Theories of Practice

The Intellectual and Disciplinary Context

Practice theory is a family of theories in contemporary Western social thought. These theories tend to be resolutely multidisciplinary in nature, drawing on ideas developed in disparate disciplinary contexts. They also tend to be as philosophically informed, as are any theories in social thought. The disciplines that have most prominently contributed to practice theory are philosophy, sociology, anthropology, and science and technology studies. Theories of practice have come to be increasingly applied to understanding [Page 1448]consumption, as consolidated in Alan Warde's article “Consumption and Theories of Practice.” Of particular significance is the recognition that consumption occurs in the course of carrying on practices. This recognition implies that, to understand properly how people consume or how consumer culture changes, social theory needs to take full account of the development and organization of practices in daily life.

The initial—and core—practice theories arose in the 1970s and 1980s. They were united by two general themes, one concerning the nature of human activity and the other concerning the character of society (see next section). These core theories also arose in opposition to specific types of theory that were prominent at the time, above all, semiotics, structuralism, post-structuralism, cognitivism, and individualism, including rational choice theory. Since the 1970s and 1980s, practice theory has come to encompass a much more diverse collection of accounts. These accounts are unified by nothing more than the centrality they accord practices. Even their conceptions of practice vary considerably.

Core Practice Theories

The theories that originally and still today are most widely identified as practice theories are strongly philosophical or sociological-anthropological in character. Two general themes unite them. The first is the aim of conceptualizing human activity tangentially to certain great either-ors of modern philosophy. The second is the idea that practices are central to conceptualizing human society, or social life.

The first theme is of philosophical origin. Beginning in the 1970s, certain theorists appropriated the term practices to articulate theories of human activity that transcend the subject-object dualism that had dominated philosophical discussions of human life since the seventeenth century. According to philosophers such as Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Taylor, to conceptualize human activity as practices is (1) to highlight the role of skills, practical understanding, or nonpropositional knowledge in human action (nonpropositional knowledge is knowledge whose content cannot be linguistically formulated) in human action; and (2) to claim that activity, thought of as grounded in such phenomena, both is conceptually prior to and underlies the traditional division between mind and world. For these thinkers, explanations of activity that cite skills or practical understanding partially replace and otherwise specify the scope of venerable explanations of human conduct that cite mental phenomena such as reason, will, consciousness, and goals. Standing behind these theorists' accounts of human activity were the ideas of the eminent twentieth-century philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger. Both Wittgenstein and Heidegger stressed the importance vis-à-vis human activity of practical knowledge, or know-how (to use the famous term of the English philosopher Gilbert Ryle), as opposed to propositional knowledge, or know-that. They also held that acknowledging this importance undermines modern subject-object pictures of human life.

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