Practice Theoretical Perspective Research Articles

What Does a Downvote Do? Performing Complementary and Competing Knowledge Practices on an Online Platform

Large-scale online platforms powered by user-generated content are extensively researched as venues of learning and knowledge production. In this ethnographically oriented study, we examine knowledge practices on a community question answering platform for computer programmers in relation to the platform mechanics of voting. Grounded in the practice theoretical perspective and drawing on the analysis of online discussion threads and platform-related online materials, our study unpacks the dominant practice of crowd-based curation, the complementing practice of distributed moderation, and the more marginal practice of providing feedback to content producers. The practices co-exist in tension and consonance, which are embedded in the materiality of the platform and are continuously enacted through user discursive boundary work, sustaining the mentioned practices as intelligible for other users, and outlining what counts as legitimately participation on the platform. The study contributes to existing research on the roles voting plays on online platforms, as well as offers implications for research on social and material organization of users' online practices. The study also discusses that it is the ambiguity around the mechanics of voting that allows practices to co-exist. While this ambiguity is often discussed by users as problematic, we suggest as potential implication of our study that it may be productive to design platforms for workable forms of ambiguity allowing knowledge practices to co-exist in tension and to provide space for user negotiations of these practices.

A project-as-practice perspective on helping behavior and reciprocity in an inter-organizational project

Much research on project management links clear roles and responsibilities stemming from formal job descriptions to successful project performance and processes. However, research on discretionary behavior suggests that individuals’ voluntary commitments, which are not part of the contractual tasks, such as giving help, also contribute to organizational success. Drawing on ethnographic data and a practice theoretical perspective, we investigate the role and impact of helping on the social life of an inter-organizational project. We show how actors engaging in acts of helping assume roles of receivers and givers of help. We show that the establishment of these roles prompts behavior on behalf of the actors, which may have an adversarial impact on the contractually defined roles and thus pose central challenges for the rational management of projects. We conclude by arguing that the connection between practice and social life applies to all social practices, which means that project managers should pay close attention to the actualities of project practices.

Toward a practice-theoretical view of the situated nature of attention.

In this paper, we examine how a practice-theoretical perspective may complement and expand the central tenet of the attention-based view (ABV) that attention is contextually situated. We put forward three main arguments. First, the components that make a practice possible and that locate it in history and context (practice architecture) also prefigure a situated horizon of relevance and possibilities (pragmatic field of attention). Attention thus often befalls organizational members outside the realm of discursive consciousness as a consequence of being engaged in socio-material practices. Second, attention is situated at the crossroads of multiple practices, each with its practice architecture and local pragmatic field of attention. Organizational attention implies tensions, conflict, and contradictions and emerges from the interaction and negotiation of multiple individual and group pragmatic fields of attention. Finally, attention is situated in the temporal dynamics of sustaining and turning attention. This allows us to distinguish between inattention, dysfunctional distraction, and potentially productive attention turning. We argue that by focusing on the ordinary and routinized nature of attention, a theoretical practice view complements and enriches the ABV by offering a less voluntarist and top-down view and proposing a richer view of situatedness. A practice-theoretical approach also distributes attention among a broader set of elements, offering resources to theorize how these elements are connected. The approach also establishes a link between paying attention and caring, thus bringing emotions back into the study of organizational attention. In turn, the ABV helps the practice-theoretical perspective to recognize the central role of attention in organizational matters and the importance of engaging in full with the organizational unit of analysis when dealing with attention-related issues.

Playing with disaster, moving toward change

The paper presents the theoretical framework for the use of role-playing games (RPG) to foster and motivate ecoliteracy. First, we discuss previous work on the uses of RPGs in relation to environmental education. Then we introduce the practice theoretical perspective grounding our approach. This is followed by a brief consideration of theories of motivation, as we seek to leverage this drive through playful and co-creative processes via the use of an open-ended RPG. Finally, we lay out the principles guiding our work, followed by some reflections of the results of the first pilot-test of the game.

