Practices and People

Ted Schatzki

doi:10.21714/2238-104x2017v7i1-32735

Abstract

A perennial issue in social thought is the relationship of people to enveloping social phenomena such as structures, institutions, and systems. The present essay explores this relationship through the lens of practice theory. Theories of practice have said much about practices, a type of enveloping social phenomena, but relatively little about people. This general inattention probably has something to do with the fact that theorists of practice deny that they are individualists. The neglect is nonetheless surprising, for people are everywhere in the plenum of practices. The present essay aims to help address this situation, offering a way of thinking about practices and people according to which these two phenomena are equally real while mutually dependent and co-responsible for social life.

Highlights

Section one first explores the general idea that people are everywhere in the plenum of practices
Theories of practice have said much about practices, a type of enveloping social phenomena, but relatively little about people.i This general inattention probably has something to do with the fact that theorists of practice deny that they are individualists
This is true of the views of Bourdieu, Giddens, Taylor, Reckwitz, Gherardi, Kemmis, and myself and true in modified form of those of Shove and her associates. These theorists conceptualize action/activity differently and propound disparate ideas about what else, in addition to actions/activities, compose practices. These differences notwithstanding, they concur, further, that the actions/activities that compose a practice are performed by multiple people

Summary

General Considerations

Section one first explores the general idea that people are everywhere in the plenum of practices. People move about on the earth through this given reality, perpetuating as well as transforming it.iii The sequences of actions that help compose their lives are components of linked contiguous bundles. People’s lives proceed as part of particular bundles amid these bundles’ geometric material arrangements, sensitive to both the place-path arrays anchored there and the normative organizations of the bundles’ practices. The timespaces of their lives help compose the interwoven timespaces of these bundles. The sort of mutual dependence just expounded converges best with Archer’s (1995) view that the mutual dependence is stretched out over time and not reconsummated in the duration of each particular activity

Dimensions of the Relationship

People Outside Bundles