The Nexus of Practices

Connections, constellations, practitioners

Allison Hui, Theodore Schatzki, Elizabeth Shove, Allison Hui, Theodore Schatzki, Elizabeth Shove

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138675148
• eBook ISBN: 9781317199380
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Nexus of Practices: connections, constellations, practitioners brings leading theorists of practice together to provide a fresh set of theoretical impulses for the surge of practice-focused studies currently sweeping across the social disciplines. The book addresses key issues facing practice theory, expands practice theory's conceptual repertoire, and explores new empirical terrain. With each intellectual move, it generates further opportunities for social research.

More specifically, the book's chapters offer new approaches to analysing connections within the nexus of practices, to exploring the dynamics and implications of the constellations that practices form, and to understanding people as practitioners that carry on practices. Topics examined include social change, language, power, affect, reflection, large social phenomena, and connectivity over time and space. Contributors thereby counter claims that practice theory cannot handle large phenomena and that it ignores people. The contributions also develop practice theoretical ideas in dialogue with other forms of social theory and in ways illustrated and informed by empirical cases and examples.

The Nexus of Practices will quickly become an important point of reference for future practice-focused research in the social sciences.

1

Learning in and across practices

Enablement as subjectivation

Thomas Alkemeyer and Nikolaus Buschmann
(Translated by Robert Mitchell and Kristina Brümmer)

Practice theorists have a vested interest in studying how social order emerges via the interplay of things, artefacts and bodies. However, they rarely reflect upon how the people involved in order-making come to be or, indeed, put themselves in the position to be able to participate as competent ‘players’.¹ One reason for this oversight, from our perspective, is that practice theoretical discussions still mostly operate within the framework of familiar alternatives, namely, whether social structures constitute social action and its actors, or whether the structures are constituted by activities within the bounds of preformed agency. Accordingly, two – oversimplified – perspectives can be differentiated by the relationship they propose between praxis² and participants. If praxis is seen as pre-structured, i.e. as practice, then participants are mere dependent variables keeping routinised action ‘going’. If, on the other hand, praxis is conceived as a contingent accomplishment, then participants become autonomous actors with stores of practical knowledge that enable them to deal with the contingency of practice in a skilful and creative manner. These differences notwithstanding, the perspectives both pay very little attention to how play-ability³ arises. Furthermore, within the framework of their respective conceptions of praxis, the participants are conceived of in one way or another as pretty much ‘play-able’ out of the box, so to speak. In contrast, we understand play-ability not to be an always given property of individuals, but rather to be formed within the framework of ‘distributed agency’ (Rammert and Schulz-Schaeffer, 2002): things, artefacts and bodies mutually enable one another in their play-ability and, by doing so, bring forth a specific reflexivity of praxis.

In this chapter, we reconstruct how play-ability arises qua learning through participation in shared practices. We do this in connection with our thesis that practice theories need to be complemented by theories of subjectivation if they are to resolve the issues of both how practices are transmitted and reproduced and how they are accomplished in situated praxis. Against this background, we conceptualise subjectivation as a process inherently embedded in praxis, in which the ability intelligently to orient one’s own action towards practice-specific requirements is continually being formed and in which the process of doing can also entail the critique and transcendence of these requirements. Learning cannot be understood as the passive acquisition of operational skills. Instead, people (trans)form themselves via their engagement as recognisable subjects and cultivate their play-ability by learning to comply with the normative standards unfolding in praxis.

In this context, we utilise the processual and relational category of en-ablement. ⁴ This term indicates that people only become carriers of specific abilities through participation in practices. It also suggests that the status of a participant is dependent upon mutual recognition. We assume that ‘our participation in ... practices enables us to become the agents we are through our mutual accountability to the possibilities those practices make available and to what is thereby at stake for us in how we respond to those possibilities’ (Rouse, 2007b: 53). Accordingly, we introduce the idea of en-ablement as subjectivation in order to incorporate activity alongside passivity, adaptation and defiance, routine and reflexivity, which are all involved in the formation of play-ability.

By conceiving of the unfolding of practices and the formation of play-ability as co-constitutive and co-extensive, we attempt to do justice to the ultimate, not yet fulfilled aim of abandoning the traditional contrast between methodological holism and methodological individualism. In pursuit of this aim, we try to grasp the emergence of play-ability within a practice theoretical framework without succumbing to old habits of either attributing deterministic power to practices over the activities of participants or presupposing fully formed actors who are ready for action.

In taking this approach, we enter a research field that is usually dominated by such terms as learning or education. Hence, the first section discusses how these terms are conceptualised within the framework of practice theories. Subsequently, the second section argues that a practice theoretical perspective must seek to reconstruct the processes in which play-ability emerges in praxis. The following section portrays the development of competent participation as a process in which specific knowledge, identity and social membership are formed, thus embedding learning within power relations and conflict. The section thereafter shows that the process of becoming a ‘player’ cannot be reduced to a purely mental interaction with the world, but rather emerges as part of one’s bodily being and acting in the world. The chapter concludes by shedding light on the relationships between normativity, enablement and subjectivation.

