https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9566.13275
"For social theorists, including Bourdieu and Schatzki, people are the product of their own past, socially and materially reproduced not in the abstract but through ongoing, recursive relations between practices."
"Giddens’ (1984) contention that practices, as they are enacted and transformed across space and time, constitute the central topics of social analysis and enquiry"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQffxdj9X9c&feature=emb_imp_woyt
- They incorporate the role of tech and things in daily life, focusing on relations with tech rather than purely social
- Practices are discrete entities (have a past, present and future - a trajectory) that are performed in moments
- Practices interact with other practices to form bundles (co-located, loose) and complexes (co-dependent, cordindated, synch). Practies are always interconnecting with other practices in some way
- Theories of social practice collapse the divide between structure and agency - repreated performances create the observable structural features of the social practice
Practices over Behaviour. Health is the outcome of participating in a set of social practices. Not individual behaviours. Smoking/Drinking are behaviours and not practices. Practices are going out with friends, seeing a band
Good or Bad is part of the 'meaning' of the practice. Not the whole practice.
In socioloigy to understand social action. Not in terms of micro social actions or macrco. Change the unit of analysis away from individual behaviour and focus on rational decision making and automony at the micro level. To move away from structural at macro to looking at social practice and how they change over time.
Example. Showering. Why has the shift from bathing to showering happeneed? Shift in meanings, materials and competitices.
Stop thinking about motivations and invidivuals. The question is how do people become carriers of a social practice. How does a practice recruit people? Where does the practice recruit from? If a practice if excluding some people, ask how you can change the meaning, material or competencies to include them.
Practice is not novel or new. It is done routinely. Pracice isn't just playing violion. It includes the violin and the skills your need
Practices asre social phenomena - their performance entials the production of cultural meanings, socially leant skills and common tools, technologies and practices - Spurling
The reason you do the practice is because their is a social meaning for doing it. The perforamcne is for other people in a way. Which entails the reproduction. Practice in the reproduction of those skills. They are shared tools, not private.
Shove - three elements model:
- Meanings/Images/Symbols
- Proceduce/Competence/Skill (your social group approves of your skill -> competance)
- Materials/Objects (things that are sticky and don't change easily - could be a policy)
Practice is the interrconnection between these things. When you perform a practice you use your skills, to manipulate things in order to create meaning.
You could use best practice as a way of reinforcing a social practice.
Behaviour is an individual's performacne of a social practice.
Social practice is a lot like jazz. Always improvasional. Competency is being able to recreate the practice despite the material changing.
Stability are no ends points of a process. They are ongoing accomplishments in when things are linked together in similar ways.
We often aren't taught social practices, we copy, then don't talk about them in the same way. TDD has different ways of doing it.
What does an account of a good day at work entail? Does Anxiety/Boredom (too samey), inbetween is flow. Csikszentmihalyi.
'being compentant' is being able to change when the constraints change. It's about realigning when this happens.
We like things to be predictable. You see people do skills with material with an outcome you don't worry. When you see people do alternatives you get worried.
Schatski - not a social system, it's practices that are networked together. Things hold together by principles, rules and instructions. 'teleoaffective' (future feelings) about how we think should end (projects, emotions, moods, purposes).
Nexus of practice: Practices have stablishing factors (understandings, policies, teleoaffice structures) and destablishing/challenging factors (env chage, changes in associated practies, changes in expectation).
Implications: focus of analysis moves from individuals to 'shared behavioural routines'
WTF is historicity. Normative vs Absolute Logic.
It's not purely environment/context or purely the independant action.
DevOps is about the negotation of the boundary of a set of social practices (and their three elements).
- Transformation isn't an event. It's a progressive accumlation of habits. (Big Switch theory)
- It's changing the flow state of practices (new meanings, materials and skills)
- We change the social norms. Not indivudlas. Practices are what we change, we don't analyse individuals
- Places to intervene in the system
- reconfigure the network of practices (redesign / undesign)
- reconfigure the practice (develop / automate)
- Replace a practice (de-norm / re-norm)
- Shook and Schein both miss the point that you work on all three elements.
- WTF: Hermeneutic Loop (world view -> attention/intention -> experince of the world -> interpetation)
- These things create a loop: I do this, with this, for this (interpreation changes).
- Boundary Practices: Kinda compentecies, but in social bubbles. Some are shared practices, which are boundary practices.
- We have practices that are meaningful between socialgroups
- We have practices that exist inside a social group
- Social Spanning System: The internal complexity is to the state that someone centrally notices and negotiates the 'what is competance' argument. To increase the resilience and performance of the system.
- Transformation is about the boundaries.
- A laundrmat has a shared meaning, though they use a different skillset
- Requsisite coherence (only one way of doing) and requsitie variety (exploration of space).
- Showering is hard to change as it is private - less judgement. Harder to modify.
- You can convince me that environmentalism is good. But you have to convince me on each pratice.
