Practice+(Lyles)


 * Practice** **-** a concept that is commonly used in science and technology studies that encompasses anything that people actually do. To the study of science and technology studies, it is often used to denote an attention to the creation and reproduction of scientific knowledge as well as the processes that recreate scientific institutions and devices.

Practice itself is understood as “recurrent processes governed by specifiable schemata of preferences and prescriptions” (Cetina, 2001) and while some work has focused on the rules and boundaries that govern the processes, it is also possible to study the act the process by which the practice is done and redone in such a way that gives a sense of the positions that people find themselves space for reflection and modification of practice. It is in a sense a study of how //what// people do determines //why// people do it and how that //why// turns around and influences the //what//. Certina raises this as a particular concern:

//“At the core of this characterization lies the assumption that creative and constructive practice—the kind of practice that obtains when we confront nonroutine problems—is internally more differentiated than current conceptions of practice as skill or habitual task performance suggest. The dissociation I have in mind is that between subject and (work) object; though time differentiation is also important, I think subject-object differentiation captures more directly what happens when work ceases to be habitual procedure.”// (2001, p. 184 - 185)

To that end, Rouse raises five considerations that he uses to make practices a concept of study within the field of since and technology studies in order to give us a sense of where he sees some of the tensions in the study to be more obvious.


 * 1) **Practices, rules and norms -** An attention to the way in which practices, rules and norms set up the boundaries for behavior to be understood as a practice. In so, Rouse draws from Wittgenstein (rule-following) and Heidegger (Understanding and Interpretation) to note:

//“The notions that society or culture is the realm of activities and institutions governed or constituted by rules, of meaningful performances rather than merely physical or biological processes, or of actions according to norms rather than (or as well as) causally determined events are ubiquitous…Actions governed by norms also involve understanding and responding to the meaning of one’s action, and of the situation in which one acts. Indeed, grasping and responding appropriately to meaning is perhaps the exemplary case of normative governance.” (2006, p.503)//


 * 1) **Reconciling Social Structure with Individual Agency** – An attention to the existing paradigms that have side stepped individuals as relevant in the study of forming, negotiating and recreating practice and instead giving the agency of practice to the study of institutions. Instead, practice theory would suggest paying closer attention to individual agency as a source of development.

//“A second theme in practice theories has been to mediate, or perhaps by-pass, perennial discussions of the relative priority of individual agency and social or cultural structures. The issue in these debates has typically been whether the social sciences can and should refer to and achieve knowledge of social wholes (institutions, cultures, social structure, traditions, etc.) that cannot be decomposed into actions by or states of individual agents.”// (2006, p. 504-505)


 * 1) **Bodily Skills and Discipline**s - An attention is also payed to the role that human bodies play in the understanding and development of practice in order to address the perceived problem of idealizing the conception of work hat is drawn from understandings of practice that are rooted in Marx.

//“A third important theme in practice theory has been the central role of human bodies and bodily comportment. Emphasis within practice theory upon under- standing human agency and social interaction as bodily performance has countered intellectualist conceptions of culture and social life, although the charge of intellectualism comes from many directions.” (2006, P. 511)//


 * 1) **Language and Tacit Knowledge** - An attention to the way in which language and tacit knowledge, the things that are part of practice but are not spoken of, the things that happen that make practices happen and relates all practices to other similar practices. The work of post-structuralists is particularly useful here for discussion of rhetoric and language as it relates to practice.

//“Practice theorists’ emphasis upon bodily skills or dispositions co-exists uneasily with the integral role of language in social life. Virtually every practice theorist treats this as an important theme, but they take it in some apparently discordant directions.”// (2006, p. 515)


 * 1) **Social Science and Social Life** - An attention to the divergent understandings of scientific practice as it interacts with social practice. There must be an awareness that Mertonian, disinterested study of practice comes into conflict with the participants understanding of the activity such that while the social sciences may attempt to explain practice in its entirety, there is an interested, reflexive portion of practice that does not allow for the explanation through traditional theoretical understanding.

//“Those practice theories that emphasize a tacit, inarticulate dimension to social practice give especially clear impetus to another theme. How should one conceive the relation between the presuppositions, norms, or skills implicit in social practice, and the effort to articulate this background explicitly within social science or social theory?”// (2006, p.523)


 * References**

Karin Knorr Cetina, "Objectual Practice," in The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory, ed. Theodore R. Schatzki, Karin Knorr Cetina, and Eike von Savigny (Routledge, 2001) Joseph Rouse, "Practice Theory," Handbook of the Philosophy of Science, Volume 15: Philosophy of Anthropology and Sociology, ed/ Stephen Turner and Mark Risjord (Elsevier, 2006):499-540.