Through the practice lens: Where is the bandwagon of practice-based studies heading?

Gessica Corradi, Via G. Verdi 26, Trento, Italy, I-381222.

Email: gessica.corradi@gmail.com

'practice-based studies' (henceforth PBS). It strikes us as a platitude, as an idea whose time has come, because it seems to have been always with us.

The aim of this article is to investigate how the idea of PBS came into being, and how its entry into use started up a 'bandwagon': that is, brought together various strands of inquiry with certain features in common. The question that we shall seek to answer is where is this bandwagon heading?

Two labels—practice-based standpoint and practice-based or work-based learning—share the feature that they consider practice to be the locus of learning and knowing although they refer to two different research communities (organization scholars and educationalists). Now briefly described is their interest in the use of the concept of practice and their principal interpretative categories. It is important to consider the years in which studies were published in order to trace the chronology of the bandwagon's setting in motion.

An obligatory point of departure for reconstruction of the PBS bandwagon is the 1991 study by Brown and Duguid, who coined the expression 'practice-based standpoint'. Practice became the locus for understanding situated learning processes: 'from this practice-based standpoint, we view learning as the bridge between working and innovating' (Brown and Duguid, 1991: 41).

Drawing in particular on works by Orr (1987, 1990), Brown and Duguid conceive every work setting as an arena of repeated practices (canonical or otherwise) and constant innovations. Methodologically, in every context, divergences must be sought between 'espoused practice' and 'actual practice' (Brown and Duguid, 1991: 41). The dimension of espoused practice consists in the opus operatum characterizing the activities of each actor. This 'canonical vision' of a person's activities comprises the set of actions which every individual undertakes, formally or otherwise. Vice versa, the dimension of actual practice consists in the modus operandi negotiated in the everyday routine of people operating in a context: the situated doing, the composite set of 'non-canonical' activities that cannot be governed in abstract by executives. To study the often obscure dimension of work practices is to explore the complexity of situations and to trace the network of roles that constitute a work setting. It was this insight that represented the most fruitful contribution of Brown and Duguid's article to the subsequent literature, although the label 'practice-based standpoint' did not acquire significant currency. It was replaced in this group of authors' subsequent studies by the concepts of epistemology of practice and the 'generative dance' among practitioners, organizational knowledge and organizational knowing (Cook and Brown, 1999; Brown and Duguid, 2001).

Knowledge can be depicted through two very distinct 'visions': the epistemology of possession, and the epistemology of practice (Cook and Brown, 1999: 387). Referring to the thought of Dewey, these authors defined knowing as 'literally something which we do, not something that we possess'. For this reason, the epistemology of practice is able to show the coordinated activities of individuals and groups in doing their 'real work' as it is informed by a particular organizational or group context. The practice in this case is embedded in a particular organized context, articulated into specific practices of behaviour, socially developed through situated learning and training for the profession: 'by practice we mean, as most theorists of practice mean, undertaking or engaging fully in a task, job, or profession' (Brown and Duguid, 2001: 203).

The label 'practice-based learning' is used mainly by researchers who investigate the social and collective process of learning that takes place in education (Raelin, 1997; Boud and Middleton, 2003; Billett, 2004; Fenwick, 2006; Raelin, 2007); but also by those interested in organizational learning within a community (Strati, 2007), at the boundaries among different communities (Carlile, 2004) or at distance (Nicolini, 2007). Educationalists also use the label 'work-based learning' to denote how learning takes place, not only in a school classroom through teaching, but also in the workplace through observing, discussing and acting in different social worlds and in relationship with numerous other learners. A social learning theory was developed along the lines of pragmatism on one side and symbolic interactionism on the other (Elkjaer, 2003) in order to look at conflict perspectives and tensions within and between social worlds as a driver to learn (Elkjaer and Huisman, 2008).

Raelin (1997: 572) argues that 'this approach recognizes that practitioners in order to be proficient need to bridge the gap between theory and practice. Work-based learning subscribes to a form

of knowing that is context-dependent. Practitioners use theories to frame their understanding of the context but simultaneously incorporate an awareness of the social processes in which organizational activity is embedded'. In this case the focus is on the theory/practice gap evidenced by studies on informal learning in workplaces (Billett, 2001; Boud and Middleton, 2003) or on the processes of adult education (Fenwick, 2006).