Being, becoming and sustaining: learning professional learning in teacher education

ABSTRACT In this study, we are exploring the development of professional learning of nearly qualified teachers, here referred to as prospective teachers, during their subject teacher education at a Finnish university. From a teacher educator stance, we aim to understand how teacher education practices can support prospective teachers’ professional learning. The research question guiding our study is: How are prospective teachers portraying their professional learning by making use of a self-reflective portfolio? The data analysed consists of self-reflective learning portfolios written by prospective subject teachers as a course assignment in a course in general didactics. Drawing on a practice theoretical perspective, the analysis highlights how activities and assignments supporting both individual and collegial learning can be arranged during pre-service teacher education, and how prospective teachers can achieve a sense of collaborative and dialogic professional learning. The results contribute to discussions about promoting sustainable professional learning for both prospective and in-service teachers.

Simple questions for complex matters?

Renewable energy sources have emerged as a current subject matter in Sweden amidst discussions regarding energy costs, climate change and development of energy production. This study explores how Google Search is used for seeking information about wind power and how utilised search queries contribute to the understanding of this energy source. Adopting a practice theoretical perspective, the study explores search queries as doings and sayings, and understands search engines as an established part of everyday routinised information seeking-activities. Data collection was carried out in a trace ethnographic vein through the automatic retrieval of search queries enacted between November 2021 and October 2022. Through a digital methods approach, the search queries were analysed and visualised according to their prevalence and character string composition. A qualitative, multiple coding approach was moreover used for the identification and interpretation of themes and subthemes. The results show that geographical locations, wind power functions and small wind turbines comprise the most prominent subthemes of the search queries. This is replicated also in the search term frequencies, providing further insights to queries related to wind turbine’s efficiency as well as subthemes of advantages and disadvantages. Moreover, the study shows the tendency to phrase search queries as simple questions for complex matters, with nuances being lost in the pursuit of austere, uncomplicated answers. Altogether, the results contribute to a wider understanding of how environmental information seeking is conducted today.

The convenience of gaming

The frequency of video game consumption is a contested topic among scholars. In existing research, the extent of video game use is often related to the terminologies ‘excessive gaming’, ‘video game addiction’ and ‘problem gaming’. Yet the socio-material and practical qualities of gaming in everyday life have received little theoretical and empirical attention in the research on frequent video gaming. By considering these issues this article aims at detaching time spent gaming from a problem framework through a practice theoretical perspective. The empirical data stems from a qualitative study of young Danish adults who are frequently engaged in gaming. The article finds that gaming is constituted by multiple socio-material components that make it highly convenient to consume in everyday life. First, the devices and applications involved in gaming setups conjure mundane, and not focused, engagements with video games. Second, the mobility of gaming enables it to be simultaneously performed with other everyday practicalities such as cooking or commuting. Third, frequent video gaming may occur because the affordances of gaming grant easy access and flexible options for socialising. The convenience of gaming suggests that frequent engagements with video gaming can be viewed as a consequence of how people value their time use.

Doing vulnerability : The social construction of age(ing) during the COVID-19 pandemic

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic old age has been "vulnerablilized" in the media by characterizing old age as a vulnerable and risky phase of life. Gerontologists have criticized the age-based definition of risk groups for their underlying agism. From a practice-theoretical perspective the article asks through which social practices a vulnerable age is realized during the COVID-19 pandemic. The article refers to data from six qualitative interviews with people aged 65 and older. The data was analyzed using fine structure analysis followed by a topic analysis. The results show that during the COVID-19 pandemic doing age was characterized by a not doing or the disappearance of routinized everyday practices. For the respondents this not doing age was connected to experiencing vulnerable ageing, in which they felt physically and temporally vulnerable. Practices of aging during the COVID-19 pandemic have developed against the backdrop of a societal discourse that has positioned activity as an indicator of good and positive aging. At the same time few opportunities have been created to maintain activity under the conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Designing lesson study for individual and collective learning: networking theoretical perspectives

