Content uploaded by Silvia Gherardi
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Silvia Gherardi on Sep 29, 2019
Content may be subject to copyright.
Content uploaded by Silvia Gherardi
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Silvia Gherardi on Aug 09, 2019
Content may be subject to copyright.
1
Introduction
This book is about the practice of doing practice research. It is conceived
as a narrative process that tells stories about practice-based studies and
intends to communicate the multiplicity of ways of doing empirical
research on practices. Therefore, it can only begin by telling an exemplary
story about a social practice.
At the beginning of 2018, when I began to work on the second edition
of this book, the Italian press published a news story that captured my
attention. I could hear Horace whispering in my ear: ‘de te fabula narratur’,
meaning ‘about you the tale is told’ and I narrate it for the readers as an
invitation to start to explore with me the realm of social practices. This is
the story:1
A huge debate was spread by rumour of the introduction of a wireless bracelet
(a newly announced practice) at Amazon in Italy, where two new centres have
been opened, for a total of 1600 jobs. The bracelet, just patented in the US,
had been designed to speed up the search for products stored in warehouses by
employees, monitoring where they put their hands, vibrating to guide them in
the right direction, and actually controlling all their movements. These details
were to be transmitted to the minicomputer on the employee’s wrist, guiding
them to take the goods, put them in a box, and switch to the next task. News of
the patent appeared in nearly all the newspapers, and almost all the exponents
of the government and political parties reacted on social media, accusing the
company of transforming their employees into new slaves of the capitalist
system. Speaker of the House Laura Boldrini declared that ‘Working is not
a crime’, and called the proposal ‘degrading and oensive’. Even the Prime
Minister Paolo Gentiloni put a word in, saying that the challenge facing Italians
was ‘quality jobs, not jobs with wristbands’, and that Italy (dierently from
other countries) has labour laws that apply to every company.
What did a wireless bracelet – a new tool that was not yet in use –
produce? It made evident the sociomaterial relations in a texture of
practices,2 producing an agencement in which the reputation of a company
(that turns employees, paid little, into human robots who work near real
robots, carrying out repetitive packaging tasks as quickly as possible, with
the goal of achieving the ambitious delivery targets set by Amazon) was
materialized. Moreover, the story of the wireless bracelet produced the vis-
ibility of the operational logic of retail services that work with thin prot
GHERARDI_9781788973557_t.indd 1 20/06/2019 15:15
Silvia Gherardi - 9781788973564
Downloaded from Elgar Online at 09/29/2019 01:44:17PM
via communal account
2 How to conduct a practice-based study
margins, that minimize the cost of labour, that use work contracts that
advise workers of their schedule time with little notice and that use algo-
rithms to organize stang according to optimization of presence. We can
see the bracelet’s performativity not only in its capacity to reveal the con-
nections between working and organizing practices, but also in its capacity
to bring to light a question of moral (and not only economic) value. The
bracelet made audible/readable/tangible/knowable a societal issue: What is
the value of work? What is the meaning of work in a life and in a society?
The (potential) political and ethical materialization of a practice within a
society (and dierently from other societies) is made sayable.
The Amazon story may exemplify how a rumour (but was it a rumour
rather than a non-accomplished intention?) was transmitted and spread
within a social network of people that used several material media of
transmission, which materialized as activities of relating, linking and con-
necting (Kuhn et al., 2017). The sociomateriality of the bracelet activated
multiple connections, and it was a dierent ‘thing’ within multiple rela-
tions: from being an instrument in a cooperative relation with humans, to
being a material symbol of slavery, to being an issue of labour relations.
Moreover, in this story communication is seen as a performative practice
whose logic unfolds into the future along a trajectory, and communicative
practice is seen as a site of struggles over meaning.
What is the moral of this story? Aesop teaches us that every story has a
message for the listener. In my formulation of such a question there is an
implicit invitation to leave behind questions about ontology (what practice
is) for questions about performativity (what practice does). In other words,
empirical ontologies are ‘done’ in specic and situated epistemological
practices, as John Law (2004) and Annemarie Mol (2010), among many
others, have illustrated. The passage from the singular ‘ontology’ to the
plural ‘ontologies’ has marked the way for considering multiplicity and
indeterminacy. Therefore, the reection on how we do empirical research
is an epistemological reection about how ‘things’ are made to matter and
how epistemological relations make ‘things’ acquire a situated position.
