Beyond the Provisional Nature: Towards a Radial Concept of Practice

Abstract

Practice is one of the key concepts of our time. During the last 30 years, the Practice-Based Studies have spread all over the world. The “rediscovery” of practice has inspired many reflections and empirical researches, contributing to the recent development of the organizational and management studies. This article aims, on the one hand, to reconstruct the debate around the concept of practice and, on the other hand, discuss its meaning, as defined within the PBS. In this paper, it will be argued that practice should be conceived as a “radial concept”. This idea, coming from the political science, is the key to explore new universes of meaning and to read and compare the practitioners' activities, the functioning of organizations and the collective learning processes. The paper will introduce the phenomenon of the so-called Observatories of Civil Justice. These interprofessional communities represent a unique window on the Italian judicial system. This case study enables to critically analyse the concept of practice and to highlight its subtypes: experimental practice, solipsistic practice, diffused practice, concerted practice, fixed practice, institutionalized practice.