat arcane, definition of the EM programme by Garfinkel: ‘Ethnomethodological studies analyse everyday activities as members’ methods for making those same activities visibly-rational-and-reportable-for-all-practical-purposes, i.e., “accountable,” as organisations of commonplace everyday activities. The reflexivity of that phenomenon is a singular feature of practical actions, of practical circumstances, of common sense knowledge of social structures, and of practical sociological reasoning. By permitting us to locate and examine their occurrence the reflexivity of that phenomenon establishes their study’ (Garfinkel 1967, p. vii).
4. The full quotation is as follows: ‘The notion of member is the heart of the matter. We do not use the term to refer to a person. It refers instead to mastery of natural language… We ask what it is about natural language that permits speakers and auditors to hear, and in other ways to witness, the objective production and objective display of common-sense knowledge, and of practical circumstances, practical actions, and practical sociological reasoning as well. What is it about natural language that makes these phenomena observable-reportable, that is account-able phenomena? For speakers and auditors the practices of natural language somehow exhibit these phenomena in the particulars of speaking and that these phenomena are exhibited is thereby itself made exhibitable in further description, remarks, questions, and in other ways for the telling’ (Garfinkel and Sacks 1970, p. 342).
5. For a list of these works see Garfinkel and Wieder 1992.
6. See for example Garfinkel and Wieder 1992, p. 175.
7. The example was originally used by Llewellyn (2008). The author examines the work of some well-known ethnographers such as Casey, Burawoy, and Du Gay, noting their tendency to leave unexplained several of the central concepts and activities in their description which, on the contrary, constitute the central concern of EM investigation.
8. The felicitous expression is from Psathas 1980, p. 12.
9. '[…] the unique adequacy requirement of methods is identical with the requirement that for the analyst to recognise, or identify, or follow the development of, or describe phenomena of order in local production of coherent detail the analyst must be vulgarly competent in the local production and reflexively natural accountability of the phenomenon of order he is “studying.” ’ (Garfinkel and Wieder 1992, p. 182).
10. One of the most famous cases is that of Sudnow (1978). Sudnow spent a decade first learning how to play piano, then how to play piano music that was recognized by other jazz musicians as jazz, and finally, how to instruct students in jazz piano. At the end of his inquiry, Sudnow fulfilled Garfinkel’s recommendation by developing a commercially successful ‘piano method’ widely used in the USA and available for inspection at http://www.sudnow.com.
11. The attacks against ethno-methodology during meetings of the American Sociological Association, such as those by of Coleman in 1967 and Coser in 1975, are well-known and well-documented (see e.g. Mullins 1973; Dingwall 1981). What is less widely known is that the controversy surrounding EM determined the almost complete marginalization of its practitioners from the sociological community for almost two decades and, more significantly, their almost total exclusion from journals and the academic job market in US universities.
12. One could note that Garfinkel and Wieder’s comments made in 1992 were, in fact, scarcely applicable to the European context. The attention to the lived work, the role of language, and processual and constructive nature of the organizing process, had already become a major concern in organization studies and had never disappeared from the agenda of labour process scholars in the UK and ergonomics in France.
13. The expression is taken from Heritage 1984, p. 243.
14. Empiricism is the philosophical position which emphasizes the primary role of experience, especially sensory perception, as the main source of ideas and knowledge. More specifically, empiricism is the epistemological theory that genuine information about the world must be acquired by a posteriori means, so that nothing can be thought without first being sensed. While overall the EM projects avoids the risk of overt naïve empiricism, it embraces a radical form of naturalism that espouses this type of criticism, especially when it affirms that the approach can actually access the hacceity of phenomena, and that its objects of work are ‘raw data’. Accusations of erring on the side of empiricism have been directed towards certain varieties of EM such as conversational analysis. Consider, for example, the following statement by its founder and leading figure:

Practice as the House of the Social: Contemporary Developments of the Heideggerian and Wittgensteinian Traditions

7.1 Why people do what they do

7.2 Practices and their organization

7.3 Practices and materials

7.4 How practices constitute action, sociality, the world, and themselves

Practices institute the spaces of intelligibility in whose terms they themselves proceed

Practices (together with materials) constitute social phenomena and 'house' them.

• Chains of actions descend very much from the fact that actions presuppose practice, as explained above.
• Commonality, orchestration, and prefiguration descend from the teleoaffective structure of the practices, and the rules and general understandings associated with them. The same also applies for the non-human elements.
• Material arrangements (artefacts, objects, symbols, and how they relate to each other and are positioned) are themselves organized according to the unfolding of the practice and its teleo-affective structure.

