Reading :: Practice Theory

Practice Theory, Work, and Organization: An Introduction
By Davide Nicolini

I've seen this book referenced in various places, but a conversation with Julian Waters-Lynch convinced me that I needed to pick it up. Although the book as a whole is solid, I'll focus below on aspects that are salient to activity theory.

As the title indicates, Nicolini provides an introduction to practice theory, an umbrella term for "contemporary theories of practice" contributing to "the practice turn in social and organizational studies" (p.1). These theories include praxeology (Giddings, Bordieu), practice as tradition and community (Lave, Wenger), activity theory (Engestrom), ethnomethodology, social practice (Heidegger, Wittgenstein), and conversation analysis. These are all different, but they generally agree on certain points:

1. "Practice approaches are fundamentally processual and tend to see the world as an ongoing routinized and recurrent accomplishment" (p.3).
2. Practice approaches are material, bodily, with active objects (p.4).
3. "Practice theories carve a specific space for individual agency and agents" (p.4).
4. "Adopting a practice approach radically transforms our view of knowledge, meaning, and discourse. From a practice perspective, knowledge is conceived largely as a form of mastery that is expressed in the capacity to carry out a social and material activity" (p.5) 
5. "All practice-based approaches foreground the centrality of interest in human matters and therefore put emphasis on the importance of power, conflict, and politics as constitutive elements of the social reality we experience" (p.6). 

In practice theories, practice comes first—not rational agents (practitioners) (p.7). They "use a performative perspective to offer a new vista on the social world" and they provide an "alternative to  cognitive perspectives that try to explain organizational conduct and phenomena as something stemming from the mind or brain of an individual" (p.7). They are material (p.7). They are dynamic and discursive, but not solely discursive (p.8). Finally, they "depict the world in relational terms" (p.8).

Practice theory impacted organizational studies in the 1990s, shifting the focus of org studies from orgs-as-things to orgs-as-social-processes (p.11). The current practice-based organizational studies derive from three research streams: "the study of learning and knowing phenomena as situated practices," "the study of technology as practice," and "the study of strategy as practice" (p.11). 

In Chapter 2, Nicolini traces the roots of practice theory to Aristotle's focus on praxis and poeisis, discusses its demotion in the Western tradition, and examines its rediscovery in Marx, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein. In particular, Marx embraced praxis as critical to materialism, arguing that thought and world are always connected via human activity and cannot be separated (p.30). Nicolini argues that when Marx articulated his famous thesis—"the philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it"—his epistemological proposition was "the need to engage practically as well as cognitively with phenomena in order to understand them" (p.32). 

After Chapter 2, Nicolini begins covering various strands of practice theory, including interstitial chapters that illustrate each strand with a case study. Let's skip to Chapter 5, on activity theory.

Activity theory, Nicolini notes, is not unified. Here, he focuses on CHAT, Engestrom's variation and "the strand of activity theory that tackles more explicitly the issue of theorizing practice, and which has been translated into organization and management studies" (p.104). And "the fact that the result of one type of activity may become the raw material for another makes work the fundamental grounding of sociality as well as one of its outputs. Work is thus not only material, but also inherently social" (p.105)—to which I would add that this stance was articulated in Engels' origin story in Dialectics of Nature and retold by Vygotsky & Luria and Leontiev. 

Nicolini articulates five major tenets of CHAT: "the mediated nature of practice; the notion of an activity system; the object-oriented nature of human activity; its historical and contradictory nature; and the necessarily interventionist and developmental nature of the study of practice" (p.106). 

In discussing the object of the activity, Nicolini notes that the object is "partly given and partly emergent, both socially constructed and objective" (p.112). Since "the object is actively constructed through the negotiation, alignment, or ignoring, of the different motives, interests, and aspirations represented in the community," "it follows that the object is inherently fragmented" because it "is not visible in its entirety to any one of the participants", and it is also "composed of heterogeneous entities" and therefore "inherently multiple" (p.112). 

In discussing CHAT's interventionist orientation, Nicolini notes the "Marxian reading of Kurt Lewin's principle that you cannot understand a human organization until you attempt to change it." For CHAT, "Expansive learning always originates from small fractures, deviations, and individual exceptions, and proceeds in cycles or spirals, through multiple phases and over lengthy periods of time" (p.116). 

Overall, I found Nicolini's overview of practice theory, and his view of CHAT, to be valuable. In places, I thought he worked a little hard to fit CHAT into the practice theory mold (for example, I'm not sure that Engestrom sees the object the way Nicolini does). But viewing CHAT from this direction helps me to think through its structure and limitations. For that, and for the general insights into practice theory, I recommend the book highly.