Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on questions that fall under three general headings: Practices and the Practical Dimension, Normativity, and Transformation. It examines different ways of defining practices and delimiting their scope and significance and explores particular features of practices or the practical dimension. The book also examines diverse issues concerning normativity: how practices can be defined by reference to different kinds of normativity, and how inherent normative features of professional practices unexpectedly raise normative issues about those practices. It argues that practices are most adequately understood as forms of biological niche construction in the linage of human evolution. The book focuses on various forms of transformation in social life and explores the phenomenon of self-negation; that is, situations where individuals foreclose their own possibilities for self-development.