The world is a vast nexus of practices

7.5 Some further theoretical implications

7.6 Empirical and methodological consequences: a 'site' still under construction?

Rolling case study: Telemonitoring as a practice-order bundle ${}^{32}$${}^{32}$^(32){ }^{32}

NOTES

1. The expression is borrowed from Foucault who in one of his lectures explicitly used it in reference to Heidegger. See Foucault 1979, p. 147.
2. In organization studies this position has been developed especially by authors such as Chia and Holt (2006) and Tsoukas (2009).
3. See Schatzki (1997) for an extensive discussion and criticism of Bourdieu and Giddens.
4. Other formulations of the definition of practice include ‘temporary unfolding and spatially dispersed sets (or nexuses) of doings and sayings’ (Schatzki 1996, p. 89) or ‘open, temporally unfolding nexuses of action’ (Schatzki 2002, p. 72). An analysis of the evolution of Schatzki’s thought as transpiring from these different definitions goes beyond the scope of the present work.
5. He calls this a ‘unity in difference’ (Schatzki 1996, p. 47). The approach thus makes room for meaningful doings and speech acts that are performed by expressive bodies and do not require the intervention of verbal or written discourse. Shaking the head or winking, for example, are meaningful actions that do not have a discursive nature.
6. See for example Schatzki 1996; Schatzki et al. 2001; Rouse 2006.
7. Although several of these approaches also build on the work of Wittgenstein and Heidegger, they are strongly rejected as based on a fundamental misunderstanding: Schatzki, for example, calls Lyotard’s linguistic-only interpretation of Wittgenstein’s idea of language game ‘radically wrong’ (Schatzki 1996, p. 126).
8. Similarly to activity theory, these sets of sayings and doings are composed of increasingly complex wholes that Schatzki calls tasks and projects. Accordingly, the same sayings and doings can occur in different tasks, and several tasks often enter into the accomplishment of a project. The same term (e.g. writing) can designate either a task (as in writing comments
   while marking) or a project (as in writing an article), although in the first case the practice is marking an essay, while the other is publishing an article.
9. A classic example would be the state of flow (Csikszentmihalyi 1997). Flow is the mental state of operation in which a person in an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity.
10. In this sense it is not tacit.
11. ’ . . . memories are secured via complexes of actions, thoughts, and readinesses that are differentially distributed among participants in the practice: actions that pursue acceptable or enjoined orderings or that manifest general understandings; thoughts, discussions, and negotiations about which orderings are acceptable or enjoined or about what general understandings entail; all the sorts of acts of admonishment and sanction and readinesses thereto that contribute to the memory of rules; and feelings of satisfaction at certain events and distress at others’ (Schatzki 2006, p. 1869).
12. This is, of course, where practice theory encounters the tradition of symbolic interactionism.
13. Latour uses the concept of practice in different passages of his works (see e.g. 2005) but does not develop his theory of the social within the recognizable framework of practice theory. Indeed, Schatzki (2002) excludes actor network theory from the count of practice theories, and Latour probably did not shed tears about this. Latour’s debt to Heidegger and, less prominently, to Wittgenstein’s work is however not in doubt (see Latour 2005). Hence his inclusion here.
14. See Reckwitz (2002) for an extensive discussion.
15. ‘Accommodation’ and ‘mangling’ are constant traits of practices. We do not know in advance what a new artefact will do, as we cannot predict what other people, or even we ourselves will do. Therefore, pursuing a (scientific) practice always entail an important dimension of tinkering and tuning that, according to Pickering, works both ways, on human and non-human agency: ‘My basic image of science is a performative one, in which the performance-the doings-of human and material agency come to the fore. Scientists are human agents in a field of material agency which they struggle to capture in their machines. Further, human and material agencies are reciprocally and emergently intertwined in this struggle. Their contours emerge in the temporality of practice and are definitional and sustain one another.
