Practice theory, work, and organization. : an introduction / Davide Nicolini.

By:

Nicolini, Davide

Material type: Text

TextPublication details: Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2013.Edition: Reprint of 1st edDescription: ix, 272 p. : ill. ; 24 cmISBN:

9780199231591

Subject(s):

DDC classification:

306.36072 NIC

Contents:

Introduction -- Praxis and Practice Theory: A Brief Historical Overview -- Praxeology and the Work of Giddens and Bourdieu -- Practice as Tradition and Community -- Practice as Activity -- Practice as Accomplishment -- Practice as the House of the Social: Contemporary Developments of the Heideggerian and Wittgensteinian Traditions -- Discourse and Practice -- Bringing it All Together: a Toolkit to Study and Represent Practice at Work.

Summary: What is practice theory? Where do practice theories come from? What do they say? Do they really offer something new to the study of work and organization? In setting out to answer these questions, this book provides a rigorous yet accessible introduction to contemporary theories of practice, discussing their distinctive contribution to work and organization studies. Practice theories are a set of conceptual tools and methodologies for investigating, analysing, and representing everyday practice through written text, language, images, and behaviour. Drawing on a variety of theoretical traditions, they have explored the idea that phenomena such as knowledge, meaning, science, power, organized activity, sociality, and institutions are rooted in practice. The book first examines the origins of the idea of practice. Recognizing that a unified theory of practice does not exist, the central chapters of the book then discuss the theory and concepts of the main scholarly traditions that have, collectively, contributed to the \'practice turn\' in social and organization studies. Each of the central chapters concludes with a fully worked example of the theory in application. Practice theories have become of increasing interest for management and organizational scholars in recent years, and this book is an advanced introduction to the complexities of the area for academics, researchers, and graduate students in organization studies, management, and across the social sciences.--Publisher\'s website.

Holdings
Item type	Current library	Call number	Copy number	Status	Date due	Barcode
Standard Loan	Moylish Library Main Collection	306.36072 NIC (Browse shelf(Opens below))	1	Available		39002100480806

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

What is practice theory? Where do practice theories come from? What do they say? Do they really offer something new to the study of work and organization? In setting out to answer these questions, this book provides a rigorous yet accessible introduction to contemporary theories of practice, discussing their distinctive contribution to work and organization studies. Practice theories are a set of conceptual tools and methodologies for investigating, analysing, and representing everyday practice through written text, language, images, and behaviour. Drawing on a variety of theoretical traditions, they have explored the idea that phenomena such as knowledge, meaning, science, power, organized activity, sociality, and institutions are rooted in practice. The book first examines the origins of the idea of practice. Recognizing that a unified theory of practice does not exist, the central chapters of the book then discuss the theory and concepts of the main scholarly traditions that have, collectively, contributed to the 'practice turn' in social and organization studies. Each of the central chapters concludes with a fully worked example of the theory in application.Practice theories have become of increasing interest for management and organizational scholars in recent years, and this book is an advanced introduction to the complexities of the area for academics, researchers, and graduate students in organization studies, management, and across the social sciences.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [243]-259) and index.

What is practice theory? Where do practice theories come from? What do they say? Do they really offer something new to the study of work and organization? In setting out to answer these questions, this book provides a rigorous yet accessible introduction to contemporary theories of practice, discussing their distinctive contribution to work and organization studies. Practice theories are a set of conceptual tools and methodologies for investigating, analysing, and representing everyday practice through written text, language, images, and behaviour. Drawing on a variety of theoretical traditions, they have explored the idea that phenomena such as knowledge, meaning, science, power, organized activity, sociality, and institutions are rooted in practice. The book first examines the origins of the idea of practice. Recognizing that a unified theory of practice does not exist, the central chapters of the book then discuss the theory and concepts of the main scholarly traditions that have, collectively, contributed to the \'practice turn\' in social and organization studies. Each of the central chapters concludes with a fully worked example of the theory in application. Practice theories have become of increasing interest for management and organizational scholars in recent years, and this book is an advanced introduction to the complexities of the area for academics, researchers, and graduate students in organization studies, management, and across the social sciences.--Publisher\'s website.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

