Constitutive elements of practices

As noted above, institutional theory and, in particular, its strand on IW has been influenced by theoretical underpinnings of practices. Drawing on practice scholarship, I hereby briefly discuss the constitutive elements of practices and their implications for understanding and studying institutional work.

3.2.1. Concept and nature of practices

The genealogy of organizational practice may be traced to the writings of philosophers, sociologists and cultural theorists like Aristotle, Wittgenstein (1953), Heidegger (1962), Weber (1978), Bourdieu (1990; 1977), Leotard (1979), Foucault (1980), Giddens (1984) and Garfinkel (1967), who contributed to the conceptualization of practices in unique ways, highlighting their particular aspects.

More recent theoretical developments among other scholars have been advanced by Fairclough (2003), Orlikowski (2002), and Schatzki et al. (2001). Having such a

rich historical background, contemporary empirical studies use various definitions of practices. For example, Vaara and Whittington (2012) in their review of strategy as practice (SAP) studies offered a broad definition of practices as “accepted ways of doing things, embodied and materially mediated, that are shared between actors and routinized over time (Reckwitz, 2002; Schatzki, Knorr-Cetina, & von Savigny, 2001)” (p. 287). A social, taken-for-granted, and repetitive nature of practices is emphasized in this definition. Barnes (2001) calls practices a collective action,

“recognized forms of activity” (p. 19) guiding “the behavior according to the situation” (Goffman, 1959; Pentland and Reuter, 1994 cited by Zietsma and Lawrence, 2010, p. 192). Practices are thus, “not simply what people do, but the socially legitimate routines in any given community” (Barnes, 2001; Schatzki, 2001 cited by Phillips and Lawrence, 2012). Both situated and institutionalized nature of practices is emphasized in latter conceptualizations.

Bourdieu (1977) argues that it is habitus, a mental or cognitive system of structures, a collective phenomenon and socially constructed behavior provides patterns of practices. Habitus in Bourdieu’s terms is defined “as temporally durable dispositions, embodied unconsciously and predisposed to function as frameworks that generate and regulate practices and ideas” (Bourdieu, 1977 in Battilana, 2006, pp. 655-656). Habitus is an internalized embodiment of external social structures that are acquired over time. It is a structure through which we produce our thoughts and actions which in turn create external social structures. Habitus constrains, but does not determine what a person should think or how they should act. It only suggests. Agents will act on the basis of practical sense or fuzzy logic, not formal logic. They will react reasonably in given situations. When habitus matches the field in which it evolved, agents act instantaneously and intuitively. Both Bourdieu (1990) as well as Giddens (1979) argue that “subject (agency) and object (structure and society) are entwined” (cited by Cunliffe, 2011, p. 652).

Battilana (2006) noted that some neo-institutional scholars, (cf. DiMaggio, 1979) have criticized the notion of habitus for being ambiguous and “for leaving almost no room for agency, and thereby for social change (Sewell, 1992; Fowler, 1997;

Boyer, 2003; Mutch, 2003)” (p. 656). While reading Jenkins’s (2002) interpretation of Bourdieu’s work, I have made an observation that although Bourdieu talks about practices as taken-for-granted, he rejects the duality of their nature. In Bourdieu’s theorization, practices are neither wholly conscious nor wholly unconscious, neither based on rules, recipes nor on normative models (Jenkins, 2002). They are improvisatory, temporal, and adaptive, influenced by environment, time and space.

Similarly, Antonacapoulou (2008) views practices as dynamic, fluid and relational.

According to the scholar, practice can be conceptualized as “a flow of connections

between multiple dimensions that define the workings of a social group in relation to wider contextual forces that shape interpretations and reconstructions of reality”

(ibid., p. 168).

3.2.2. Knowing, meaning and values

More recent scholarly accounts of practices built on Bourdieu’s conceptualization, describe them as a way of knowing and doing (Gherardi, 2001). Cook and Brown (1999) describe practice as action informed by meaning drawn from a particular group context (p. 390 in Corradi, Gherardi and Verzelloni, 2010 p. 269). In line with these theorizations, I have earlier quote Kostova (1999) claiming that practices “are meaning and value-based, as well as knowledge based” (pp. 310-311).