In my opinion this is the rst lesson to be learnt when the question ‘why a
practice approach’ is posed. In fact, researching social practices is a social
practice in its own right and it is a performative3 practice that produces
realities, instead of representing realities ‘out there’.
Telling stories about practice is a methodological strategy that rests on
the power of narrative knowledge as opposed to paradigmatic knowledge.
The distinction between paradigmatic (or logical-scientic) knowledge
and narrative knowledge is developed by Bruner (1986). While the former
is aimed at categorizing and reducing events to general laws, the latter is
aimed at the understanding and interpretation of meanings and the way
GHERARDI_9781788973557_t.indd 2 20/06/2019 15:15
Silvia Gherardi - 9781788973564
Downloaded from Elgar Online at 09/29/2019 01:44:17PM
via communal account
Introduction 3
in which individuals organize their experience. Telling stories as a research
practice has a tradition in Actor-Network Theory, and Annemarie Mol
(2002, p. 31) denes her ethnography of practice as ‘praxiography’, a story
about practices.
I shall follow a narrative approach, and this is the reason for choosing
methodology as the main entrance to practice theories, since my aim
is to illustrate how ‘doing practice theory’ rests on methods that enact
realities. Nevertheless, this is not a book on research methodology in the
conventional sense. It is not intended to be a handbook of the ‘how to do
it’ type, because I believe that it is not through a prescriptive and routinized
methodology that one can learn how to conduct research. The fact that
methodology texts are more comprehensible to those who already know
how to do research compared with those who read such texts to learn how
to do it, is well known but rarely taken seriously. The alternative suggested
is to furnish narratives of the research process so that the practices of
doing research are reconstructed (Roth, 2005). It is this awareness that has
induced me to write a book which gives space to narratives from the eld,
so that substantive knowledge of the subject is combined with methodo-
logical awareness.
In setting and pursuing this objective, I have made a specic method-
ological choice. It consists in introducing the reader to research which
may be considered in a certain sense ‘classic’ within practice-based studies,
the purpose being to provide contact with authors and topics that, to my
mind, are signicant in developing a methodological sensibility. In this
way, the reader will be introduced to diverse authors who have conducted
practice-based empirical research, and he/she may come into contact with
the methodological apparatus evinced by the examples. I have accord-
ingly constructed brief case studies consisting of short stories from eld
research so as to elicit methodological reection which works inductively.
Moreover, the brief case studies, disseminated in the book as ‘boxes’, can
be used in the classroom for teaching purposes.
In this introduction I anticipate some of the basic assumptions of the
approach, although these will only be discussed expressly in the book’s
conclusions. I shall therefore start by framing the practice-based approach
within organizational studies and the conception of organization that they
adopt.
To assume a practice point of view is therefore to develop a conception
of organizing as taking place within a texture of practices which extend
internally and externally to the organization. We may therefore say that
practices constitute a mode of ordering the ow of organizational rela-
tions. They furnish an ordering principle as the institutionalization of
activities and ways of doing which are sustained by sociomaterial relations.
GHERARDI_9781788973557_t.indd 3 20/06/2019 15:15
Silvia Gherardi - 9781788973564
Downloaded from Elgar Online at 09/29/2019 01:44:17PM
via communal account
4 How to conduct a practice-based study
Simultaneously, however, this ordering principle is also temporary and
unstable, and is therefore a disordering principle as well. By means of prac-
tices, organizations solve the problem of their everyday reproduction, so
that practices are an answer to the problem of how to reduce uncertainty.
It can also be said that practices introduce indeterminacy because they
always express a rationality that is contingent and in a ‘becoming’. In fact,
with a ‘becoming’ epistemology (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980), we may
keep open the possibility that things might be dierent.
Why assume practices as the units of analysis of organizing? The
simplest answer is that practices are loci – spatial and temporal – in which
working, organizing, innovating and reproducing occur. At a disciplinary
level, this makes it possible to bring the study of work closer to the study
of organizing, and to view both of them not only in their interrelations but
as processes which take place in time and space, therefore in a ‘becoming’.
