The practice of studying social practices: What does the empirical literature tell?

Abstract

Academic work on social practices has developed rapidly and resulted in a vibrant yet fragmented body of literature. With the field facing few shared fundamental methodological principles, such fragmentation seriously hampers progress in theory and empirical research. To represent the existing approaches and to advance the future empirical work on social practices, this paper reviews the empirical studies published in leading journals in management and organization science between 1991-2011. By revisiting Gareth Morgan’s (1980) thoughts on organization studies we analyze ‘the practice of studying social practices’ which includes the perspectives, research themes, and research designs that scholars adopt to empirically study social practices. We find that four perspectives structure fieldworkers' understanding of social practices: knowledge, artifacts, politics, and ethics. Furthermore, we reveal a strong tendency toward knowledge-driven trajectories of theory building, a separate handling of research questions along the four perspectives, and a systematic omission of questions related to ethics. While a majority of the studies reviewed use ethnography-informed research designs, there is variance in terms of data collection methods used. The paper suggests promising routes to augment today’s practice of studying social practices. We first use the review to derive a research agenda and then disentangle methodological guidelines which particularly suggests iteration between observational, textual, and what we introduce as perspectival reflexivity.