PurposeThis article aims to explore, by drawing on, and coordinating and combining Cultural Historical Activity Theory and Community of Practice theoretical perspectives, what we might learn about how to design for Lesson Study that best supports both collective and individual learning.Design/methodology/approachThe article primarily makes a theoretical contribution. It does, however, draw on, and is informed by, the design of a large-scale study that sought to improve teaching and learning in mathematics with the particular aim of improving grades of post-16 learners in national examinations in England. Lesson Study was central to the designed intervention and such design is explored from the two theoretical perspectives.FindingsTheoretical analysis suggests how the careful design of Lesson Study can facilitate both individual and collective learning in terms of the theories networked here. In particular, it is suggested that supporting collective learning requires careful attention to how “disturbances” in activity systems need to be designed for rather than being left to chance and how architectures that can support individual learning in terms of identity development should pay attention to supporting emerging practices as well as defining what is non-negotiable.Originality/valueThe article takes a novel approach by coordinating and combining two different, and well established, theoretical approaches, which, significantly, are used quite widely in social science research. Together they provide a rich view of learning at both individual and collective levels and suggest ways in which we might better support design for Lesson Study.

Making and breaking links: the transformative potential of shared mobility from a practice theories perspective

Shared mobility has the potential to contribute to the transition to a more sustainable mobility system. However, the environmental impacts and the extent of proliferation of the various shared mobility practices differ considerably. It is problematic that the most widespread practice—free-floating carsharing—shows the least environmental potential. Thus, the question arises as to why some shared mobility practices proliferate more readily than others. This paper studies this question from a practice theoretical perspective, focusing on how practices link or do not link with one another. It analyses how various shared mobility practices, as well as the practice of private car travel, connect to other practices via spatial-material and temporal links. The analysis explains why private car travel and, to a lesser degree, free-floating carsharing integrate relatively easily into everyday life, while other forms of shared mobility struggle to do so. This observation leads to the need for far-reaching interventions, both in the making of links of sustainable practices but also in the breaking of links of unsustainable practices. This paper scrutinizes this issue in an anticipatory and theory-based manner and offers suggestions on how to refine practice theoretical concepts regarding inter-practice connections.

Environmental ethics in action: relations between practices, ethics and the culture of consumer society

This article investigates how environmental ethics are at play in people’s everyday lives and practices of consumption from a practice theoretical perspective. The analysis is based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews from a larger study, with a selected focus in this article on the biographies and everyday practices of three households. These households were chosen for the analysis in order to reveal the greatest variation in degrees and ways of relating ethically to the environment. Situating ethics in the specific contexts and lifeworlds of research participants reveals how environmental ethics of differing contents are to varying degrees at work in people’s lives. The article suggests that the general understanding of environmental ethics is closely connected to biographical histories as well as to social and cultural contexts. In a practice theoretical framework, environmental ethics are understood as a kind of general understanding that connects to larger scale cultural formations linking provision and consumption conceptualised as teleoaffective formations. In some cases, the general understanding may contribute to the formulation of a cultural critique of modern consumer society and create a vision of an alternative system of provision and consumption connected to an imagined teleoaffective formation.

The Constitution of Boundaries: How the Embeddedness of Organizational Users Structures the Transfer of their Knowledge

Private and organizational users are widely treated as equal in the literature on the integration of users in innovation projects. Based on a practice-theoretical perspective, we argue in this paper that this equation is inconsistent and inadequate. While users are conceptualized as competent and embedded when it comes to the genesis of their user knowledge, both factors are ignored when their involvement in the innovation process is considered. Drawing on empirical findings on interorganizational knowledge transfer, we show that the social, formal, and material embeddedness of organizational users crucially structures their integration. By elaborating the role of different structural dimensions in detail, we highlight the distinctive features of organizational users. In doing so, we further develop a heuristic that enables a detailed and adequate analysis of their integration.

A web of leading for professional learning – leadership from a decentring perspective

ABSTRACT Research shows that leadership is crucial for professional learning, often highlighting principals' or middle leaders' leading practices. However, in leading, professions with differing roles work together. With a decentring perspective on leadership, we shift the focus from the individual principal or middle leader to joint leading practices. Based on a practice theoretical perspective, this article explores how educational leadership unfolds in shared leading practices in a Swedish case where professional learning is led by principals, middle leaders, and an external development leader. The findings visualise a web of practices focusing on understanding roles, changing structures and changing content for professional learning. The shared leading practices are enabled by shared ideas, different positions, and common arenas for communication, but constrained by simplified assumptions and exclusion of teachers. In this web, single dilemmas are handled in different practices from differing perspectives, with changes in plans for professional learning as an outcome.