There is consequently an empirical interest in assuming practices as
the units of analysis of organizing but there is an epistemological reason
as well. The renewed interest in the study of practices – beside the tradi-
tional theories of practice in sociology – has arisen within the so-called
‘post-epistemologies’. The aim of a renewed interest in practice is to go
beyond problematic dualisms (action/structure, human/nonhuman, mind/
body), to see reason not as an innate mental faculty, but as a practice
phenomenon, and to question individual actions and their status as build-
ing blocks of the social (Schatzki, 2001, p. 10). Hence a practice should
not be viewed as a unit circumscribed by given boundaries and constituted
by dened elements, but rather as a connection-in-action: that is, as an
agencement (Gherardi, 2016) of elements which achieve agency by being
interconnected. Humans do not occupy a privileged position in this eld of
dynamic interconnections. To use Law’s (1994) expression, it is relational
materialism which provides the basis on which to construe the intercon-
nections between humans, nonhumans, discourses and sociomaterial rela-
tions. In other words, I shall assume a posthumanist onto-epistemology
(Gherardi, 2015a) that displaces the human subject as the centre seat of
agency, the one in control of the world, the one from whom intentional
actions emanate, thus dierentiating it from human-centred practice
theories (that study humans and their practices). De-centring the subject
does not mean removing it, but placing subjects, objects and instruments
in an agential and material-discursive environment.
The book is organized so that the reader can gradually acquire the lexi-
con for the empirical analysis of practices and thus develop a sense of how
to set about identifying the salient aspects of the practice-based approach
that I propose and the elements that are of theoretical importance for
empirical analysis. Only in the nal chapter do I draw the complete picture
GHERARDI_9781788973557_t.indd 4 20/06/2019 15:15
Silvia Gherardi - 9781788973564
Downloaded from Elgar Online at 09/29/2019 01:44:17PM
via communal account
Introduction 5
of what I mean with the term ‘a posthuman approach to practice-based
studies’.
The rst chapter invites the reader to consider practices within a proces-
sual view, as accomplishment. Its purpose is therefore to emphasize that
working and organizing are situated and emergent processes. From the
theoretical point of view, this chapter introduces the topics of situatedness4
and of knowing-in-practice as a situated activity in accomplishing a prac-
tice. The second chapter illustrates practice as a collective knowledgeable
doing. Putting a set of activities into practice requires both individual and
collective work and competent participation in a practice (that is, learning)
is achieved by maintaining a common orientation. From the theoretical
point of view, this chapter demonstrates the continuity between learning
and knowing, and between knowing and doing.
The third chapter introduces the topic of sensible knowledge and, in
making ‘present’ the body and its sensible knowing, opens to sociomate-
riality beginning with the physical materialities of gendered and knowable
bodies. Thus, I have considered it important to position the body at the
outset of an analysis intended to destabilize taken-for-granted dichotomies
(mind/body, nature/culture) and to sustain a vision of practice as the site
where tacit, elusive, pre-verbal and aesthetic knowledge is kept.
The fourth chapter takes sociomateriality to the world of nonhumans and
what they do and get done. From the theoretical point of view, this chapter
concerns sociomaterial relations with artefacts within a framework of rela-
tions that Knorr Cetina (1997) has called ‘post-social’. When analysing a
practice, the tools of that practice, the technologies and the material setting
itself can be considered the relational infrastructure (Star, 1999) which
supports performance of the practice while at the same time being invisible.
The fth chapter deals with what we may call another relational infra-
structure: namely the support which rules – given and emergent – provide
for situated practising. From a theoretical point of view, practices enable
us to see how normativity (of sense, consensus, as well as prescription)
emerges from situated action, whilst from the methodological point of
view, the practice-based approach enables us to analyse a practice as the
locus of ordinary prescription.
The sixth chapter focuses on discursive practices. It stresses that the
concept of practice, qualied in the previous chapters as sociomaterial, can
also be dened as materialsemiotic. Discursive practices are of particular
importance for showing that people work not only by doing, but also by
saying. Saying in a situation is also a ‘doing’, and discursiveness is a means
by which researchers (and not only practitioners) gain access to how indi-
viduals in situations construct those situations themselves and the objects/
subjects of discourses.
GHERARDI_9781788973557_t.indd 5 20/06/2019 15:15
Silvia Gherardi - 9781788973564
Downloaded from Elgar Online at 09/29/2019 01:44:17PM
via communal account
6 How to conduct a practice-based study
The seventh chapter asks the following question: how are the practices
socially sustained? It illustrates how aesthetic and ethical judgement sus-
tains a normative understanding of appropriate activities within a practice,
while aection is manifest in the practitioners’ engagement with the object
of practice. Such engagement – aesthetic, ethical, aective – is formative
of the object of practice (be it a physical object, like a crafted product or
an abstract object, like care). Formativeness is illustrated as a form of
knowing that, while doing, invents the way of doing and thus sustains the
accomplishment of the practice and its appropriateness.
