Introduction

This chapter focuses on the essential constitutive relationship between particular actions/practices and particular concepts and emphasises the systematic relationship between individual realms of activity and the bodies of knowledge specifically associated with them. It lays out a general framework for the analysis of domain-specific discourse, to go hand in hand with, and shed light on, the study of social practices. The chapter develops some implications of the arguments for practices of concept-formation in the social sciences. It examines the question of how to identify practices in social-scientific research. The chapter presents a distinctive conception of possibility, one which contrasts with the way that concept is normally used in social theory and in "cultural" approaches to the social sciences. It suggests that causal explanation should not, at any rate, be the primary analytical focus of the study of practices – at least not causal explanation as classically construed.