Practising EU foreign policy

Russia and the eastern neighbours

Beatrix Futák-Campbell

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780719095894
• eBook ISBN: 9781526124845
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Comparative Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book looks at practitioners' approaches to the EU's foreign policy to its eastern neighbourhood, particularly Russia, and offers a new methodology for capturing practices using the analytical approach of Discursive International Relations and the Discursive Practice Model.

Part I
Theory

1
Studying practitioners’ practices

Practice theory is a diverse and constantly evolving body of ideas regarding the nature of social action, transcending a variety of disciplines in the social sciences. In this chapter, I trace the evolution of the practice turn, from the seminal work The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory (Schatzki et al., 2001) to a more recent application in the field of IR (Pouliot, 2010; Adler and Pouliot 2011) and EU studies (Adler-Niessen, 2016). In the process, I illustrate the different debates and discussions that have guided the path of the practice theory towards an application within IR and EU scholarship. I particularly emphasise the importance of Raymond D. Duvall and Arjun Chowdhury's contribution to the field, which highlights the emergence of two distinct approaches that the practice turn facilitates, namely the focus on behaviour/conduct on one hand, and the discursive/linguistic on the other. While the former seems to have found greater support in the discipline of IR, I argue that the ontological foundations upon which the practice turn rests allude to the utility and even necessity for a discursive practice approach, and this book serves as a contribution to the linguistic approaches within the practice turn.

Practice theory in the social sciences

While the scholarly impulse to attribute primacy to practice over other traditional structure agency dichotomies to make sense of social action has existed for a while (see for example Bourdieu, 1977; Wittgenstein, 1958; Giddens, 1991 or the ethnomethodology and CA literature),¹ it was Theodore R. Schatzki, Karin Knorr Cetina, and Eike von Savigny (2001) who first sought to produce an overview of the state of the practice turn from philosophical, sociological, and scientific perspectives.

In the introduction to the volume, Schatzki identifies general agreement among practice scholars in terms of equating practices to ‘arrays of human activity’ (2001: 2). Beyond this definition, it is generally agreed that social phenomena such as meaning, power, language, knowledge, or science can be understood as elements of the field of practice, where practice is the ‘nexus of interconnected human practices’ (ibid.). Another fundamental element of practice theory is the embodied quality of practice, where social action is seen as a productive force of the character of the human body itself. This social action, in turn, is founded upon a shared understanding of skills or tacit knowledge that is instilled in social life.² In other words, the practice turn advocates primacy of practice over social agents as the unit of analysis to explain social action. Schatzki illustrates this notion by focusing on post-humanist approaches, as they do away with the centrality of the human mind as the source of social phenomena. In general, practice theorists accept this decentralisation of the human, and see the human mind as constituted by practices, not vice versa.³ However, most practice theorists still seek to explain practices from a human perspective. While they distance themselves from human agency as a point of departure for understanding social action, most shy away from incorporating the nonhuman into their investigations, which would call for a redefinition of the term social itself. Based on this ontological foundation of the practice turn, Schatzki concludes that ‘the social is a field of embodied, materially interwoven practices centrally organised around shared practical understandings’ (ibid.: 3).

It is this precise notion of the ‘shared practical understandings’ that Stephen Turner further investigates in his contribution to the same volume. Turner argues that ‘[p]ractices without sharing … are habits – individual rather than shared’ (ibid.: 120). This ‘sharing’ of tacit knowledge is so fundamental to the social action in which practices operate, since it is vital to know how this ‘sharing’ can take place. This is where language comes in. Language is the key social phenomenon that allows the constitution of practices in the first place. This also implies that language ought to be considered as a productive force within a practice theory framework; in other words, there is the need for a discursive practice approach in order to fully comprehend how social action takes place. Turner takes a similar position when he claims that ‘[a]ny account of practice that fails to account for language will be defective’ (ibid.: 121).

