ABSTRACT
Conceptual elaboration of practice theories and their positioning in the academic field are important because this makes them more visible and prominent in academic research as well as in education.1 The distinctiveness and attractiveness of practice theory has been linked to its ability to offer a third-way perspective on society, moving beyond individualist/subjectivist and structuralist/objectivist understandings of the social. Not individual agents or social structures, but social practices are put forward as the adequate starting point for organizing both theorizing and carrying out empirical research. However, practice theories are frequently seen as being relevant for the study of small social phenomena only, such as daily routinized activities and face-toface interactions. Studies on situated practices (Stones, 2005) praxeologize the realm of the social by diving into, taking a close look, developing a view from within and providing thick descriptions of social practices that most of us are familiar with. It is true that numerous practice-based studies of mundane activities at the micro level have been carried out the last decade, such as washing practices, Nordic walking practices, medical practices, canteen practices, energy practices, sports practices and day trading practices (e.g. Schmidt, 2012; Shove et al., 2012; Kuijer, 2014; Nicolini, 2012; Spaargaren et al., 2013; Naus et al., 2014). However, social life also consists of large social phenomena, such as industries, markets, civil aviation, educational systems, sports leagues and international organizations. Until recently, the characteristics and transformations in these large social phenomena were the domain of other social and economic theories, like neo-institutionalism (Powell and DiMaggio, 1983) and transition theory (Grin et al., 2010; Geels et al., 2015), while hardly any practice-based studies existed of such phenomena. This situation is now changing as practice theorists and practice-based researchers are starting to think big. Nicolini (2012) and Schatzki (forthcoming) have been theorizing how to analyse large scale social phenomena from a practice perspective, while others have engaged in empirical research of complex chains of social practices (Lamers and Pashkevich, 2015), transitions in global food practices (Spaargaren et al., 2012) and the governance of sustainable
development practices (Shove et al., 2012; Shove and Spurling, 2013). While this book shows how practice-based research can be put to use to study a wide variety of small scale social phenomena, it also contributes to the ambition of practice theories to investigate larger scale social phenomena. The objectives of this book were two-fold: first, to demonstrate how practice theories can be used for empirical analyses that aim to understand social reproduction and social change; and second, to outline the conceptual and methodological challenges connected with the use of practice theories when applied to both small and large social phenomena. To meet these objectives the contributions to this book were organized in three main ways. First, by combining research on small and large phenomena into one book, we aimed to show that research on social practices can and must engage with practice-arrangement bundles of different sizes. Practicearrangement bundles refer to interconnected social practices and material arrangements (Schatzki, forthcoming). They can be more or less stretched out in time and space, and their extensiveness can be investigated with the lens alternating from the proximity modus to ever more distant views, and back. Second, since the focus of the book is on conceptualizing and researching the dynamics in contemporary societies, the contributions cover a diverse set of empirical phenomena. The reader is introduced in social phenomena as diverse as street violence, playing tennis, growing food, preventing waste, governing forests, suffering in medical care practices and managing conservation tourism partnerships. By exploring such diverse corners and segments of the plenum, practice theories are tested for their most generic and specific qualities at the same time. Generic in the sense that the book demonstrates that taking social practices as the privileged unit of analysis is instrumental for generating new knowledge about the social across a wide range of social phenomena. Specific in the sense that when practice theories are applied to, for example, the field of violence research, they are shown to be innovative on a number of aspects in that domain, which are however less relevant for the positioning of practice theories in, for example, sports or forest governance. Third, we also invited the authors of this volume to be sensitive about the policy or governance dimension of their research. Reflecting on the socio-political impact of research is important because new knowledge can be used in the ongoing reproduction of social practices by different actors in different ways. Furthermore, being more clear on the insights that practicebased research delivers for policy making and evaluation raises its overall relevance. This chapter will discuss how and to what extent we have reached the aims of this book. The remainder of this chapter is structured as follows. In the next section we will make up the balance of the book, highlighting the key contributions made by both the individual chapters and the book as a whole. The chapter will conclude with a future agenda for practice theory and practice-based research.
