ABSTRACT
The author sketches the differences between his approach and standard social-scientific understandings of the efficacy of cultural phenomena. His argument throughout has been that the empirical study of practices is a tool not only useful but indeed in certain respects essential to sophisticated social-scientific inquiry. To claim that the study of practices is essential is decidedly not to claim that it is the only way people should do social science. A focus on practices allows people to avoid the artificial and sterile analytical regimentation of social phenomena in terms of "levels of analysis". One of the merits of a practice approach is to diminish the excessive theoretical attention paid to actors as an analytical category in the social sciences. An emphasis on practices is resolutely agnostic on the extent to which either obtains in the social realm. The study of practices can furnish a valuable tool for the diagnosis, characterisation and explanation of large- and small-scale change in social life.