Mundane normativity and the everyday handling of contested food consumption

Much contemporary public debate focuses on food consumption. Societal and individual health, risk, climate change, sustainability, animal welfare and food quality are all issues which influence the culturally established or traditional food routines practised in every day life. This cultural contestation and debate suggests that consumption in everyday life is already a site of normative action. Yet existing research has focused largely either on political and ethical consumption, or on tacitly reproduced routines in consumption. The mundane processes in which explicit and implicit ways of handling normative issues are entangled have received little attention, either empirically or theoretically. This article seeks to consider these issues in detail, suggesting a new framework for empirical investigations of processes of reproduction and change in consumption patterns. It introduces two new terms in mundane normativity – expectable and acceptable consumption – and uses examples to show how these terms can help better understand mundane normativity from a practice theoretical perspective. Material from four different Danish research studies on contested food consumption exemplifies these new terms. The article suggests that the terms expectable and acceptable consumption can enable consumption researchers to examine more variety in relation to the normative in consumption and investigate the intertwined processes of reproduction and change in consumption better. Furthermore, the article argues that analysing mundane normativity points towards an issue in consumption that practice theoretical research has not yet addressed sufficiently – social hierarchies.

Towards a View of Organizational Attention as Practice

In this paper, we examine how a practice-theoretical perspective can complement, integrate, and expand work conducted with the tradition of the Attention-Based View of the firm (ABV), the idea that organizations should be understood as collective mechanisms for directing, regulating, and distributing attention. We argue that a practice-theoretical approach can expand the ABV in at least three ways. First, it allows theorizing the situated nature of attention, showing that a pragmatic field of attention is inherent in all practices and their nexuses. Therefore, the scholarly inquiry should focus on the practices for paying and attracting attention and the attentional effects of practices. Second, it enriches the idea of distributed attention, suggesting that many more -- and more heterogeneous entities are involved in attentional processes than previously thought. Third, it provides a conceptual apparatus to shed new light on the competitive processes that preside on strategy makers’ situational attention, recovering the phenomenon’s integral political nature

Compartmentalization as the norm: Exploring the bundling of (un-)sustainable practices in Germany

In the face of intensifying socio-ecological crisis phenomena, a public and academic discourse of urgency has developed with regard to the sustainable transformation of lifestyles. However, in reality, individuals prove resistant to normative calls for more sustainable consumption and consumption patterns often remain inconsistent across different domains of everyday life. A variety of relatively well-studied causes exist for this (e.g., behavioral lock-ins or motivational goal conflicts). Nevertheless, it remains crucial to empirically investigate questions such as: Between which everyday domains are relations of congruence or incongruence particularly pronounced? And how do these relations differ with sociodemographic variables?Starting from a practice theoretical perspective on everyday life, I present empirical findings on the clustering of (un-)sustainable everyday practices in the fields of energy, food, and mobility. Drawing on population representative survey data from the German cities of Muenster and Stuttgart (n = 2005), I identify six distinct clusters of (un-)sustainable practice patterns by combining a multiple correspondence analysis and a hierarchical cluster analysis. Furthermore, I show how these clusters relate to sociodemographic characteristics. My overall analysis reveals that compartmentalization rather than congruence of (un-)sustainable everyday practices is the empirical norm. However, two clusters represent uniformly (un-)sustainable performances of practices but each only account for less than 10% of the surveyed population.