The idea of introducing practice into studies on teaching has been developed further by Raelin, who proposes an outright epistemological change: 'an emerging practice epistemology will view learning as a dialectical mediated process that intermingles practice with theory' (Raelin, 2007: 506). A similar concern pervades the management literature which complains about the distance between academic studies and everyday managerial practice. In this regard, the label highlights the opposition between theory and practice, but it is also employed to emphasize that practical knowledge is a process, and that learning takes place as things are done in the relationship between human and non-human elements.

The role of objects in structuring and stabilizing practical knowledge is a central theme of activity theory (see the special issue of Organization edited by Blackler and Engeström, 2005). In this regard, Engeström et al. (1999) introduced the term 'knotworking' to emphasize that networking does not suffice if the relationships are not then 'knotted' into enduring forms, and that objects perform this practical function. Within this theoretical framework, Macpherson and Jones (2008: 177) state that 'mediating artifacts, or boundary objects, provide an opportunity to develop new shared conceptions of activity and new modes of action'. Local and temporary events are in fact able to establish solid relations among bodies of knowledge which are neither planned nor foresighted. In these cases, unlike those in stable activity systems, the division of tasks—and therefore what each actor does in practice—changes according to the different situations made possible by the object of the activity.

Learning in work practices also occurs in virtual contexts—as evidenced by Nicolini's (2007) study on distance work, where he examines how medical practices have been spatially and temporally reconfigured by the advent of telemedicine. The latter expands medical practices in time and space. It entails much more than a simple redistribution of what already exists, because it reframes the objects and contents of activities, giving rise to new artefacts and new identities, and to changed positions among them.

Another way of considering practice as an empirical object comprises the conception of practice 'as what people do', an expression often used in regard to the study of a phenomenon (science, gender, strategy, routine, leadership) 'as practice'. The theoretical referents in this case may be extreme, because they range from rigorously ethnomethodological formulations to a commonsense use of the term 'practice'.

The label of practice as 'what people do' has in recent times driven the bandwagon of strategy researchers, but it has an illustrious—if not always duly recognized—precedent in studies on science as practice. Both these strands of inquiry seek to determine what people routinely do in their particular field of practice. Whilst ethnomethodology inspires the first strand, the second has more heterogeneous theoretical sources which relate at times to activity theory, and at times to no particular theoretical tradition.

During the second half of the 1970s, studies and seminars on the 'sociology of scientific knowledge' founded a new approach to the study of science which distinguished itself first because it viewed knowledge as a social product, and second because, by discarding philosophical 'a priori's,

it investigated the empirical and natural sphere (Pickering, 1990, 1992). In the 1980s, interest in these themes grew to the point that very different positions were taken up in their regard. Amid this climate of 'intellectual heterogeneity', Pickering distanced himself from traditional studies on scientific knowledge by proposing an opposition between 'science as knowledge' and 'science as practice'. He centred his analysis on scientific practice—what scientists actually do—with a correlated interest in scientific culture, meaning the set of resources on which and within which a practice operates. The practical dimension as the key to studying 'what scientists do' linked with the body of studies interested in the 'macro' social dimension of the world of science and scientific laboratories: most notably the ethnographic studies by Latour and Woolgar (1979), those on laboratory work by Knorr-Cetina (1981), the ethnomethodological studies of Lynch et al. (1983), the pragmatic and symbolic interactionist analyses of science (Fujimura et al., 1987) and the actor-network approach (Callon, 1980; Latour, 1984, 1987). As Lynch (1993) notes, during the early 1990s, philosophers, historians and sociologists of science showed great interest in the everyday practices of scientists, prompted to do so mainly by the influence of ethnomethodological studies and those on the sociology of scientific knowledge. Ethnomethodology, in particular, investigated 'ordinary practical reasoning' and made a decisive contribution to these analyses. The strength of these science-as-practice approaches was the empirical nature of their inquiry:

they conduct case studies of actions in particular social settings; they pay attention to detail; and they try to describe or explain observable (or at least reconstructable) events. Terms of the trade like empirical observation and explanation are problematic, given their association with empiricism and positivism, but it should be clear that ethnomethodologists and sociologists of science are especially attuned to—actual—situations of language use and practical action. (Lynch, 1993: XV)

The label 'strategy-as-practice' evinces complex and composite systems of habitus, artefacts and socially-defined forms of action that constitute the flow of strategic activities (Jarzabkowski, 2003: 24). On this view, practices are defined as 'the infrastructure through which micro strategy and strategizing occurs, generating an ongoing stream of strategic activity that is practice' (Jarzabkowski, 2003: 24). Paraphrasing the shift from organization to organizing, those who study strategy propose a shift to strategizing. The 'practice perspective' (Jarzabkowski et al., 2007) seeks to identify the strategic activities reiterated in time by the diverse actors interacting in an organizational context.

