Practical Theory

The linguistic and discursive turn in the social sciences has focused attention on the importance of practice when studying human systems. The term practice is a broad term that has been used in a variety of ways. Practice has been used to refer to the situated flow of messages within the stream of conversational activity. Practice has also been used to refer to specific kinds of communicative activity that people carry out in groups, organizations, and societies as well as the specific sites for their performance. The former is represented by studies of practice that look into how activities such as management, therapy, and mediation are brought off in interaction, and the latter focuses on institutional scenes such as homeless shelters, planning meetings, and academic colloquia where the key question becomes how people manage various interactional challenges within particular kinds of settings.

The practice turn in the social sciences, therefore, has turned our attention to the way social actors construct their communicative conduct and the kinds of cultural resources they draw on as they act. A microfocus on practice centers attention on the specific moves that people make during conversation and what they accomplish and create.

[Page 787]A number of theoretical and methodological approaches such as conversational analysis, action implicative discourse analysis, and ethnomethodology focus on the way that individuals structure their practice within situated conversations. A macrofocus on practice concentrates on articulating the larger sociocultural resources actors draw on that inform their patterns of conduct. Michel Foucault's notions of archeology and genealogy to articulate discursive formations—the assumptions and premises that inform an ideology or world-view—as well as Norman Fairclough's critical discourse analysis highlight the importance of identifying those sociocultural resources that transcend situations and are variously available to social actors. A growing number of approaches such as Anthony Giddens' focus on constitutive approaches to communication as well as discursive psychology have attempted to connect micro- and macrofocuses on practice.

The practice turn in the social sciences has also necessitated a different form for theorizing communication. The communication discipline has long had a commitment to the practical, and the long-standing assumption has been that communication theory and research should facilitate the creation of better social and professional lives for individuals and communities. Grounded in Kurt Lewin's recognition that good theories are inherently practical, communication scholars have long recognized the important connection between theory and practice. Inspired by the work of Robert T. Craig and Vernon E. Cronen, the term practical theory began to emerge in the mid-1990s to refer to a particular form of theorizing within communication studies.