- Agile Manifesto is just values and principals, but it has no practices. That's why anyone can say they are doing it
- Policie are created by bosses to save them from being harrassed about problems between teams. You get the classic wall of policy problem that all interactions become highly transactional. You must perform this ritual to interact with this other team. No to negotiate but to satisfy their particular requirements. Ops vs Dev example, Devs want releases every two days, which breaks Ops tooling so they create policies to stop that which just creates barriers to change making big problems rather than small problems every couple of days.
- Rather than a policy relationship, go to a reciprical relationship talking about practices and outcomes with the recongition that all of those things don't need to be defined up front, but change over time
- How long does it take for a novice to learn to send an email alone? Two years.
Yes. But it allows us to means to conceptualise stability and change which recognising the recursive relation between practies as entities and performances.
Schatzki 47 draws a crucial distinction between practices-as-entities and practices-asperformances. Where practice-as-entity refers to “a temporally unfolding and spatially dispersed nexus of doings and sayings” (Shatzki 1996, p.89) linked together through understandings, explicit rules and teleoaffective structures, by contrast, practice-asperformance refers to specific moments of integration between elements that occur when practices are enacted in particular local situations. In other words, practices-as-entities can be recognised to exist across time and space, even if they are not currently being enacted – the laundry being one such example as discussed in this paper. However, it is during situated and specific performances of laundry that the practice ‘lives’. A dialectical relationship exists between entities and performances because, whilst practices-as-entities may guide performances, it is through these performances that entities are (re)produced and either stabilised or changed (Warde, 2005)
- Social practices consist of elements that are integrated when practices are enacted
- Practices emerge, persist and disappear as links between their defining elements are made and broken
- Don't follow the actors, follow the elements of practice and track changing configurations over time
The big three
- Materials: things, technologies, tangiable physcial entities (inc. the body) and stuff of which objects are made
- Competences: skill, know-how and technique
- Practical consciousness, deliberately cultivated skill, shared understandings of good performance (you don't have to be able to do it yourself)
- Meanings: symbolic meanings, ideas and aspirations
- Meaning, emotion and motivation
- Mental activities, emotion, motivatioanl knowledge. Social/Symobilic signficance of participation in the moment.
Practices exist when elements are integrated. Before they are linked they are 'proto-practices'. Practices disintegrate when links are no longer sustained.
For the links to continue, the links need to be renewed time and time again. It is not linear, it is an ongoing accomplishments where things are linked in similar ways.
Car example: It's a wagon with a gasoline engine. All that changed was how to maintain it. Only mechanics could drive at first. Coachmen tried to changed but animal husbandry is different from engine maintainace. Know-how in the mechanic was passed into the vehicle itself, meaning more people could drive.
Gap thinking explained by John Cutler: https://mobile.twitter.com/johncutlefish/status/1235989165294014465 https://samim.io/p/2021-04-19-instead-of-gap-thinking-present-thinking/ https://amplitude.com/north-star/making-the-north-star-framework-stick
Breaking links (car example): no more 'bundling up' (clothes), back twine. We live alongside the material trace of practcies past (coaching inns, canals, tollgate cottages). But what about competencies and meanings? We don't do hand signals anymore, most cannot read a map. They go dormant, but can come back in other practices - or history videos.
- autopoietic a system capable of reproducing and maintaining itself by creating its own parts and eventually further components. Relation to complexity: producing more of their own complexity than the one produced by their environment.
- dialectical: concerned with or acting through opposing forces.
- practices-as-entities: "linked together through understandings, explicit rules and teleoaffective structures". Exist across time and space, even if they are not currently being enacted – the laundry being one such example
- practice-as-performance: refers to specific moments of integration between elements that occur when practices are enacted in particular local situations. It is during situated and specific performances of laundry that the practice ‘lives’
- Teleoaffective formations (Schatzki): are configurations across multiple practices that enjoin those practices to common ends, ordering their affective engagements and offering general understandings through which participants make sense of the projects they pursue
- nonlinear system is a system in which the change of the output is not proportional to the change of the input.
- methodological injunction: a warning against a system of methods used in an area of study
- unit of enquiry This is the unit—for example individual, household, corporation, or whatever— about which we are researching by asking questions (inquiry would mean investigating in a more formal way)
- normative: Normative generally means relating to an evaluative standard. Normativity is the phenomenon in human societies of designating some actions or outcomes as good or desirable or permissible and others as bad or undesirable or impermissible
- causality: Causality is influence by which one event, process, state or object contributes to the production of another event, process, state or object where the cause is partly responsible for the effect, and the effect is partly dependent on the cause
- metaphorically: A metaphor is a figure of speech that, for rhetorical effect, directly refers to one thing by mentioning another. It may provide clarity or identify hidden similarities between two different ideas
- epistemic: branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge. nature, origin, and scope of knowledge, epistemic justification, the rationality of belief