The strategy-as-practice strand of analysis has been developed in particular by Whittington, Jarzabkowski, Johnson and Balogun. A first example of this 'new' perspective can be dated to 1996, the year in which Whittington published a paper entitled 'Strategy as Practice' and in which he stated that 'the practice perspective is concerned with managerial activity, how managers "do strategy"' (Whittington, 1996: 732). Starting from the theoretical framework of activity theory, Jarzabkowski (2003) argued that every system of activity can be understood by examining the ways in which management practices translate strategy into practice. The following year Jarzabkowski (2004) resumed her analysis by focusing on the concepts of 'recursiveness' and 'adaptation'. Drawing on a composite theoretical base comprising the concepts of 'structuration' (Giddens, 1984), 'habitus' (Bourdieu, 1990), 'social becoming' (Szompka, 1991) and 'communities of practice' (Lave and Wenger, 1991), Jarzabkowski showed the existence of a system of 'practices-in-use' (Jarzabkowski, 2004).

Whittington contributed decisively to the development of these reflections (Whittington, 1993, 2002, 2003; Whittington et al., 2003). He suggested that research on strategy should be founded

upon a 'new' theoretical basis which combined 'strategy praxis', 'strategy practices' and 'strategy practitioners' (Whittington, 2006). In the following year, Whittington (2007) proposed the model of the '4 Ps'—'praxis', 'practices', 'practitioners' and 'profession'—to enable thorough analysis of organizational strategy by going beyond the distinctions between intra-organizational and extra-organizational levels.

The methodology to analyse the strategizing dimension prompted a study by Balogun et al. (2003). Analysing strategy-as-practice is not to consider solely the strategies of senior executives, but also those of middle managers and non-managerial personnel. The aim of research on strategy is to verify how the instructions of management are translated by actors into day-to-day practices with the purpose of creating and exchanging strategy. In this view, strategy is what is done, or otherwise, within an organizational context in regard to the strategic directions laid down by the management. The attention is here more on the substantive field than on practice, whose definition is rather heterogeneous.

After 2000 the bandwagon of PBS moves toward a more explicit acknowledgement of practice as epistemology and four new labels appeared: 'practice-oriented research', 'knowing-in-practice', 'practice-based perspective' and 'practice-based approaches'.

The first two labels—'practice lens' or 'practice-oriented research' and 'knowing-in-practice'—relate to two rather homogeneous communities of scholars, the first situated in the United States and the second in Europe. Both are interested in practical knowledge, but they draw on somewhat different bodies of sociological thought: Giddens and structuration theory in the former case, ethnomethodology and actor-network theory in the latter.

One of the first works to propose the use of the 'practice lens' for the study of technologies has been Orlikowski (2000), which draws on Giddens' (1979, 1984) structuration theory to propose use of 'a practice lens to examine how people, as they interact with a technology in their ongoing practices, enact structures which shape their emergent and situated use of that technology. Viewing the use of technology as a process of enactment enables a deeper understanding of the constitutive role of social practices in the ongoing use and change of technologies in the workplace' (Orlikowski, 2000: 404). Starting from the assumption that technologies have two dimensions—that of the artefact and that of its use (what people do with the technological artefact in their recurrent and situated practices)—Orlikowski observes how organizational subjects activate structures pertaining to technology-in-use. These structures 'are not fixed or given, but constituted and reconstituted through the everyday, situated practice of particular users using particular technologies in particular circumstances' (Orlikowski, 2000: 425). The concept of 'technologies as social practice' or technology-in-use has also inspired the study by Suchman et al. (1999), who theorize that technology acquires different identities in relation to the circumstances and the practices in which it is embedded. The designers of a technology must therefore consider the context and the working practices in which the technological structures will be inserted (Suchman, 1987). For example within the field of information technology (Levina and Vaast, 2006) Bourdieu's practice theory has been used to show how the production of boundary-spanning practices involves varying degrees of embodiment (i.e. relying on personal relationships) and objectification (i.e. relying on the exchange of objects).