    Existing culture constitutes the surface of emergence for the intentional structure of scientific practice, and such practice consists in the reciprocal tuning of human and material agency, tuning that can itself reconfigure human intentions’ (Pickering 1995, p. 21).
16. The neologism sociomateriality without the dash was introduced in organization studies by Orlikowski (2010).
17. See, in particular, Schatzki (2002) Ch. 1 for an in-depth discussion.
18. Wittgenstein famously developed this view in reference to the question of how to follow a rule.
19. Schatzki (2002) goes to some length to demonstrate that there are a variety of ways to conceive the notion of context, and that most of the current conceptions are faulty. Many authors tend, in fact, to equate context to a sort of static background against which events happen (not unlike the set in a play). Alternatively, context is used as a residual category: what we cannot explain we call context. Schatzki suggests that practice theory uses a particularly strong understanding of context which he calls a ‘contextured’ site. A contexture is a particular type of context where entities of different types co-exist. Contextured sites are contextures where entities are intrinsically part of their own context (p. 64). In simple terms, practices are both the cause of themselves and their outcome-so that practices perpetuate themselves, albeit imperfectly, in a quasi-recursive movement.
20. See Schatzki (2002).
21. The term ‘arrangement’ is used here to signal that sociality requires a minimal level of lives hanging together, and does not require the level of integration, coherence, and regularity usually associated with the term ‘order’.
22. Schatzki provided different versions of this argument. My illustration builds largely on Schatzki (2002, pp. 38-47) and Schatzki (2005).
23. We can see here the roots of Schatzki’s residual humanism in the discussion of the relation between people and objects above. While, ontologically, the world is a recursive mesh of practice and material arrangements, analytically we must start from the practices and not from the arrangements. This means that activities and objects are not equal-activities are more equal than their material counterparts (they carry more responsibility).
24. The issue of following rules and the foundation of normativity are, of course, two of the most debated issues in the history of human sciences. On the debate on the sources of normativity, see e.g. Korsgaard (1996).
25. Turner $(1994,2001)$$(1994,2001)$(1994,2001)(1994,2001) has raised a number of serious criticisms to this solution, arguing that no description of practice can exhaust all the variants of its performance, and therefore the ‘regularity’ of conduct among people cannot be explained terms of rules. People have different ideas of how to dress for the beach and to decide whether they are part of the same habitus or practice is impossible.
26. As we have seen in Chapter 2 Ortner (1984) calls this a theoretical triangle. Views diverge with regards to how durable such structures are. As discussed in Chapter 3, Bourdieu believed that habitus is very much constituted by existing objective conditions, or ‘the system’, while authors such as Pickering would strongly disagree.
27. The expression is from Latour 2005, p. 46. Latour uses the image of the actor on stage ‘who is never alone but part of a larger apparatus’.
28. See in particular Latour 2005.
29. Schatzki uses the expression emphatically in most of his writing. See Schatzki (1996) and especially Schatzki (2002): ‘It is important to emphasize that the organization of a practice describes the practice’s frontiers: A doing or saying belongs to a given practice if it expresses components of that practice’s organization. This delimitation of boundaries entails that practices can overlap’ (p. 87).
30. See for example Turner (1994).
31. See Schatzki 2002, p. 83.
32. Background information on the practice of telemedicine is provided in the Introduction.
33. I am using the same words to be found in Schatzki 2002, p. 166.
34. I told the story of the emergence of telemonitoring in Nicolini (2010).
35. The two sentences are taken from Schatzki 2002, p. 155.

