ABSTRACT
In this paper, I want to develop some concepts designed to capture the affective and relational undergirding of practice in areas where practice is creative and constructive. Current conceptions of practice emphasize the habitual and rulegoverned features of practice. Though much debate surrounds the exact specification of the relevant rules and habits (see Bourdieu 1977; Giddens 1984; Lynch 1993; Turner 1994; Schatzki 1996), most authors seem to agree that practices should be seen as recurrent processes governed by specifiable schemata of preferences and prescriptions. Such processes are doubtlessly prominent in many areas of social life; their existence sustains our sense of practices as customary or routinized ways of behaving. However, it is also a characteristic of current times that many occupations and organizations have a significant knowledge base. In these areas, one would expect practitioners to have to keep learning, and the specialists who develop the knowledge base to continually reinvent their own practices of acquiring knowledge. Practice, in this case, would seem to take on a wholly different set of meanings and raise a different set of questions from the ones raised by habitual activities. For example, how can we theorize practice in a way that allows for the engrossment and excitement-the emotional basis-of research work? What characterization of practice might make the notion more dynamic and include within it the potential for change? Research work seems to be particular in that the definition of things, the consciousness of problems, etc., is deliberately looped through objects and the reaction granted by them. This creates a dissociation between self and work object and inserts moments of interruption and reflection into the performance of research, during which efforts at reading the reactions of objects and taking their perspective play a decisive role. How can we conceive of practice in a way that accommodates this dissociation?