The metaphor of the 'practice lens' is associated with the label 'practice-oriented approach'. For example, Schultze and Boland (2000) stress that it is essential when designing and implementing technologies to adopt a 'practice-oriented approach' which focuses on 'what people "actually" do rather than on what they say they do or on what they ought to be doing' (Pickering, 1992, in Schultze and Boland, 2000: 194). Studying what people actually do also requires understanding the results of technological implementations, and consequently, observing the practices within the circuit of reproduction described by Bourdieu (1973, 1998). To paraphrase Foucault (1982: 787), this means that when technologies are implemented, importance should be given not only to what people do but also to the consequences of their doing ('what doing it does') (Schultze and Boland, 2000: 195). A few years later Schultze and Orlikowski (2004: 87) argued that the practice lens 'highlights how macro level phenomena such as interfirm relations are created and recreated through the micro level actions taken by firm members'. Finally, Østerlund and Carlile (2005) illustrate, through a re-reading of three classic studies on communities of practice, how practice-oriented research is based on a relational thinking in which the practice is the locus for the production and reproduction of social relations.

The point of departure for reflection on the concept of knowing-in-practice is the special issue of Organization edited by Gherardi (2000), which seeks to explain why and how the traditions of research represented by activity theory (AT), actor-network theory (ANT), situated learning theory (SLT) and cultural perspectives on learning (CP) can be grouped under the heading of 'practice-based theorizing'. The basic idea is that knowledge is not something present in the heads of people; nor is it a strategic productive factor located in the organization's management; rather it is a 'knowledge-in-practice' constructed by practising in a context of interaction. In this view, practice is the 'figure of discourse that allows the processes of knowing at work and in organizing to be articulated as historical processes, material and indeterminate' (Gherardi, 2000: 220–21, 2006, 2008). The practice constitutes the 'topos' that ties the 'knowing' to the 'doing'. Participation in a practice is on the one hand a way to acquire knowledge in action and, on the other, a way to change/perpetuate such knowledge and to produce and reproduce society (Gherardi, 2000: 215). Studies on knowing-in-practice have spread a 'new vocabulary' in organization studies (Nicolini et al., 2003). The study of knowing-in-practice prefers action verbs able to transmit the idea of an emergent reality, of knowing as a material activity. Numerous studies use terms and expressions connected to material artefacts: sociality is related not only to human beings, but also to symbolic and cultural artefacts. The debate on practice is rich in terms linked with the space-time location of the 'doing' of actors, that is, with the 'situatedness' of practices. Finally, the debate is characterized by the use of words that denote uncertainty, conflict and incoherence, understood as features intrinsic to practices because they produce innovation, learning and change.

A few years later, Orlikowski (2002: 249) also used a 'perspective on knowing in practice'. The use of this label 'suggests that knowing is not a static embedded capability, or stable disposition of actors, but rather an ongoing social accomplishment, constituted and reconstituted as actors engage the world of practice'. The practices of the context (the author refers in particular to identity sharing, face-to-face interactions, the alignment of efforts, learning-by-doing and participation) produce a collective 'knowing how' that is constantly activated and enables organizational subjects to operate across temporal, geographical, political and cultural boundaries (distributed organizing).

Various empirical studies have analysed knowing-in-practice. Gomez et al. (2003: 122), for example, describe the complex nature of knowing in a kitchen: 'cooking practice is a mix of personal

predisposition, knowledge acquired through tough training and repetitive practice, knowledge of rules integrated and internalized by cooks, and knowledge acquired through reflexive thinking about practice².

Knowing-in-practice links with both the sensible knowledge and the aesthetic judgment that practitioners use to appraise and transmit a practice. Strati (2003, 2007: 62) investigates the dimension of sensory knowledge and aesthetic judgement. 'Aesthetic' or sensible knowledge comprises 'what is perceived through the senses, judged through the senses, and produced through the senses. It resides in the visual, the auditory, the olfactory, the gustatory, the touchable and the sensitive-aesthetic judgment'. If we consider work routine, in all jobs—though obviously to different extents—people use their bodies and activate their senses to learn the community's practices. Strati (2007: 69–70) illustrates the relation between sensible knowledge and practice-based learning with various examples. One of them concerns a group of building labourers working on a roof without safety protection. Work on the roof involved the senses of touch, 'feeling the roof under your feet', and those of hearing and sight, 'looking with the ears' at the movements and noises of workmates and objects. The perceptive-sensory capacities were therefore crucial for performance of the roofing work, like others, because they influenced the choice of that kind of work, its teaching, its learning and the selection of those capable of performing it. More generally, they comprised every aspect of what people do when they work.