8 Discourse and Practice

8.1 Conversation analysis: discourse as talk in interaction

8.1.1 THE BASIC ASSUMPTIONS OF CA AND THEIR IMPLICATIONS FOR THE UNDERSTANDING OF PRACTICE

8.2 Practice as discourse: Foucault and the Foucauldian tradition

• Discourse has a constitutive nature. Far from being a way of signifying and representing the world, discourse is involved in the definition and structuring of the lived world.
• Discourse is inherently material and heterogeneous. For Foucault, discourse is never to be reduced only to language and its mundane use. In fact, discursive formations cannot be reduced to their linguistic and symbolic elements alone. Rather, they must be seen as configurations of statements, techniques, interventions, and norms held loosely together by a body of anonymous historical rules directed to the practical exercise of power and control in specific organizational sites. The governmental technologies that constitute power in modern society are always heterogeneous, thus combining seamlessly discursive and non-discursive practices. Heterogeneity refers also to the fact that the rules of formation of discourses are obtained by assembling, in a novel way, existing discursive and non-discursive
  elements. Any discursive practice builds upon others and is defined in relation to them. Intertextuality ${}^4$${}^4$^(4){ }^{4} and interdiscursivity are therefore inherent in any discourse formation, and the relation between discursive practices, both historically and synchronically, is therefore complex and nonlinear. Moreover, because of all the tensions and conflicts implicated in this complex process of assembling and aligning heterogeneous and, at times, contradicting elements, the order of discourses, discursive formations, and their fields of statements are in a state of constant flux; that is to say, discourse is not a static entity as much as a living and constantly shifting process.
• Discourse ties the exercise of power and control to an organized array of socio-material discursive and non-discursive practices. At least later in his career, Foucault tended to conceive of power in discursive ways, or at least to focus on the discursive ways in which power manifests itself: ‘the practices that Foucault places so much weight upon-interview, counselling, and so forth-are to a substantial degree discursive practices’ (Fairclough 1992, p. 50). This establishes at the same time an inherent relation between power and knowledge, insofar as knowledge and belief are embodied and ingrained in the power relations and practices that give rise to them. It also clarifies the discursive nature of power, insofar as many of the practices and techniques of modern control are of a discursive nature; it finally sets discourse as both a major locus of power struggle and an object for that struggle.
  Discursive practices are not, therefore, simply the traces of past struggles or the outcome of systems of domination. Instead, they become both the object and the media of power struggles, the ‘very thing which is to be seized’ (Foucault 1970, p. 107) and the arenas where such struggles take place.
• Discourse and power are contingent and ‘subject-less’ overarching effects. The analysis of power and discourse should follow a ‘bottom-up’ or ascending, rather than descending, path. This aspect is especially visible in Foucault’s genealogic works. It descends from his notion of power as ‘employed and exercised through a net-like organization’ (Foucault 1980, in Reed 1998, p. 196) as opposed to the prevailing juridical or sovereign conceptions. Power/knowledge discourses should not be conceived of and/or studied as the result of intentional hegemony or domination strategies put in place by organized groups or classes. They must rather be considered as ‘highly provisional, localized and contingent expressions of a multiplicity of forces, energies, materials, and interventions consistent with an overarching framework of ontological imperatives and methodological protocols’ (Reed 1998, p. 197).

8.3 Critical discourse analysis

In order to ‘cut across’ the levels described in Figure 8.1, CDA analyses ‘context’ in four related ways: (1) the immediate, co-textual, and linguistic context of texts (CDA often uses ethnographic methods); (2) the intertextual and inter-discursive relationships between utterances, texts, genres, and discourse; (3) the extra-linguistic social variables and local institutional frames; and (4) the broader sociopolitical and historical context within which

8.4 Mediated discourse analysis

8.4.1 THE FIVE PILLARS OF MEDIATED DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

8.4.2 NEXUS ANALYSIS

Rolling case study: Telemonitoring: a conversation analysis view ${}^{13}$${}^{13}$^(13){ }^{13}

NOTES

1. According to Martin Rojo (2001), the emergence of the concept of discourse as practice stems from two related development in Western thinking: the ‘linguistic turn’ mentioned above and the more recent ‘reflexive turn’ in social theory. Both these development have been touched upon in Chapter 2, but it is useful to rehearse them again here in the context of the study of language and discourse.

9 Bringing it all Together: A Toolkit to Study and Represent Practice at Work

9.1 The need for a toolkit approach

• Practices constitute the horizon within which all discursive and material actions are made possible and acquire meaning (see especially Chapters 4, 5, 7, and 8).
• Practices are inherently contingent, materially mediated, and cannot be understood without reference to a specific place, time, and concrete historical context (see especially Chapters 6, 7, and 8).
• Practices are social accomplishments, even when they are attributed to individuals. Social actors (and actants, in radical theories such as actornetwork theory) emerge as part of a web of relationships and mutual dependencies on which they depend and to which they contribute (see especially Chapters 5, 7, and 8).
• While practices depend on reflexive human carriers to be accomplished and perpetuated, human agent capability always results from taking part in one or more socio-material practices (see especially Chapters 3, 4, and 7).
• Practices are mutually connected and constitute a nexus, texture, field, or network. Social co-existence is in this sense situated in the field of practice, and is both established by it and establishes it. At the same time, practices and their association perform different and unequal social and material positions, so that to study practice is also to study power in the making (see especially Chapters $3,5,7$$3,5,7$3,5,73,5,7, and 8 ).

