I recently had an interesting email exchange with Tom Hargreaves, one of my supervisors here at UEA, regarding the role of social practice theory. For those uninitiated into the world of practice, a very brief synopsis (taken from Reckwitz) is as follows:
“A ‘practice’...is a routinized type of behaviour which consists of several elements, interconnected to one another: forms of bodily activities, forms of mental activities, ‘things’ and their use, a background knowledge in the form of understanding, know-how, states of emotion and motivational knowledge. A practice... forms so to speak a ‘block’ whose existence necessarily depends on the existence and specific interconnectedness of these elements”.
A practice is therefore a set of interconnected heterogeneous elements, and artefacts are included as elements in the constitution of practices. As Reckwitz argues: “Carrying out a practice very often means using particular things in a certain way. It might sound trivial to stress that in order to play football we need a ball and goals as indispensable ‘resources’... but it is not”.
In effect, the focus becomes the practice itself rather than the practitioner (or agent in agency-structure terms). It is in the act of doing the practice itself that the potential for environmentally damaging outcomes to occur appears...
Right, brief summary over, here's the exchange we had....
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Q. In practice theory terms, what is being changed if you switch to low-energy light bulbs? Is it the ‘stuff’ (see Shove) of the practice, or the practice itself?
A. (from TH) From the householders perspective it'd definitely be the stuff of practice that changed in this instance, although I'd possibly question whether or not there is such a thing as a 'lighting practice' in the first place. Maybe instead it's a sub-practice of a broader practice of 'indoor comfort' which light (from candles, electric lamps, windows etc) contributes to - a tricky one to unpick I'd have thought though.
It is indeed hard to say when a practice has changed - just changing the stuff of practice, but leaving the skills and images intact doesn't seem like much of a change to me...but, maybe if change to the stuff of practice was to begin to influence images and skills a change might be on the cards - i.e. if low energy bulbs were installed for envtl reasons, this MIGHT lead to a change in the meaning of the practice (i.e. indoor comfort shouldn't damage the envt) which, in turn, could lead to a change in the skills (i.e. people MIGHT try using lights less). Hobson's (2006) work on 'techno-ethics' (how objects carry ethics) is maybe worth a look here, although it's not couched in practice theoretical terms...
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Q. Practice theory does seem to suffer from the 'what IS the practice' problem - i.e. how you define and identify what the practice actually is...I know that is acknowledged in the literature, but it does seem a problem for looking at environmental issues from a practice perspective as so much practice has some environmentally negative outcomes...do we try to change them one by one or see them as a whole and try to instil (although I'm not sure how) an environmental ethic at a higher level?
And one more point/question - what is to stop the concept of communities of practice being extended to those beyond the traditional organisations such as workplaces that it has been applied to? For example Wenger's modes of belonging belongs in his community of practice approach but why restrict it to learning processes in workplaces - can't they be applied to a much broader range of 'communities' engaged in a much broader range of practices?
A. (TH reply) Your first question - the best answer to the 'what IS practice' question, I think, is that you can only work this out phenomenologically i.e. the first question is 'whose practice?' - once you've identified a practitioner (or community thereof), you can then start to work out what a practice is by asking them.
So, when it comes to 'looking at environmental issues from a practice perspective' we then have a whole load of different questions. First, if we're taking the householders perspective then we'll probably find in most cases that environmental issues don't, apparently, have anything to do with practice whatsoever. If, on the other hand, we're looking at practice from the perspective of an environmental NGO (for example) then we're analysing practice in quite a different way to start with. Remember, the first rule of practice theory is to start from what it is people are DOING, not what (we think) they're thinking - if you take this rule seriously then, in most cases, irrespective of the environmental outcomes, practice has next to nothing to do with the environment.
Taking this into account, when we then think about changing practices, and whether we do this one by one or at a higher level, the first thing we have to ask is CAN we change practices intentionally? There are some major challenges here. Practices change and evolve of their own accord all the time. Attempts to change practices in particular directions often don't work at all, and even when they do they may have unintended (and unpredictable) effects that may undo any of the good intentions behind the change. Some of Arie Rip's work on reflexive governance is interesting here - the question really is, is it possible to get outside the system we're all a part of? And if not, how can we intentionally steer something when we've no idea in what direction we're headed? This is the key point made in the CAUTION! Transitions ahead paper by Shove and Walker. So, when it comes to 'instilling an environmental ethic at a higher level', we have to use a very different and much broader set of criteria to judge the 'success' of such an initiative, we also have to ask which practitioners of which practices are trying to instil it, and upon whom?