Practice theories and learning

Within the ‘family’ of practice theories, research in the field of learning and education addresses concepts of socialisation, habitualisation and embodiment (Hillebrandt, 2014: 67). These concepts have the advantage of bringing often neglected bodily, pre-reflexive and non-linguistic processes to the fore (Alkemeyer and Brümmer, 2016), thereby avoiding the reduction of learning and education to cognitive processes and the acquisition of propositional knowledge. However, they portray participants mostly as passive embodied receptacles of practice-specific stores of knowledge (Shove et al., 2012: 63–79). By assuming a fit between field and practice-specific orders and participatory competences, they focus primarily on what participants have to (be able) to do in order for practices to continue their routine course (Brake, 2016: 97). To put it succinctly: the position that teachers hitherto occupied in mechanistic theories of learning has been filled in these approaches by practices, which teach participants a specific way of perceiving (Reckwitz, 2015: 448) and practical know-how. Learning appears foremost as adaptation to the status quo and the issue of the acquisition and the constant (re)creation of play-ability in praxis never emerges (Nicolini, 2012: 78).

The neglect of these issues in some of the currently most discussed practice theoretical approaches in sociology⁵ is the consequence of studying practices as quasi-automatically succeeding ‘choreographies’ within which participants’ actions interlock frictionlessly, as if following a hidden rhythm or magical hand.⁶ This view on practices is an artefact of observation which owes its existence to the overview inherent to a ‘theatrical perspective’ on the social world; how this world presents itself to participants remains invisible (Alkemeyer and Buschmann, 2016).

As a consequence of this perspective, these approaches neglect, first, the many different requirements for engaged participation that arise from the uncertainty of practical accomplishments. In the flow of praxis, participants must always be able to adjust to situational necessities and possibilities. There is always a ‘potential of the situation’ (Jullien, 1999: 33ff) and scope for transformative interventions of participants. Second, these approaches overlook the point that learning requires disposition and activity from participants who must be amenable to being taken in by or to engage with practices. Due to their tendency to extrapolate from practice-specific orders to participatory competences, we learn very little about how people mindfully, actively and purposefully partake in their formation as participants (Brümmer, 2015: 72). Third and related, the status of materialities such as things, artefacts and bodies also appears in a different light. In a functionalist perspective, which primarily considers how practices succeed, materialities are viewed as ‘proposals for being’ whose potentials in general are fulfilled in the successful practical connection with other participants. However, the verily important finding that things as warrants of their usage ‘thicken’ the contingency of practical accomplishments (Schmidt, 2012: 55) should not hide the trouble and resistance which emanate in situ both from the things and artefacts as well as from embodied habits. For example, which ‘affordances’ (Gibson, 1979) artefacts invoke within learning processes and to what extent they become meaningful objects therein, presenting and delivering practice-specific knowledge, cannot be ascertained at the outset. This is instead an empirical matter which must be investigated in each socio-material constellation in connection with the practices performed within it.

These, in a common functionalist perspective neglected, aspects are much more strongly represented in currently less noticed practice theoretical concepts as post-Marxist approaches or the New Pragmatism of Boltanski and Thévenot (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2011), which emphasise the multi-positionality, multi-perspectivity and power asymmetry of praxis, and which evoke the conflictuality and instability of practices (Schäfer, 2013). In this view, performing a practice ‘not only leads to stability through habituation but also to diversity, brought by the unstable structure of practices themselves’ (Gherardi, 2012b: 228). The research focus then lies on the processual, relational and therefore interactive construction of social order. Consequentially, these approaches are concerned with making empirically visible the diverse methods, strategies, competences, activities and activity forms utilised in the practical creation of a specific intelligible social reality (Garfinkel, 1967; Nicolini, 2012: 134–61). Attention, consequently, shifts to participants’ coping strategies. The pendant to the ‘flow’ of praxis is the improvisation of participants from whose perspectives the practical accomplishment-in-the-moment appears as a never completely predictable sequence of responses to situations. Each one of these situations presents participants with a specific task. The necessity for continual learning becomes obvious when we recognise the often conflictual demands and situationally specific requirements with which participants are confronted: learning is not only required in order to form practice-specific habits and routines, but also to be able to deal with conflicts, ambivalence and uncertainty.

It is only when open-endedness, fragility and unpredictability are taken into account alongside the prefiguration and structuration of praxis that we catch sight of the bodily, mental and cognitive resources that participants bring to bear in the collective accomplishment of all practices (Barnes, 2001). This applies even when the diverse elements of a practice routinely harmonise, as appears to be the case when, for example, soldiers march in formation: what may appear from the theatrical perspective as a ‘continuity of form’ (Giddens, 1979: 216, original emphasis), becomes tangible from the participants’ perspectives as an uncertain string of events in which every single soldier must invest effort – e.g. in breathing (Lande, 2002) – in order to be ‘recruited’ by the practice of marching in the first place (Brümmer and Mitchell, 2014: 159ff).