9.2 A package of theories and methods

9.2.1 THE THEORY-METHOD PACKAGE: AN OVERVIEW

9.2.2 ZOOMING IN ON PRACTICE: IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE DEED

9.2.3 REPRESENTING PRACTICE THROUGH FOREGROUNDING THE ACTIVE ROLE OF TOOLS, MATERIALS, AND THE BODY

9.2.4 REPRESENTING PRACTICE THROUGH ZOOMING IN ON ITS ORIENTED AND CONCERNED NATURE

9.2.5 APPRECIATING PRACTICE AS BOUNDED CREATIVITY

9.2.6 REPRESENTING PRACTICE BY FOCUSING ON LEGITIMACY AND LEARNING

9.3 Zooming out by trailing practices and their connections

9.3.1 A PALETTE FOR ZOOMING OUT

• What are the connections between the ‘here and now’ of the practising and the ‘then and there’ of other practices? Which other practices affect, enable, constrain, conflict, and interfere, etc., with the practice under consideration? How are configurations, assemblages, bundles, and confederations of practices kept together?
• How does the practice under consideration contribute to the ‘wider picture’? In which ways does the practice reproduce existing social arrangements or generate tension and conflict? How do different arrangements of practice establish the social world of interactions, scenes of action, organizations, and institutions in which we live? What worlds do they conjure for the practitioners?
• How did we get to where we are? What are the interests, projects, hopes, and manoeuvres, etc., that led us to the current state of affairs? How could the world be otherwise?

Following the associations between practices

Zooming out by studying the effects brought to bear by the associations between practices

9.3.2 HOW PRACTICE AND THEIR ASSOCIATIONS CAN ACT AT A DISTANCE

9.3.3 HOW DID WE GET HERE?

9.3.4 WHEN TO STOP THE ZOOMING IN AND OUT?

9.4 The benefits and perils of the zooming metaphor

9.5 Where next

NOTES

1. The idea was introduced by Wittgenstein who suggested that things such as games do not share one essential common feature and are, in fact, connected by a series of overlapping similarities. It follows that there is no such thing as a feature common to all games, although we recognize games on the basis of their family resemblances which he defined as a ‘complicated network of similarities, overlapping and criss-crossing’ (Wittgenstein 1953, §66).
2. Here is where Stengers’ criteria start to differ drastically from Popper’s falsificationism.
3. I am paraphrasing Geertz’s story about an Englishman who, having been told by an Indian man that the world rested on a platform, which rested on the back of an elephant, which in turn rested on the back of a turtle, was asked what the turtle rested on. ‘Another turtle’, was the response. ‘And that turtle?’ rebuked the Englishman ‘Aha, Sahib’, said the Indian, ‘after that it is turtles all the way down’ (Geertz 1973).
4. It follows that practice theorists are necessarily either empirically oriented philosophers or socially savvy philosophers. A quick review of the authors surveyed in the text will illustrate what I mean.
5. Latour’s words here are, ‘Depending on what happens in it, there is or there is not an actor and there is or there is not a network being traced’. I intentionally substituted the words ‘actor’ and ‘network’ with ‘practice’, as I believe that Latour’s observation applies to any topic of social science.
6. See Gherardi (1995) and especially Nicolini (2009a) for an in-depth discussion.
7. See Turner (1984) for a discussion. Turner has the merit of raising this important issue, but then, by bundling all the practice theories together, he ends up ‘throwing the baby out with the bath water’.
8. Jean Lave made this remark during a presentation in Manchester in 1999.
9. CHAT authors evoke a similar idea when they suggest that practices cannot be understood in isolation and that the appropriate primary unit of analysis to understand human affairs is, in fact, ‘a historically evolving collective activity system, seen in its network relations to other activity systems’ (Engeström 2000, p. 964).
10. According to Latour (2005), it constitutes an infra-language in that it sets the scene for a performative material way of doing social science without, however, defining ex-ante the characters who will play on it.
11. How the knotting and translation are actually performed is a matter of empirical study. Although it has become customary to refer to Callon’s sequence of ‘problematisation, interessement, enrollment and mobilization’ (Callon 1986), there is a risk that the model itself becomes an eliminativist device. While undoubtedly useful, the ‘problematisation, interessement, enrollment and mobilization’ model is only a template and there is a real risk that it ends up hiding, instead of surfacing, interesting empirical phenomena.
12. While a comparison between these concepts goes well beyond the scope of the present work, it is apparent that we are better served by adding potential focuses for the inquiry-hence my call for an eclectic approach.
13. As we have seen in Chpater 5, the two often do not coincide.
14. The idea of hermeneutic circle refers to the movement back and forth between the parts and the whole that allows one to grasp the meaning of a text. For many hermeneutic scholars, the circle must go beyond the here and there of the text, and include the text’s relationship to historical tradition and culture at large.
15. Personal communication.
16. Unlike Corradi et al. (2010), who have already declared the bandwagon of practice to be already well on its way, I still see only a very small carriage in need of more and bigger allies.

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INDEX