The eighth chapter introduces the concept of the texture of practices to
illustrate how the single practice that the researcher has isolated for heuris-
tic reasons, is not ‘a reality in itself’, it is not ‘given in the order of things’
(to use Foucault’s phrase) but rather is part of a fabric of connections to
other interdependent practices. In this way the micro/macro distinction
is dissolved within the practice-based approach and a methodology (the
spiral case-study) is developed to trace and map the connections between
practices.
The methodological reection continues in Chapter 9 in the form of
‘tricks of the trade’, that is, in a non-systematic way. The chapter oers
the reader some suggestions that come principally, but not exclusively,
from my experience in conducting practice-based studies. So, I introduce
the reader to some tricks to access the tacit knowledge of practitioners,
such as the interview with the double, ethnography of the object, and
aective ethnography. The purpose of this chapter is to stress that one of
the main motivations for studying practices is the purpose of changing,
rening them and empowering the practitioners. Thus knowing-in-practice
becomes transformative.
The book nishes with a concluding chapter which has two purposes: on
the one hand, to review the theoretical background that has generated the
interest and eld of studies that have formed under the umbrella concept
of practice-based studies; on the other hand, to systematize the conceptual
and analytical framework on which this book is based. The message is
that theorizing on the eld of ‘practice-based studies’ is a theorizing in the
making, that is, a collaborative activity with others that unfolds in time.
The rst and the second editions of this book spring from my experience
during the past eighteen years of teaching undergraduates and doctoral
students at the University of Trento and other universities, and from the
innumerable international doctoral seminars which I have organized in
Trento and elsewhere, together with my colleagues of the Research Unit
on Communication, Organizational Learning and Aesthetics (RUCOLA).
I draw inspiration from the research that my colleagues at Rucola and
I have personally conducted in these years as my theorization on the
GHERARDI_9781788973557_t.indd 6 20/06/2019 15:15
Silvia Gherardi - 9781788973564
Downloaded from Elgar Online at 09/29/2019 01:44:17PM
via communal account
Introduction 7
practice-based approach originated and developed as a collective enter-
prise based on the empirical analysis of working practices. In addition, the
rst edition of this book was accompanied by a ‘twin’ book, Learning and
Knowing in Practice-based Studies, in which I and my colleague Antonio
Strati collected the main articles that marked the path traced by Rucola in
practice-based studies. The twin books intend to solicit a methodological
sensibility that the reader may possess and/or may have developed from
contact with other researchers, gaining understanding of the types of
questions that other authors have posed, how they have sought answers
to those questions, what further questions remain open and how to set
up future research. The book’s aim is therefore to engage in dialogue with
those who share common interests in the study of working practices and to
construct an ideal community of intellectual inquiry.
NOTES
1. The pleasure of narrating lies in telling the same story over and over again and I have
already told this story about the constitutive construction of communication and the dis-
cussion of the book by Kuhn et al. (2017) in a special Forum of the journal Management
Communication Quarterly (Gherardi, 2019b).
2. A texture of practices can be dened as composed of activities and practices intercon-
nected in constantly changing patterns (see Chapter 8). Other authors have used similar
terms like constellation (Wenger, 2000), mangle of practices (Pickering, 1993), bundles,
nexus, or plenum (Hui et al., 2016).
3. The term ‘performativity’ has been used with several meanings in organization studies.
Gond et al. (2016), in introducing the ‘performative turn’ identify ve conceptualizations
of performativity: doing things with words (Austin); searching for eciency (Lyotard);
constituting the self (Butler, Derrida); bringing theory into being (Callon and MacKenzie);
and sociomateriality mattering (Barad). My use of the concept follows Actor-Network
Theory for which I am indebted to Karen Barad (2007).
4. I use the concept of situatedness following the tradition of Haraway (1988) and Suchman
(2007), that is, as situated knowledge and situated action. Situation has also a root in sym-
bolic interactionism, as illustrated in Chapter 10. There is an assonance with Schatzki’s
(2005) ‘site ontology’ and Nicolini’s (2011) elaboration of it; however, apart from the
similarity, the two terms come from dierent vocabularies and serve dierent purposes.
GHERARDI_9781788973557_t.indd 7 20/06/2019 15:15
Silvia Gherardi - 9781788973564
Downloaded from Elgar Online at 09/29/2019 01:44:17PM
via communal account