In the article, we propose to frame organizational learning as inquiry into and resolving tensions arising from the performance of different commitments to work and its organizing. We expand learning as participation with its focus upon identity and membership to the development of work and the experiences and knowledge of its participants. The proposal is inspired by pragmatist philosophy both through its emphasis on learning as ascribing meaning to experience and its sociological version, symbolic interactionism with its emphasis on work (...) and its organizing in social arenas/worlds. We show that a pragmatist learning theory, founded on principles of non-dualistic, non-hierarchy, and a non-linear view on relations, thinking and practice aligns well with the proposed refurbished learning approach via complexity theory in this special issue. Further, we propose that Dewey’s pragmatism adds an important feature to a refurbished theory of learning in organizations by emphasizing the tensional and uncertain aspects of situations as contextual wholes that for a pragmatist learning theory constitute the analytical point of departure. (shrink)

Until the end of the last century, media sociology was synonymous with the investigation of mass media as a social domain. Today, media sociology needs to address a much higher level of complexity, that is, a deeply mediatized world in which all human practices, social relations, and social order are entangled with digital media and their infrastructures. This article discusses this shift from a sociology of mass communication to the sociology of a deeply mediatized world. The principal aim of the (...) article is to outline a new media-sociological imagination: media sociology as a cross-sectional sociology, a sociology of entanglement, and a new critical sociology of technological deep structures. (shrink)

Situated approaches to affectivity overcome an outdated individualistic perspective on emotions by emphasizing the role embodiment and environment play in affective dynamics. Yet, accounts which provide the conceptual toolbox for analyses in the philosophy of emotions do not go far enough. Their focus falls (a) on the present situation, abstracting from the broader historico-cultural context, and (b) on adopting a largely functionalist approach by conceiving of emotions and the environment as resources to be regulated or scaffolds to be used. In (...) this paper, I argue that we need totake situatedness seriously: We need (a) to acknowledge that emotions are not situated in undetermined “contexts” but in concrete socio-culturally specific practices referring to forms of living; and (b) to agree that not only are context and emotionsusedfor the sake of something else but also that the meaning-disclosive dimension of affective intentionality is structured by situatedness as well. To do so, I offer a multidimensional approach to situatedness that integrates the biographical and cultural dimensions of contextualization within the analysis of situated affective dynamics. This approach suggests that humans affectively disclose meaning (together) which is at once product and producer of specific forms of living – and these are always already subjects of (politically relevant) critique. (shrink)

Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies offer new ways of conducting decision-making tasks that influence the daily lives of citizens, such as coordinating traffic, energy distributions, and crowd flows. They can sort, rank, and prioritize the distribution of fines or public funds and resources. Many of the changes that AI technologies promise to bring to such tasks pertain to decisions that are collectively binding. When these technologies become part of critical infrastructures, such as energy networks, citizens are affected by these decisions whether (...) they like it or not, and they usually do not have much say in them. The democratic challenge for those working on AI technologies with collectively binding effects is both to _develop_ and _deploy_ technologies in such a way that the democratic legitimacy of the relevant decisions is safeguarded. In this paper, we develop a conceptual framework to help policymakers, project managers, innovators, and technologists to assess and develop approaches to democratize AI. This framework embraces a broad sociotechnical perspective that highlights the interactions between technology and the complexities and contingencies of the context in which these technologies are embedded. We start from the problem-based and practice-oriented approach to democracy theory as developed by political theorist Mark Warren. We build on this approach to describe practices that can enhance or challenge democracy in political systems and extend it to integrate a sociotechnical perspective and make the role of technology explicit. We then examine how AI technologies can play a role in these practices to improve or inhibit the democratic nature of political systems. We focus in particular on AI-supported political systems in the energy domain. (shrink)

Additional theorizing about mathematical practice is needed in order to ground appeals to truly useful notions of the virtues in mathematics. This paper aims to contribute to this theorizing, first, by characterizing mathematical practice as being epistemic and “objectual” in the sense of Knorr Cetina The practice turn in contemporary theory, Routledge, London, 2001). Then, it elaborates a MacIntyrean framework for extracting conceptions of the virtues related to mathematical practice so understood. Finally, it makes the case that Wittgenstein’s methodology for (...) examining mathematics and its practice is the most appropriate one to use for the actual investigation of mathematical practice within this MacIntyrean framework. At each stage of thinking through mathematical practice by these means, places where new virtue-theoretic questions are opened up for investigation are noted and briefly explored. (shrink)