Not sure if that makes any sense at all - basically, practice theorists question the very concept of individual agency (individuals are 'carriers' of practice i.e. parts of practices) so the idea of intentionally effecting change is problematic...
Q. Is there not also an issue with practice theory that it offers an interesting analysis of what practice is now but not what could it could be? I guess that's the whole point about evolving practice, but if 'we' are trying to encourage sustainable lifestyles that are made up of evolving practices, how can a practice theory perspective be anything other than descriptive rather than prescriptive?
A. (TH reply) I don't think a practice theory perspective CAN be prescriptive and, to some extent, that's part of the point. Practice theorists are at pains to point out the naivete of previous attempts to impose narrow imperatives on social life. Whether or not that renders practice theory solely descriptive is a different question. Latour (not a practice theorist really, but one of its forefathers) suggests that description is all we can have anyway, that explanation is simply description at another level. So, in this view, there's nothing wrong with description. Taking this further, I would suggest that prior attempts to 'explain' social life by referring to individual attitudes, values, beliefs etc and to contextual 'barriers' and such like and whacking them into linear and predictive models, fundamentally ignore large sections of the object (social life and behaviour) they're trying to explain. In this respect, although they are purportedly 'explanatory' (i.e. they have cause-effect programmed into them), in actual fact they 'explain' next to nothing. That practice theory makes 'explanation' harder to come by should therefore be seen, I'd argue, as one of its strengths rather than a weakness and, if you look at previous empirical studies (such as Shove's on nordic walking, or anything in her 3 Cs book) it's hard to deny that they do offer more encompassing 'explanations' of social phenomena than previous narrow attempts. They are, however, all historical, 'explaining' what has already happened...so, if by 'explanation' you actually mean 'predictive'...well now, then we're onto a whole new territory and this is, for me, where Flyvbjerg's work in MSSM becomes interesting - take a look at the CSERGE working paper I've just written for my thoughts on this (it's on the CSERGE website
here).
RB reply: Thanks for that...I shall leave my queries for now as I feel your answers have provided quite enough food for thought at present!
Although I will make one point - predicting the future is, naturally, full of uncertainties...ergo, anything predictive or prescriptive is full of uncertainties too, and taking a small sideways step into physical science, is of course one of the key challenges of climate change science itself and is the space where sceptics run free, using uncertainty to justify business as usual economic policies which in turn brings us back into the social and makes encouraging behavioural change in a world of uncertainty very difficult...so what is one to do??
TH reply: What, indeed, is one to do...
Flyvbjerg (in Making Social Science Matter - see review
here) argues that the natural/physical sciences can predict things (to an extent) because the natural/physical world doesn't 'answer back'. By contrast, the social sciences can't make universal, context-independent predictions (in the same way as the natural sciences) because social life is fundamentally dependent on context and in order to make universal predictions, context would have to be ignored (he goes on about this at great length and with much greater eloquence than I can)...so, if prediction in the social sciences is out of the question (and I'm inclined to agree that it is, certainly beyond extremely narrowly defined parameters in which case prediction would seem pointless), what indeed can we do? Here Flyvbjerg offers a fairly simple but also quite profound answer - the role of the social sciences is to help real life communities/individuals to understand and confront the large scale value-rational questions that they face. This demands asking questions like 'where are we going?', 'is this desirable?' who wins and who loses?' and 'what should we do about it?' This may not lead to predictions, but it certainly sounds like a much more useful form of social science than one that pretends prediction is possible and is then left looking rather rubbish when they inevitably fail to materialise.
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And I guess my question is, where should we look to find ways of encouraging change? If practice theory suggests that practices simply evolve and it is naive to imagine we can deliberately alter them where does that leave the work that I'm doing? I choose, therefore, to cling to the 'illusion of agency' that Rip speaks of which Shove suggests is enough to encourage us to continue researching how practices evolve in 'the working expectation that a difference can be made even in the face of so much evidence to the contrary'.