List of Figures (p. x)
1 Introduction (p. 1)
1.1 What is new? The affordance of practice theories (p. 1)
1.2 There is no such a thing as a unified practice theory (p. 8)
1.3 Practice theories and the study of work and organization (p. 11)
1.3.1 Returning to practice: a weak and strong programme? (p. 12)
1.4 The content and structure of the book (p. 14)
1.5 The rolling case study (p. 16)
1.5.1 What is telemedicine? (p. 17)
1.5.2 What is chronic heart failure? (p. 18)
1.5.3 Telemonitoring at Garibaldi (p. 18)
1.6 Words of thanks (p. 19)
2 Praxis and Practice Theory: A Brief Historical Overview (p. 23)
2.1 The legacy of Greek classical thought and the demotion of practice in the Western tradition (p. 23)
2.1.1 Plato's intellectualist legacy (p. 24)
2.1.2 Aristotle on praxis (p. 25)
2.2 The demotion of practice in the Western tradition (p. 28)
2.3 The rediscovery of practice: Marx, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein (p. 29)
2.3.1 Marx (p. 29)
2.3.2 Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the primacy of practice in the phenomenological tradition (p. 33)
2.3.3 Wittgenstein: intelligibility as practice (p. 37)
2.3.4 The return of practice in contemporary social thought (p. 40)
3 Praxeology and the Work of Giddens and Bourdieu (p. 44)
3.1 Giddens: practice as the basic domain of study of the social sciences (p. 44)
3.1.1 Giddens' view of practice (p. 46)
3.1.2 Giddens at work (p. 49)
3.2 Bourdieu's praxeology: an overview (p. 53)
3.2.1 On habitus (p. 55)
3.2.2 How habitus produces practice (p. 59)
3.2.3 Theorizing practice (p. 61)
3.2.4 Bourdieu's praxeology and the study of work and organization (p. 66)
Rolling case study: Telemedicine and the nursing habitus (p. 70)
4 Practice as Tradition and Community (p. 77)
4.1 Practice, tradition, and learning (p. 78)
4.2 Practice and community (p. 86)
4.3 Withdrawing the phrase 'community of practice'? (p. 92)
Rolling case study: Becoming part of the practice of telemedicine (p. 96)
5 Practice as Activity (p. 103)
5.1 The Marxian roots of cultural historical activity theory (p. 104)
5.2 The central tenets of cultural and historical activity theory (p. 105)
5.2.1 The central role of mediation (p. 106)
5.2.2 The activity system as the basic unit of analysis (p. 108)
5.2.3 There is no such a thing as an object-less activity (p. 111)
5.2.4 The conflictual and expanding nature of activity systems (p. 113)
5.2.5 The interventionist nature of CHAT (p. 115)
5.3 The weaknesses of a strong theory (p. 117)
Rolling case study: Telemedicine as an activity system (p. 123)
6 Practice as Accomplishment (p. 134)
6.1 Ethno-methodology's view of everyday activity (p. 135)
6.1.1 Accountability (p. 135)
6.1.2 Reflexivity (p. 137)
6.1.3 Indexicality (p. 138)
6.1.4 Membership (p. 139)
6.2 The implication of ethno-methodology for the study of (work) practices (p. 140)
6.3 The new generation of EM-oriented studies of work and organization (p. 145)
6.4 An unfinished task (p. 150)
Rolling case study: Accomplishing monitoring (p. 153)
7 Practice as the House of the Social: Contemporary Developments of the Heideggerian and Wittgensteinian Traditions (p. 162)
7.1 Why people do what they do? (p. 163)
7.2 Practices and their organization (p. 164)
7.3 Practices and materials (p. 168)
7.4 How practices constitute action, sociality, the world, and themselves (p. 171)
7.5 Some further theoretical implications (p. 175)
7.6 Empirical and methodological consequences: a 'site' still under construction? (p. 178)
Rolling case study: Telemonitoring as a practice-order bundle (p. 182)
8 Discourse and Practice (p. 189)
8.1 Conversation analysis: discourse as talk in interaction (p. 191)
8.1.1 The basic assumptions of CA and their implications for the understanding of practice (p. 191)
8.2 Practice as discourse: Foucault and the Foucauldian tradition (p. 195)
8.3 Critical discourse analysis (p. 198)
8.4 Mediated discourse analysis (p. 202)
8.4.1 The five pillars of mediated discourse analysis (p. 203)
8.4.2 Nexus analysis (p. 205)
Rolling case study: Telemonitoring: a conversation analysis view (p. 208)
9 Bringing it all Together: A Tooklit to Study and Represent Practice at Work (p. 213)
9.1 The need for a toolkit approach (p. 214)
9.2 A package of theories and methods (p. 216)
9.2.1 The theory-method package: an overview (p. 219)
9.2.2 Zooming in on practice: in the beginning was the deed (p. 219)
9.2.3 Representing practice through foregrounding the active role of tools, materials, and the body (p. 223)
9.2.4 Representing practice through zooming in on its oriented and concerned nature (p. 224)
9.2.5 Appreciating practice as bounded creativity (p. 225)
9.2.6 Representing practice by focusing on legitimacy and learning (p. 226)
9.3 Zooming out by trailing practices and their connections (p. 228)
9.3.1 A palette for zooming out (p. 230)
9.3.2 How practice and their associations can act at a distance (p. 235)
9.3.3 How did we get here? (p. 236)
9.3.4 When to stop the zooming in and out? (p. 237)
9.4 The benefits and perils of the zooming metaphor (p. 238)
9.5 Where next (p. 240)
Bibliography (p. 243)
Index (p. 261)

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Davide Nicolini is Professor of Organization Studies at Warwick Business School. He co-directs the IKON Research Centre at Warwick Business School and the Warwick Institute of Health. Prior to joining the University of Warwick he held positions at The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in London and the University of Trento and Bergamo in Italy. His work has appeared in journals such as Organization Science, Organization Studies, Journal of Management Studies, Human Relations, Management Learning, and Social Science and Medicine. From 2009 he has been Editor of Management Learning.