In his recent work on postsecular societies Jürgen Habermas has stressed the need for a dialogue between religious and nonreligious citizens aimed at strengthening social integration and rejuvenating the moral bases of modern political and juridical institutions. This dialogue should focus on the translation of religious traditions into rational, secular forms. In his more recent work on the social function of rituals, however, he rejected the Durkheimian view of public secular rituals as mechanisms for fostering social integration. In this article (...) I discuss Habermas’s early reflections on postsecularism and assess his interpretation of public religious rituals as sources of social integration. I then propose an alternative to his translation proviso whereby religious symbolic content would be translated into behavior-regulating technologies aimed at developing the dispositional resources needed for a continuous postsecular dialogue between religious and nonreligious citizens. (shrink)

The actions of affect are prominent in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and can be broken down for the purposes of education into two roles. The first alludes to the history of philosophy and the ways in which affect has been used by Spinoza (Deleuze, 1992) Nietzsche (Deleuze, 1983) or Bergson (Deleuze, 1991). In this role, Deleuze reinvigorates and challenges definitions of affect that would place them into systems of understanding that could take paths to metaphysics or to becoming paradigms (...) for capture in any further theorisation of affect. For example, scholars might attest to the use of affect as defined by Spinoza in the Ethics. Deleuze (1983, 1991, 1992) attends to the ways in which scholarly understanding of affect has been broached in order to free the idea up for empirical studies and also to show that the power of didactic language may be subsumed and subverted. The second role of affect in the work of Deleuze comes about in his first two co-authored books that he produced with Félix Guattari (Deleuze & Guattari, 1984, 1988). These publications have a distinct purpose from the scholarly work, which this article shall examine in terms of educational activism, group identities and the sociology of education. This level imbues the use of language in pedagogic acts with an intense affective resonance and the multiple traces of becoming that might be present in any teaching and learning context. (shrink)

The material interrelations between bodies and objects are a wide, worthwhile and absorbing field, which has not been sufficiently examined yet. Focusing on such interrelations within air travel, this article contributes to the exploration of this field. It delineates that such interrelations do not simply happen, but that they have to be accomplished continuously by different participants with a certain risk to fail at many points. Within mobilities, such processes of interrelating occur under the specific circumstances of a moving vehicle. (...) Based on empirical data from an ethnographic study on air travel, the paper is concerned with the ongoing dynamics of body-object-interrelations. Based on this analysis, it suggests emphasizing the continuous modification that material assemblages built of people and objects undergo even when “only” staying immobile during a flight. Passengers do not simply enter and exit a vehicle staying identical with themselves. Rather, they are continuously adapting to a material infrastructure that shapes and adjusts their corporeal needs and capacities, including their senses. (shrink)

It is the continuity between epistemology and empirical science that the naturalism in contemporary philosophy of science emphasizes. After its individual and social dimensions, the philosophy of scientific practice takes a stand on naturalism in order to observe complex scientific activities through practice. However, regarding the naturalism’s problem of normativity, the philosophy of scientific practice today has deconstructed more than it has constructed.

This paper deals with Wittgenstein’s rule-following paradox, focussing on the infinite rule-regress as featured in Kripke’s Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. I argue that one of the most salient and popular proposed solutions (championed by John McDowell), which argues that rule-following is grounded in “custom,” “practice” or “form of life, remains unsatisfactory because part of this proposal is the rejection of further “theory” (commonly attributed to Wittgenstein) which seemingly makes it impossible to substantiate the claim of how customs, practices (...) or forms of life ground rule-following. I argue that this conundrum can be solved by introducing Wilhelm Dilthey’s overlooked notion of objective spirit as the objectivated sediment of historical human communality. This proposal allows us to substantiate Wittgenstein’s hints at the connection between rule-following and customs, practices, and forms of life without introducing “problematic theories.” Combining Wittgenstein’s views with Dilthey’s notion of objective spirit results in a solution that is neither skeptical nor straight, but therapeutic. (shrink)

