This article concerns a recent methodological debate in American sociology that generated widespread attention in the United States. It was a debate that spanned at least four journals: American Journal of Sociology, Sociological Methods & Research, Qualitative Sociology and American Journal of Cultural Sociology. As the debate was not just about methods per se but about the ‘theory of reality’ underlying each method and its ‘social ontology’, critical realism has much to say about it. Although at the end everyone comes (...) around to critical realism's position of methodological pluralism, what makes the debate interesting is the reasoning, the ontological assumptions, and the surprising directions of attack. Above all this article will take issue with the assumption common to all disputants that people tend ‘to give self-contradictory and inadequate accounts of their actions and motives’. (shrink)

The core claims of the practice turn in International Relations (IR) remain ambiguous. What promises does international practice theory hold for the field? How does the kind of theorizing it produces differ from existing perspectives? What kind of research agenda does it produce? This article addresses these questions. Drawing on the work of Andreas Reckwitz, we show that practice approaches entail a distinctive view on the drivers of social relations. Practice theories argue against individualistic-interest and norm-based actor models. They situate (...) knowledge in practice rather than “mental frames” or “discourse.” Practice approaches focus on how groups perform their practical activities in world politics to renew and reproduce social order. They therefore overcome familiar dualisms—agents and structures, subjects and objects, and ideational and material—that plague IR theory. Practice theories are a heterogeneous family, but, as we argue, share a range of core commitments. Realizing the promise of the practice turn requires considering the full spectrum of its approaches. However, the field primarily draws on trajectories in international practice theory that emphasize reproduction and hierarchies. It should pay greater attention to practice approaches rooted in pragmatism and that emphasize contingency and change. We conclude with an outline of core challenges that the future agenda of international practice theory must tackle. (shrink)

In this paper, I outline a general framework for cultural analysis consistent with an “analytic” approach to explanation in social science. The proposed approach provides coherent solutions to thorny problems in cultural theory. These include providing a coherent definition of culture (and the “cultural”), specifying the nature of cultural units (both simple and complex), and outlining the processes making possible episodes of cultural genesis, transformation, and reproduction within bounded units characterized as cultural causal systems.

The aim of this paper is to provide a characterization of ability theories of practice and, in this process, to defend Pierre Bourdieu’s ability theory against Stephen Turner’s objections. In part I, I outline ability theorists’ conception of practices together with their objections to claims about rule following and rule explanations. In part II, I turn to the question of what ability theorists take to be the alternative to rule following and rule explanations. Ability theorists have offered, and been ascribed, (...) somewhat different answers to this question, just as their replies, or positive accounts, have been heavily criticized by Turner. Due to this state of the debate, I focus on the positive account advanced by a single—and highly famous—ability theorist of practice, Pierre Bourdieu. Moreover, I show that despite Turner’s claims to the contrary, his arguments do not refute Bourdieu’s positive account. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to develop a critical and extended understanding of creative practices in organisation from a phenomenological point of view. To develop such an understanding of practice, this paper will first outline a phenomenological understanding of creative practice, understood particularly with Merleau-Ponty as an embodied and situated nexus of action. Subsequently, the paper will show the contribution of pragmatism to an interpretation of practice as an experience-based reality and will describe the significance of habits. After briefly (...) comparing common characteristics of both pro-experiential philosophies, some perspectives on a creative "inter-practice" and an inclusive "pheno-pragma-practice" will be explored. Furthermore, improvisation is discussed as a form and medium for the actual realisation of an embodied, situational inter-practice. Finally, some practical, political, theoretical and methodological implications and perspectives on creative pheno-pragmatic practices in organisation will be outlined. (shrink)

Community engagement is increasingly defended as an ethical requirement for biomedical research. Some forms of community engagement involve asking the consent of community leaders prior to seeking informed consent from community members. Although community consent does not replace individual consent, it could problematically restrict the autonomy of community members by precluding them from research when community leaders withhold their permission. Community consent is therefore at odds with one of the central principles of bioethics: respecting autonomy. This raises the question as (...) to how community consent can be justified or even required. This paper aims to provide an answer to this question by arguing, based on the work of Taylor and Kymlicka, that community practices are important for the identity and autonomy of community members. When these practices are incompatible with a solitary focus on individual informed consent, they need to be protected by making these decision‐making practices (including asking permission to community authorities) part of the consent process. Since these decision‐making practices are important for the autonomy of community members, community consent with the goal of protecting these practices is not necessarily in conflict with autonomy. (shrink)

The linguistic turn in historiography has given way to a ‘cultural’ or ‘practical’ turn over the course of the last several decades. For its proponents, this new development heralds a return of the intentional subject and a re-invigorated concern with the dynamic nature of the social realm. Approaches clustered around the concept of practice, emphasizing routines of daily activities as the backbone of social organization and its stability, specifically seek to resolve the persisting conceptual tension in social sciences between structure (...) and agency. This article surveys the seminal work on the topic of practice, and considers how the approach can be recruited for purposes of historiographic analysis. In defending a tentatively optimistic assessment of practice theory’s usefulness for this purpose, the article also evaluates some of the weaknesses that this approach has yet to cogently address. (shrink)

Of S. S. Stevens's well-known classification of nominal, ordinal, interval and ratio ‘scales of measurement’, perhaps its least-known aspect is its most distinctive, namely the distinction between interval and ratio scales. This article investigates the circumstances of the typology's origins among the experimental psychologists at Harvard in the 1930s and the unique fusion of personal, technical and intellectual forces this setting represented. It shows how it came to be that an influential psychologist reconceptualized measurement from first principles in such a (...) way as to both preserve the distinction between psychology and physics in this regard and yet implicitly classify his own work as the latter. The article concludes with the general suggestion that, if it is necessary to measure something, it might as well be something tangible enough to be measured usefully. (shrink)

Pragmatic sociology is often read as a reaction to and an alternative to Bourdieu’s ‘critical sociology’. This article, in contrast, offers an assessment of pragmatic sociology in terms of its contribution to the theory of culture in general and its affinities with repertoire theory in particular. Whereas the tendency has been to conceive of repertoires as largely unstructured entities, pragmatic sociology has demonstrated a systematic interest in their internal contents and structure, which it has even expanded through its more recent (...) turn to historical and macro comparative analysis. In the process, however, pragmatic sociology has also been leaning towards a form of cultural sociology that actually challenges some major aspects of repertoire theory–thus also bringing into relief the dilemmas facing any attempt at further elaboration of what is now a growing strand of cultural theory. (shrink)