Thus, practice theory cannot stop at viewing the emergence of play-ability as a mere fitting into extant orders, nor should it succumb to the individualistic myopia of reducing learning to an internal process within solipsistic individuals. Rather, it must attend to the reciprocal production of social order and play-ability. Only then can it provide a plausible account of how skills are acquired and made available via participation in practices and of how this allows for participants not only to make routine contributions to the workings of a practice but also to intervene creatively in events and therefore be a transformative force in praxis. Accordingly, the approach presented here emphasises that it is participants who produce the social regularity in praxis as an empirically concrete structuration. In doing so, participants undergo a transformation themselves: they become able to adjust and improve their participation in the context of not just one practice but many similar practices in a process of learning self-structuration. By laying ‘focus on the trajectories of learners as they change’ (Lave, 1996: 128) through active engagement in and across practices, people appear as increasingly competent carriers of specific abilities, including critical competences. As such, they become enabled via the interplay with other participants to not automatically reproducing the social order, but also to reflectively modifying and critically transcending it.⁷

At this juncture, and in summary, our approach sheds light on the fundamental heteronomy of the acquisition of participatory competences. We stress that candidates for participation reciprocally initiate themselves as and make themselves into participants by equipping one another, with the collaboration of things and artefacts, with situational possibilities of action and, at the same time, delimiting them. Being enabled therefore means simultaneously to be put and to put oneself in the position to fulfil the requirements (or rather what is recognized as a requirement) of a practice. Thus, learning comes into view as a process encompassing both active and passive elements, opening up new realms of possibility and entailing moments of resistance and limitations, hence implying the necessity to find new or different forms of organisation within the relations of praxis.

Learning as a precondition and form of social membership

By understanding learning as a process of self-(trans)formation within practices, it is no longer sufficient to focus on the transfer of propositional knowledge in societally cordoned-off areas of learning and teaching. Rather, learning knows no bounds: it occurs in explicitly educational forms such as drills, exercises and training as well as in games, rituals or competitions and even in the ‘implicit pedagogy’ (Bourdieu, 1977: 94) of everyday life. This means that it can pertain to all kinds of practices and that different kinds of practices imply their own techniques and contents of learning. Therefore, all situations should be taken into account in which embodied agents transform themselves by interacting in the context of a shared practice with one another as well as with the things and artefacts involved.⁸

This is also the main idea behind the concept of ‘situated learning’ (Lave and Wenger, 1991), which aims to avoid any reification of learning as a distinct activity. Understood as an ongoing process potentially taking place in any practice, learning is disconnected from explicit pedagogical intent. It is not defined as a top-down process driven by experts, but as an interactive event, with varied positions that participants can occupy vis-à-vis others’ doings in a shared practice. Learning is conceived of as a process of participating in practices in which, alongside practical and propositional knowledge, identity and social membership are formed. Thus, learning and social membership are co-dependent: learning appears as a precondition as well as ‘an evolving form of membership’ (Lave and Wenger, 1991: 51) in a ‘community of practice’ (Wenger, 1998). It requires involvement and simultaneously contributes to the development and transformation of practices. Therefore, learning processes do not merely bring out practice-specific participatory competences, but can themselves transform what is learned (Hager, Lee and Reich, 2012: 9–11).

In this view, learning is located in interactions of praxis that bring novices to possess collectively shared knowledge that is created in these very same interactions. Within an interplay of socialising acts, they learn by taking the perspectives not only of the senior members or designated instructors, but also of other novices, as they constantly correct themselves, recognise room to manoeuvre in and, thus, keep within the order at hand: all participants teach themselves and each other theoretical and practical knowledge. They reciprocally determine one another’s becoming, converging on a collective practice and, in doing so, gain a specific position within the collective, which itself is constituted as a community of practice within this process.

From this perspective, learning is a socially structured process of positioning and equipping participants with different resources and possibilities. Thus, it always takes place in historical contexts shaped by power relations (Nicolini, 2012: 79): both the historical and social structure of a practice as well as the power relations that define a specific regime of participation determine possibilities of learning and the learning trajectories of novices (Dreier, 2003; Nielsen, 2008). Since every practice provides different social positions, which come with varying amount(s) of power and influence, the responsibility for the ‘product’ of a shared practice is distributed and attributed differently. The insight that power relations and normative orders unfolding in praxis define conditions of learning illuminates why learning is associated with conflicts and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Learning in and across practices: Enablement as subjectivation
• 2 Qualities of connective tissue in hospital life: How complexes of practices change
• 3 Sociomateriality in posthuman practice theory
• 4 Variation and the intersection of practices
• 5 Epigenetics, theories of social practice and lifestyle disease
• 6 Technologies within and beyond practices
• 7 Is small the only beautiful? Making sense of ‘large phenomena’ from a practice-based perspective
• 8 Practices and their affects
• 9 Sayings, texts and discursive formations
• 10 Reflexive knowledge in practices
• 11 Matters of practice
• 12 Placing power in practice theory
• 13 How should we understand ‘general understandings’?
• References
• Index