Blackwell Reference Online

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Practice is a rich if contested term on which sociologists converge when they endeavor to portray human action in its cultural and institutional settings. Concepts of practice highlight the influence of taken-for-granted, pre-theoretical assumptions on human conduct. Such covert assumptions embrace everything that is left out of economists’ standard portrayals of intellectual calculations based on personal goals and known facts. For example, theorists of practice highlight the influence of bodily experience, practical know-how, and institutionalized understandings of self and agency. Among the diverse theorists whose research has sustained this turn to practice are Garfinkel, Bourdieu, Foucault, Swidler, and Giddens. Their practice-centered views of social life share three major themes. First, thinking as situated activity. Thinking and feeling are not preparations for action, they are action – just as public, material, and situationally conditioned as other goings-on. Classical social and economic theory once viewed thinking and feeling as mental processes separable from observable action. An invisible mind inside the person orchestrated in advance the actions to be observed from the outside. But as sociologists from the 1960s onward plumbed the life of science labs, hospitals, and other theaters of coordinated action, they concluded that individuals’ thoughts are indefinable ... log in or subscribe to read full text