Has practice theory run out of steam?

Abstract

The article poses the question of whether in the past ten years the empirical study of knowledge practices has lost momentum and the energy to continue in redefining the status of knowledge in contemporary society and in organization studies. It illustrates how the intellectual movement that has been made possible by the empirical study of knowing as a situated practice has been a movement towards the de-centering of the human subject. A posthumanist practice epistemology assumes practice to be an agencement of heterogeneous elements (knowledges, techniques and activities) that in their connections and becomings enact agency. Therefore, practice-based studies have not run out of steam, rather, they are redefining the object of knowledge by passing from an interest focused on distributed cognition within single practices, and activities within a practice, to distributed agency within a texture of practices where the interest is in how agencement comes into being and how power designates regimes of visibility and invisibility. RAC gives a good example of how knowledge objects have changed in the past ten years and, at the same time, provides a suggestion for future research.