The so-called epistemological turn of the Descartes-Locke-Kant tradition is a hallmark of modern philosophy. The broad family of normativism constitutes one major response to the Cartesian heritage building upon some version of the idea that human knowledge, action and sociality build fundamentally upon some form of social agreement and standards. Representationalism and the Cartesian picture more generally have been challenged by normativists but this paper argues that, even where these challenges by normativism have been taken to heart, our intellectual culture (...) remains fundamentally epistemic in certain problematic senses. Two problems are highlighted: first, normativism remains functionally Cartesian, for human action and sociality appear as processes driven by the shared understandings by competent contributors, and second, normativism is unable to account for forms of human action and sociality other than those occurring in the relatively small worlds of normatively regulated conceptual spaces of mutual access and listening. These points are illustrated by an applied discussion of the blind spots of normativist accounts of the emerging environmental and the on-going economic crises. (shrink)

The renewed engagement with Aristotle’s concept of practical wisdom in management and organization studies is reflective of the wider turn towards practice sweeping across many disciplines. In this sense, it constitutes a welcome move away from the traditional rationalist, abstract, and mechanistic modes of approaching ethical decision-making. Within the current engagement, practical wisdom is generally conceptualized, interpreted or read as a form of deliberation or deliberative judgement that is also cognizant of context, situatedness, particularity, lived experience, and so on. We (...) argue that while this way of conceptualizing practical wisdom moves closer to practice in accounting for the concrete and particular reality within which individuals enact ethics, it does not adequately account for practice in the ontological and relational sense posited in practice theories. Practical wisdom conceptualized on the _deliberative_ dimension still retains a higher emphasis on distinct entities (individuals/institutions), reflexive agency, conscious mental states, goal-directed action, and intentionality. In other words, it puts a higher stress on individual _wisdom_, as opposed to _practice_ or the relational interaction of the individual and social inhering in practice. We offer an alternative conceptualization of practical wisdom based on the _dispositional_ mode of being in the world which is rarely deliberate, intentional, or reflective. Our conceptualization integrates Aristotle’s original ethical framework, which is already embedded in a practice-based ontology, with insights from practice theories to show how practical wisdom is intuitively channelled in the _dispositional_ mode in a given social configuration of virtues/ends. (shrink)

Sociologists increasingly draw on dual-process models of cognition to account for the ways context, cognition, and action interrelate. Drawing from 40 interviews with improvisers and observations from improvisational theater, I find that dual-process model scholarship is limited in three respects: It does not consider how cognition operates in situations where order and disruption are concurrent, it fails to realize there is interindividual variation in cognitive processing, and it underestimates the creativity emerging through automatic processes. Interactions in improv contain elements of (...) both order and disruption, and they place demands on automatic and deliberate cognition simultaneously. Improvisers respond to these competing demands through either automatic or deliberate thinking dispositions, which are engendered through explicit instruction, practical experience, and artistic commitments. These dispositions, in turn, shape creative decision-making, predicting interindividual differences in how improvisers respond to contingencies on stage. I conclude by discussing the implications for culture, cognition, and action. (shrink)

Companies seeking to effectively manage the ethical dimensions of their business have created formal and informal practices, including those with the labels “ethics and compliance” and “corporate social responsibility” (CSR). However, there is little research describing how practitioners who create and implement these practices understand their meaning and relationship. Leveraging a communities of practice theoretical perspective, this qualitative study proposes that these practices can be studied as artifacts of managerial learning. Thematic analysis of interviews with senior managers suggests that practices (...) have diverse meaning, with only informal relationships between them in most cases. Theoretically, this research offers a new lens through which to view compliance and CSR practices as socially negotiated, contextual, and dynamic. Practically, it suggests that there may be new opportunities for learning if managers create practices through an intentional exploration of shared meaning. (shrink)

It is the continuity between epistemology and empirical science that the naturalism in contemporary philosophy of science emphasizes. After its individual and social dimensions, the philosophy of scientific practice takes a stand on naturalism in order to observe complex scientific activities through practice. However, regarding the naturalism’s problem of normativity, the philosophy of scientific practice today has deconstructed more than it has constructed.

Despite a recent resurgence of interest in social ontology, the standard conceptualization of social/cultural objects reiterates dichotomies such as nature and culture, subjectivity and objectivity: the objective components of a social/cultural environment are usually divided into their material substratum, natural or manufactured, and their imposed or assigned social import. Inert materiality and subjectively or intersubjectively assigned meanings and functions remain distinct as constitutive aspects of a reality that is intuitively experienced as a whole. In contrast—by means of examining a broad (...) range of natural/cultural entities—I propose an experiential or visceral ontology of the social, which addresses the comprehensive nature of our experience of cultural objects, as well as their perpetual transmutability within the space between nature and culture, objectivity and subjectivity. This perspective allows for a cathexis of meaning in the material constitution of cultural entities—in contrast to a mere imposition of detachable layers of meaning—and suggests a reconsideration of our unexamined perception of social/political action as editorial supervision and correction. Moreover, I point out the centrality of the concept of practice for recovering the lived sense of social things, since practice, by virtue of its inalienable informality, constitutes the field of Protean renewal of this sense. I understand my approach as complementary to the body-turn in contemporary social theory, since I extend the postulation of meaningfulness in the objective aspect of subjective existence towards its lived surroundings, which are here perceived as engaged in a process of meaningful practiced reciprocations with corporeal subjectivities. (shrink)