With the labels of 'practice-based perspective' and 'practice-based approach' we shall see how the reference to the conception of practice as epistemology become even more explicit.

In the literature on practice, some authors are distinguished by their use of the expression 'practice-based perspective'. The pathfinder for this 'wagon' has assuredly been the study by Sole and Edmondson (2002), which examines the role of knowledge and learning processes in dispersed teams working on development projects. The article conducts detailed analysis on the role of knowledge situated in diverse geographically dispersed local contexts. The 'practice-based perspective' is defined as the lens able to highlight the role of 'knowledge grounded in site-specific work practice' (Sole and Edmondson, 2002: 18). In support of their theoretical contentions, Sole and Edmondson (2002: 18) furnish their own definition of the concept of 'practice' as the dimension which:

emphasises the collective, situated and provisional nature of knowledge, in contrast to a rational-cognitive view of knowledge. Practice connotes doing and involves awareness and application of both explicit (language, tools, concepts, roles, procedures) and tacit (rules of thumb, embodied capabilities, shared worldviews) elements. Central to the practice perspective is acknowledgement of the social, historical and structural contexts in which actions take place.

The 'practice perspective' thus locates the dimension of practice in the context in which it is performed. Actors always undertake their actions within a constantly-evolving historical-cultural setting. The dimension of the 'provisional' and of the 'historically situated' are combined in the everyday 'doing' of actors.

In addition to Sole and Edmondson, the label 'practice-based perspective' has been used more recently by Swan et al. (2007), who study innovations in biomedicine. Using a theoretical approach which combines symbolic interactionism and theory of practice, these authors investigate

the interactions among the various actors making up research groups for innovation in the biomedical sector. Within this framework:

Practice-based perspectives provide important additional insights into the nature and role of objects in innovation. First, they illuminate the relationship between objects, knowledge, work practices, social groups and social context. [...] Second, where symbolic interactionist views tend to stress the essentially individual nature of knowledge, practice based perspectives make a distinctive contribution by differentiating those forms of knowledge that are acquired individually and those that are acquired collectively (Swan et al., 2007: 1813).

The practice merges the individual and collective dimensions, human and technological elements, describing and explaining the ways of doing, bodies of knowledge and situations that develop in a given work setting.

A final label on the broad bandwagon of practice is the expression 'practice-based approach'. The author who has pioneered this part of the caravan is Carlile (2002), whose theoretical and empirical research is based on what he himself calls a 'practice-based research approach'. Every organizational context should be studied by adopting a 'pragmatic view' able to explore the dimension of knowledge 'localized, embedded and invested in practice' (Carlile, 2002: 445). Knowledge is structured in practice in its relation to 'objects'—the artefacts with which practitioners interact in their everyday work—and 'ends'—the products of the creation and manipulation of those objects by the actors. The practical approach enables exploration of how individuals solve their problems, that is, how they construct their competence in practice. Practice is the dimension able to convey the process by which an actor's know-how is built: the 'trial and error' process (Carlile, 2002: 446) whereby which a person's situated practical knowledge is constructed.

In addition to Carlile, Yanow (2004) also uses the expression 'practice-based approaches'. But unlike Carlile, Yanow uses the noun 'approach' in the plural, perhaps because in her theoretical framework this serves to indicate the existence of a plurality of 'practice-based approaches to the study of organizational learning' (Yanow, 2004: 10). The study of practice brings out the specificities of behaviour and meaning in situated contexts. Knowledge can be distinguished into two types: one definable as 'expert', the other as 'local' (Yanow, 2004: 12). The 'expert' dimension comprises the stock of explicit, theory-based, academic, professional or scientifically-based, abstract and generalizable knowledge and techniques. The 'local' dimension instead comprises the complex array of forms of knowledge and ways of doing which are tacit and practice-based, and which derive from experience and interaction in a specific context. Practice therefore affords understanding of the everyday interactions between the 'expert' and 'local' dimensions of people's knowledge. Understanding the practices of individuals enables interpretation of the situated learning processes that take place in organizations.