Practice in research: phenomenon, perspective and philosophy

Abstract

The focus on practice in management studies – and the strategy field more specifically – is a recent and important development in what organizational scholars pay attention to and how. Reflecting the more general social-theoretic ‘practice turn’ (Ortner 1984; Schatzki, Knorr Cetina and von Savigny 2001; Reckwitz 2002), this development is diverse and dynamic, expressing both a range of approaches and a set of emerging possibilities (Gherardi 2006; Feldman and Orlikowski 2011; Molloy 2007; Postill 2010; Whittington 2006). Schatzki (2001a: 4) argues that, given the broad array of interpretations and interests, the most effective notion of practice may be in its framing and orienting of research. It is in this spirit of exploring various ways of structuring practice research that I offer the discussion below, and not to propose or defend any particular conception or appropriation of practice ideas. In what follows, I want to distinguish three modes of engaging with practice in research, and highlight some of their attending entailments. I then discuss some of the challenges and implications associated with taking practice seriously in studies of organizations. Throughout this commentary, I will draw on illustrations from the arena of organizational research that I am most familiar with: technology studies. These examples should offer some useful analogies and applications for strategy-as-practice research, in which parallel considerations and formations are evident. Modes of engaging practice in research I find it useful to differentiate between the different ways that the notion of practice has been attended to in the management literature (including the strategy-as-practice literature). These variations arise as a result of differences in the locus of researchers’ attention and the logic of their inquiry. Three modes of engaging practice in research are evident. The first mode emphasizes practice as a phenomenon – the notion that what is most important in organization research is understanding what happens ‘in practice’, as opposed to what is derived or expected from ‘theory’; the second mode advocates practice as a perspective – the articulation of a practice-centred theory about some aspect of organizations; and the third mode highlights the notion of practice as a philosophy – the commitment to an ontology that posits practice as constitutive of all social reality, including organizational reality.