A very general conception of values represents enduring beliefs or ideals shared by members of communities about what is important, good, or bad in a variety of situations. Values are the foundation for decisions and actions. They are constitutive elements of knowing and doing. In a neo-institutional perspective they are guiding what is ‘appropriate’ and/or legitimate. Both values and meaning are embedded in cultural-cognitive and normative frameworks guiding actions described above in section 3.1.1. While meaning is embodied in practices, it may not be known directly. Therefore, as Hatch and Yanow (2003) suggest, in order to capture the meaning (values, beliefs, feelings of lived experience) we have to study the artifacts that embody meaning (p. 66). Gabriel (2008) makes an observation that in order

to understand the meaning of a word, an interaction, or an event, we use definitions, interpretations or negotiations. All three require making sense of actors, networks, interactions, situations, contexts, and flows of events. They require sensemaking within culturally relevant framework, and they are part of social construction of reality. (p. 173)

In relation to the knowledge basis of practices, I will briefly review the nature of organizational knowledge. Organization scholars define knowledge as a mix of experience, values, contextual information, and insight (Davenport and Prusak, 1998, p. 5). Others use a more abstract definition such as "the converse of uncertainty" (Buckley and Carter, 2004, p. 372). Knowledge can be tacit or explicit (Polanyi, 1962); declarative or procedural (Anderson, 1993, cited by Schwandt, 2005 p. 179). In organizational settings, various forms of knowledge are observed:

situated, encoded, embrained, and enculturated. However, all knowledge is rooted in tacit knowing (Polanyi, 1962) and “embodied in individual cognition and

organization routines” (Inkpen and Dinur, 1998, p. 456). “The nature of knowledge is no longer considered singular; it varies from the concrete instrumental or technical to the understanding of underlying subjective assumptions and premises associated with social norms and the cultural context of actions” (communicative and emancipatory) (Schwandt, 2005, p. 181). Nonaka and his associates

“developed an influential organizational knowledge creation theory” (Gabriel, 2008, p. 151) that describes knowledge as dynamic and fluid. More recently in Nonaka’s and his colleagues’ work, knowledge is also described as meaningful, contextual, and relational (Swart et al., 2009, p. 329). Argote and Ingram (2000, p.

153) contend that knowledge is embedded in the interactions of people, tools, and tasks. In Gergen’s (1991, p. 270) view, it “is not something that people possess in their heads, but rather, something that people do together” (in Gherardi and Nicolini, 2000, p. 330). Thus, for practice scholars it is “a form of a distributed social expertise: that is, knowledge-in-practice” (ibid.) situated and manufactured in the historical, socio-material, cultural and at the same time structural context in which it occurs (ibid.; Corradi, Gherardi and Verzelloni, 2010).

Practice scholars contend that organizational knowledge is “acquired through some form of participation in a community of practice” (Gherardi, 2000, p. 330). Sharing knowledge about practices and situated learning are considered to be among key activities in communities of practice (CoP) which lead to the improved performance of organizations (Lesser and Storck, 2001; Wenger, 2006). A critique of scholarship on CoP led to a recent shift in the focus of this research stream from CoP to practices of communities. My observation is that in the HE sector the number of communities is rapidly growing. Those are networks bringing together HEIs, professional and academic associations in certain disciplines, e.g., engineering (ENAEE), chemistry (ECTNA), geography (HERODOT) or like the Joint Degree Management and Administration Network (JOIMAN) that focuses on sharing managerial and administrative practices of collaborative degrees.

A ‘practice lens’ enables a researcher to explain the phenomenon at hand by investigating empirically “how contextual elements shape knowledge and how competence is built around a contingent logic of action” (Corradi, Gherardi and Verzelloni, 2010, p. 267). Actions, activities, modes of knowing or language and symbols and the inherent tensions produced by practices, e.g. a contradiction between intention and action have all been the focus of practice-centred research (Antonacopoulou, 2008). Smets et al. (2012) argue that “the practice perspective helps institutional theorists refine explanations of endogenous change and develop a much-needed multi-level understanding of individual human agency in highly institutionalized arenas” (p. 900).