This article offers an in-depth case study of a global high tech manufacturer that aligned its ethics and compliance, corporate social responsibility, and sustainability practices. Few large companies organize their responsible business practices this way, despite conceptual relevance and calls to manage them comprehensively. A communities of practice theoretical lens suggests that intentional effort would be needed to bridge meaning between the relevant managers and practices in order to achieve alignment. The findings call attention to the important role played by (...) employees who broker understanding between managers and practices, and the boundary objects used to create shared meaning and engagement. They also highlight that an organizing logic is necessary but not sufficient to align practices. This study describes the dynamics of alignment and provides a practical road map for scholars and managers interested in understanding how responsible business practices may be collectively organized. (shrink)

This article takes the failure to grasp fully the paradigmatic case of European security after the Cold War as an example of how International Relations (IR) would benefit from reformulating not only its empirical research questions but also several of its central conceptual building blocks with the aid of Bourdieusian sociology. The separation between theory and practice and the overemphasis on military power and state actors blind IR from seeing the power struggles that reshaped European security. Instead, a Bourdieusian reformulation (...) adds new types of agency, focuses on the social production of forms of power, and stresses the processual rather than the substantive character of social reality. (shrink)

Constellations, Volume 29, Issue 2, Page 146-160, June 2022.

The paper addresses the epistemological and theoretical assumptions that underpin the concept of Work and Organizational Psychology as idiographic, situated, and transformative social science. Positioning the connection between uniqueness and generalization inside the debate around organization studies as applied approaches, the contribution highlights the ontological, gnoseological, and methodological implications at stake. The use of practical instead of scientific rationality is explored, through the perspective of a hermeneutic lens, underlining the main features connected to the adoption of an epistemology of practice. (...) Specifically, the contribution depicts the configuration of the applied research as a relational practice, embedded in the unfolding process of generating knowledge dealing with concrete social contexts and particular social objects. The discussion of a case study regarding a field research project allows one to point out challenges and constraints connected to the enactment of the research process as a social accomplishment. (shrink)

The purpose of the article is to elaborate on the scholarly debate on affect. We consider the site of affect to be the activities of embodied, socioculturally and spatially situated participants: “Affective activity is a form of social practice” (Wetherell, 2015, p. 147). By studying affect as a social phenomenon, we treat affect as a social ontology. Social practices are constituted through participation in social interaction, which makes it possible to study affect empirically. Moreover, we suggest that to consider affect (...) a social ontology connects affect to agency. We regard affect as a participants’ phenomenon where emotions and knowledge are not separated, i.e. as a social epistemology. To capture the complexity of affective activity, the study of situated participation requires video data. We collected data at a centre for persons with acquired brain injury (ABI), which highlights research ethics. The International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) framework defines participation as involvement in life situations. ICF focuses on two broader perspectives: the body and the individual in society. We turn ICF’s abstract societal perspective on participation to meaningful local accomplishments in lived social practices. Our focus is, in line with a critical social ontology in disability studies, on how-ability, the communicative abilities of the residents (Hughes, 2007). To get closer to life situations as they unfold, we analyse participation in its details as embodied actions during activities in the material environment of the centre. To conclude, we demonstrate a resident’s competent participation in an occupational therapy session through a fine-grained analysis of affective activity. Interaction, practices and phenomena are complex theoretical and practical issues. In the analysis of the encounters as complex multimodal and -sensorial situations, we use an extended version of Ethnomethodological Conversation Analysis (EMCA) that incorporates the body and material environment with the interconnectedness of interactional episodes. To do this, we enlarge the scope of analysis from the complexity of local occasions of affective activity to connections between consecutive affective entanglements. In the indicated work we draw on theoretical (lamination) and methodological (nexus analysis) suggestions in order to best pursue the sociocultural nature of situated interactions. (shrink)