Ethnomethodology is one of these accounts of practice that attributes fundamental importance to language. Returning to the social phenomena listed above, ethnomethodology avoids considering these topics as if they were ontological entities by themselves. Rather, these topics are analytically broken down into their constitutive parts, which reveal these social phenomena to be the sum of local practices (Lynch, 2001: 131). Michael Lynch understands discourse from this perspective as ‘a practically organised phenomenon: a coordinated assembly of what is said, and by whom, in particular circumstances’ (ibid.). This reconceptualisation of macro phenomena into their constitutive micro practices is what makes ethnomethodology so useful to practice theorists. Conversation analysts, who developed their approach from ethnomethodology, highlight another fundamental problem of social inquiry in general, that is the gap between methodological instructions (the blueprint of what a practice should look like) and the actual enacted practice itself. The best example of this problem is the analysis of absences or the substance and relevance of something that did not happen. Harvey Sacks (1992) argued that by focusing on these absences and by placing them in their local contexts of ‘contingently relevant events’, we can uncover not only how the absences were managed but also what these absences accomplished (e.g. power, personal stake).

The existence of this gap implies a tacit knowledge or shared understanding that Schatzki already referred to and upon which Vincent Pouliot later based much of his take on practice theory. This problem, which Lynch (paraphrasing Polanyi) terms the ‘hidden, unconsciously mastered rules’ (2001: 140), is countered by conventional methodologists through utilising a rigidly formal methodology in line with the scientific method to describe these enacted practices. The problem here is that the practices that these investigations seek to unravel through their formal methodology impose ‘theories, models, hypotheses, heuristics, protocols, and the decision rules’ (ibid.) externally onto the situation and the practitioners. This excludes from the investigation the highly localised and contextual tacit knowledge that informs the practitioners and their practice. In turn, conversation analysts do not attempt to impose grand theories or identify deterministic internal mechanisms within their observations, but rather utilise an approach that seeks to unravel the ‘machinery’ that gives rise to the specific characteristics of the given conversation (ibid.: 140). The observed practitioner's use of specific discourse can then be extrapolated and observed in other situations, unbound by the context and present agents of the initial situation. While this reliance on replicability is, in and it of itself, criticised by scholars of the sociology of scientific knowledge, it seems like the only viable means to access the particularity of enacted practices. The problem here is that the gap between theoretical methodology and enacted practices cannot be overcome through a generalisable methodological approach. As Lynch puts it ‘any abstract account of the logic of practice immediately reiterates the problem’ (ibid.: 146). Rather, the logic of practice needs to be approached as the product of highly localised and tacit knowledge shared between practitioners.

However, it is precisely this non-generalisability and reliance on unidentifiable shared presuppositions of the practice turn that leads Stephen Turner in his 1994 book to criticise the use of practice as a unit of analysis in explaining social action as ‘pseudoexplanatory’ (Rouse, 2001: 189). Rouse counters this criticism by introducing two different concepts of practices: practices perceived as regularities and practices understood as normative. Practice theorists conceiving of practices as regularities rely on a fixation of meaning in order to be able to identify reoccurring patterns between different practices. In this case, there is a difficulty in unravelling temporal continuities when these are based on implicit, inarticulable shared understandings. Explicating the knowledge that is implicit in enacted practices is a problematic endeavour. According to Turner, these regularities are only visible ‘against a background of other practices’ (1994: 191), and therefore lack objective explanatory value. However, Rouse introduces the normative way of thinking about practices that deviates from the quest to identify regularities and continuities. Rather than practices being shared in the sense that they rely on continuous tacit knowledge (despite being difficult to identify these objectively), practices are shared among actors if the action invoked through this practice is considered as correct or appropriate because they are perceived as being in accordance with other, pre-existing practices. This approach allows for an inquiry into the embeddedness of practices within a given context without relying on the problematic objective identification of underlying regularities and continuities. The conceptual detour by Rouse reframes practices not as the product of underlying causal links, but rather understands practices within their discursive context. Hence the perception and interpretation of practices by other practitioners is what lies at the heart of the normative investigation (ibid.: 195).

Practice theory in IR

The different conceptualisations of practice theory explained in The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory explicitly highlight the importance of focusing on discursive practices as a means to access the underlying forces that guide social action. While many of the themes and conclusions of Schatzki et al. fall on fertile ground a decade later in the discipline of IR through the edited volume International Practices (Adler and Pouliot, 2011), the acknowledgement of the role of the discursive, however, seems to not be backed up by scholarly application in IR. Rather, the authors further engage in the philosophical considerations regarding the normative role of practices. In their introduction, Alder and Pouliot define practices as ‘socially meaningful patterns of action which, in being performed more or less competently, simultaneously embody, act ou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I Theory
• Part II Practice
• Conclusion
• Appendix: transcript notation
• References
• Index