ABSTRACT

The past two decades witnessed a prolific revival of practice theories. Sociologists and social philosophers such as Davide Nicolini (2012), Andreas Reckwitz (2002), Theodore Schatzki (1996, 2002, 2010; Schatzki, Knorr Cetina and Von Savigny, 2001), Robert Schmidt (2012) and Elizabeth Shove and collaborators (2003, 2012) have elaborated, deepened and refined practice theories that were developed in sociology in the 1970s and 1980s by Pierre Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens in particular. To put it succinctly, practice theories are grounded in the idea that social life consists of socio-material interactions through which people transform their world and themselves. In the words of Schatzki (this volume) these socio-material interactions comprise ‘bundles of practices’ and ‘material arrangements’. The former should be regarded as ‘open spatial-temporal manifolds of activity’, while the latter consist of ‘interconnected human bodies, organisms, artifacts, and things’. Since the older generation of practice theories had neglected the material dimension of practices, current formulations aim, in critical engagement with material semiotics or actor network approaches, to make practice theory more receptive to the role of material elements and objects, of both human and non-human origin, in social practices. In addition, current practice theories emphasize their potential relevance for the governance of social change while at the same time distinguishing themselves explicitly from some of the prevailing theories of social transformation. At a time when a number of authors seek to reconcile practice theory with transition theory (Grin et al., 2010; Spaargaren et al., 2012; Shove et al., 2012; Hargreaves et al., 2013), Theodore Schatzki (this volume) is keen on pointing out the differences that exist between both kind of theories. The crucial difference in the way they study long term, structural changes is the fact that practice theories reject the claim of transition theories that there are different dynamics at play on different levels of the social. Notions such as large-scale structures, overarching culture, macro-meso-micro distinctions or niche-regime-landscape hierarchies are judged ontologically inappropriate. Instead, practices theories claim that processes of becoming and change unfold at just one level: the level of practices. Hence, the

ontology of practice theories is said to be flat (Schatzki, this volume), and allows for understanding processes of change as open ended and at least partly contingent. By emphasizing complexity and contingency, practice theories provide a realistic understanding of the limited possibilities that single (policy or governance-) actors and organizations have when they seek to manage processes of social change in a linear, direct and instrumental way (Evans et al., 2012). The message for those involved in the management of social change is to improve the quality of interventions by connecting policy strategies to the dynamics of practices as sets of interrelated doings and sayings. Although early formulations of practice theory by Bourdieu and Giddens in particular emphasized the need to go beyond structuralism and instead offer an agency-inclusive formulation of social interaction and reproduction, the relationship between agency and social change remains underexposed in many contemporary practice theories. The ways in which human agents intervene in the ongoing flow of events in the world and their involvement in bringing about changes in their socio-material environments and in themselves, remain insufficiently explored and conceptualized. As a result, the more recently developed practice theories do not provide convincing answers to issues of agency, emotions and power which might help to explain what brings about social change in a flat world consisting of practices. Why do practices appear and disappear, what makes them more or less widespread, stable and mature, and why are some practices more meaningful, attractive and intense for human actors than others? These questions all revolve around the issue that practices (are made to) matter for people. People engage with innovation, reproduction and social change in the sense that they develop a meaningful relation with the practices they help to reproduce and change, they themselves becoming different persons in the process. If we accept the idea that social life is a vast and continuous ‘open-ended spatial-temporal manifolds of actions and material arrangements’, which individuals experience as sets of more or less relevant, meaningful, coherent, and interrelated doings and saying (Schatzki, 2002: 59-122; Schatzki, 2010), then we must develop notions of agency, power and social change which help us to understand what it is that makes people move through/engage with/find their ways in social life in the first place. Issues of agency and power are about how people navigate a world of practices. Agency is conceptualized differently in different streams of social theory. In Weberian conflict theories for instance, agency is rooted in the competitive urge for privileged positions. In rational actor theories agency is about optimizing profits, and in symbolic interactionism it revolves around the capacity to give meaning to self and others in social situations. In this chapter we aim to develop a conceptualization of agency that not only remains within the contours of practice theories – practices rather than individuals are the central unit of analysis – but which is also distinct from the ways in which agency is approached in other social theories. To put it in a short and radical formulation, we argue that agency resides in emotions. Emotions are (re)produced in social practices and people experience the world and engage in it emotionally. The focus on emotions helps

to explain why practices make individual human agents engage with and actually care about the doings and sayings around them. Emotions are connected to practices in a number of ways, and they provide (positive and negative) valences to both practices and their practitioners. In this way, emotions-in-practices help explain what matters to individuals and how they are set into motion by emotions. On the individual side of the equation, we argue that the human capacity to act (back) upon the world resides in the ‘emotional modes of being’ (Freund, 1999) of individuals. On the practice side of the equation, we will show how practices produce emotional energy (Collins, 2004). The concept of power is even more debated and coated with controversies than the concept of agency. When reviewing the concept of power in sociology, Manuel Castells (2009) has suggested that in contemporary network societies the classical concepts of power as for example derived from the works of Weber and Parsons on the one hand and Marx on the other, are in need of revision. The concepts, which organized debates in sociology and political sciences since their inception, need to be complemented with new notions of power that are particularly suited to analyse social change in contemporary, ‘horizontally organized’ societies, which are composed of networks. One of the dimensions of power that need to be articulated and re-invented has to do with ‘the relationships between emotion, cognition and politics’ (Castells, 2009: 7). Although the work of Castells does not seem to go along very well with the flat ontology of practice theories,1 we argue that his discussion of agency and power can be used to highlight dynamics of change in a world of practices.