ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to outline what the practice approach entails in analysing in particular the historical and intellectual development of the approach. It then presents the main claims and research results of practice scholars in European studies. Practice theorists, while being a heterogeneous movement in the social sciences, are unified around the idea that it is in practices that we must investigate phenomena such as agency, knowledge, language, power and science. While approaches are heterogeneous, it is nevertheless possible to distinguish three groups of more or less coherent fields of research within the practice approach of European integration: The study of everyday practices and identity construction, power as relation approaches and emancipatory approaches. All in all, however, practice as well as sociological approaches in EU studies, as heterogeneous as they are, have added a fundamental and under-researched aspect of European integration: That of society construction at all levels through interaction and practices amongst agents.
