ABSTRACT
Why and how are you reading this book? Maybe you read a review of it in a social science journal. Perhaps you were advised to do so by your lecturer to prepare that paper on practice-based research. Maybe you noticed a new cover and interesting title during your monthly stroll through the local library and read for another two minutes before deciding to take it on loan. Or perhaps you are sitting behind your office-desk and just received the book that you ordered online after a ‘content alert’ from the publisher. Whatever made you reading this text as part of your daily activities, it is you as a unique individual who knows what you are up to do next. You are familiar with the situation and you know how to go on in daily life, how to take the next step. But suppose you were asked to study the behaviours and motivations of people going through similar moments like you now. People who are about to read and study a book on practices. How would you, in this particular case, frame and organize your research, both theoretically and methodologically? Theoretically, by asking yourself what kind of ‘decisions’ are at stake, and which factors are assumed to influence the process. Do emotions play a role in this? Do you happen to know the authors? Did the title of the book seduce you? The theoretical lens you decide to use will influence what you see and how much emphasis you will give to particular items and factors. Methodologically, you might wonder what qualitative and quantitative methods are available for getting to the situation in such a way that you gain the knowledge needed to understand similar situations elsewhere. The methodological approach which is often suggested in situations like this is that you develop a survey or interview topic list to ask people about their motivations, meanings, experiences and interests for reading books in the first place and for selecting this book on practices in particular. Your research-focus
in that case could be on a set of more or less well-known background variables (education, income, job, discipline, gender) combined with some stated preferences and values of the individuals. They are combined methodologically in order to predict future behaviours or to understand their meanings. Maybe you will be able to show that for students income turns out to be a more decisive factor when compared with tenured staff. There is however an alternative approach possible. One that is challenging the assumptions behind the conventional approaches to study human behaviour and social change. This alternative approach is the central theme of the present volume. Theoretically, it suggests shifting the research focus away from studying individuals, their motives and background features primarily, towards a more indepth investigation of ‘context’, or the activities, the social practices, they engage in. For our example of reading this book, the classroom, the library and the office are now included in the enquiries, as are the time-slots and the reading time being available (or not) for actually reading the book. The projected activities of the reading – glancing through, reading-with-highlighting, studyingwhile-abstracting – are not just contextualized but also investigated for their functionality in relation to the wider projects or programmes in which the reading activities of individuals are embedded. For example, perhaps you aimed to share your findings with a group of fellow students in next week’s class or you intend to write a book review for the journal of which you are an associate editor. Methodologically, the alternative approach suggests to employ methods of data collection and techniques of data analysis that allow you to gain a rich and detailed understanding of the situation. This implies that you consider using a range of techniques that are particularly relevant for ‘praxeologizing’ the would-be readers and their contexts. Both the theoretical and the methodological aspects of the alternative approach will be introduced and enhanced in this volume, by presenting key characteristics of contemporary practice theories and by showing how they can be put to use in empirical research. The idea of shifting the analytical emphasis from the individual to the situation however is not new at all. When the sociologist Erving Goffman developed his micro-sociological or interactionist approach in the early 1960s, he emphasized the impact of contextual factors on even our ‘smallest behaviors’. To understand how people ‘behave in public places’ (Goffman, 1963) and ‘present themselves in everyday life’ (Goffman, 1959), sociologists must investigate the particular situations or moments as contexts which co-constitute behaviour. Goffman showed that analysing situations is an indispensable tool for understanding why and how people act and talk the way they do. Together with their fellow actors, individuals create a social unit which cannot be reduced to the motives, intentions and meanings of single individuals. The situation represents more than the sum of its constituting elements. Therefore Goffman (1963: 3) suggests that social scientists better focus their attention to ‘moments and their men’, or – as in the case of this volume – on ‘practices and their participants’ instead of using isolated individuals as the privileged starting point for theorizing and doing empirical research on the social.