On the disappearance and presence of the Slovene-speaking minority in Carinthia (Austria): Insights into the use of language and ethnic affiliation in leisure time from a practice-theoretical perspective

For many decades, the question of setting up bilingual place-name signs accompanied the ethnic conflict between the German-speaking majority and the autochthonous Slovene-speaking minority in Carinthia (Austria). On the 10th anniversary of the 2011 compromise concerning the dispute about place-name signs, this article takes a closer look at the characterization of ethnic relations in Carinthia in the past few decades. According to a practice–theoretical empirical approach, the key to understanding this ethnic minority is the disappearance of the Slovene language. This article examines the manifold strategies used by young people to perform Carinthian Slovenian identity during leisure time in the context of, or apart from, cultural associations. With these strategies, adolescents actively try to react to the threatened disappearance of their language as they advocate for its preservation and ensure its enduring presence. The central role of the symbolic dimension of Slovenian language usage is striking. The social cohesion of the Slovene-speaking population must therefore be understood as performative ethnicity.

‘Yeah, this one will be a good one’, or Tacit knowledge, prophylaxis and the border: Exploring everyday health security decisionmaking

Approaching health security from a practice-theoretical perspective, this article advances our understanding of the everyday and locality in health security decisionmaking, and is guided by the following two questions: How is it determined when a health security threat is likely to be present at a point of entry? What knowledge informs everyday health security decisions at borders? Markedly little is known about health security decisionmaking, though conventional wisdom tells us that health security decisions are based on stringent processes and – importantly – anchored in epidemiological knowledge. The assumed primacy of epidemiological knowledge in health security decisionmaking is well illustrated by the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic: evidence-based responses emerged globally following sophisticated epidemiologic investigation. Are health security decisions always rooted in epidemiology? A 12-month period of non-participant observation of Port Health Officers – who, under the auspices of the 2005 International Health Regulations, are responsible for numerous prophylactic measures at the UK border – gives a unique, privileged entry point for understanding the health security decisionmaking process and tells a story that both questions the centrality of epidemiology and foregrounds the role of tacit knowledge and intuition in health security decisionmaking. This article, which draws on insights from the science and technology studies literature on tacit knowledge, shows how observed health risk taxonomies and corollary decisions in prophylactic border security are predicated almost exclusively on hunches and ‘just knowing’ that something ‘doesn’t feel right’.

Policy integration from a practice-theoretical perspective: integrated food policy in the making in two German cities

ABSTRACT Policy integration (PI) is needed for sustainable food system transformation. But PI is challenging, especially at the local level, where actors only begin to develop food policies and food-related discourses and institutions are only emerging. How does PI unfold in such contexts? In this paper, we employ a practice-theoretical perspective to analyze the early phase of food-related PI in two medium-sized cities in southern Germany to find answers to this question. Based on participant observation and interviews, we analyze how three dimensions of practice – doings, sayings and things – relate to the (dis-)integration of policy problems, goals and means. We find that practice dimensions play an important role in the shaping of integrative and disintegrative policymaking dynamics. We conclude that a practice-theoretical perspective on PI is an important complement to policy integration research as it allows for early identification of practical potentials and obstacles to integrated food policymaking.

A niche of their own: variations of information practices in biodiversity citizen science

PurposeInformation practices become highly complex in biodiversity citizen science projects due to the projects’ large scale, distributed setting and vast inclusion of participants. This study aims to contribute to knowledge concerning what variations of information practices can be found in biodiversity citizen science and what these practices may mean for the overall collaborative biodiversity data production in such projects.Design/methodology/approachFifteen semi-structured interviews were carried out with participants engaged with the Swedish biodiversity citizen science information system Artportalen. The empirical data were analysed through a practice-theoretical lens investigating information practices in general and variations of practices in particular.FindingsThe analysis shows that the nexus of biodiversity citizen science information practices consists of observing, identifying, reporting, collecting, curating and validating species as well as decision-making. Information practices vary depending on participants’ technical know-how; knowledge production and learning; and preservation motivations. The study also found that reporting tools and field guides are significant for the formation of information practices. Competition was found to provide data quantity and knowledge growth but may inflict data bias. Finally, a discrepancy between practices of validating and decision-making have been noted, which could be mitigated by involving intermediary participants for mutual understandings of data.Originality/valueThe study places an empirically grounded information practice-theoretical perspective on citizen science participation, extending previous research seeking to model participant activities. Furthermore, the study nuances previous practice-oriented perspectives on citizen science by emphasising variations of practices.