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Journal ArticleDOI

Outline of a Theory of Practice.

01 Mar 1980-Contemporary Sociology-Vol. 9, Iss: 2, pp 256
About: This article is published in Contemporary Sociology.The article was published on 1980-03-01. It has received 14683 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Practice theory.
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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors propose a middle-out framework for examining and supporting systemic change to a lower carbon society by mediating, enabling and aggregating both themselves and others.
Abstract: This paper concentrates on ‘middles’ and ‘middle actors’ in energy systems and introduces a “middle-out” framework for examining and supporting systemic change to a lower carbon society. We propose this “middle-out” approach as a complement to “top-down” and “bottom-up” strategies. Our approach suggests that two essential elements for successful systemic change are actors’ agency and capacity, where ‘agency’ refers to actors’ abilities to make their own free choices, and ‘capacity’ refers to actors’ abilities to perform the choices they made. We argue that due to their position between top and bottom actors and between technology and implementation, middle actors play crucial functions in the transition process. Their abilities are based to their own agency and capacity which they can exercise to influence the agency and/or capacity of other actors. The paper discusses middle actors vis-a-vis ‘intermediaries’ and demonstrates the value of the middle-out approach. Through elaborated examples of three middle actors – congregations, building professionals, and commercial building communities – it shows how middles exert influence upstream (to top actors), downstream (to bottom actors) and sideways (to other middle actors) through mediating, enabling and aggregating both themselves and others. A few weaknesses of this approach are discussed as well.

182 citations

Proceedings ArticleDOI
22 Oct 2012
TL;DR: A punctual perspective on action becomes more complex when action is seen to emerge within an unfolding mosaic of disparate materials and time frames which make possible not only systematic change, but also more enduring frameworks that provide crucial continuity.
Abstract: Human action is built by actively and simultaneously combining materials with intrinsically different properties into situated contextual configurations where they can mutually elaborate each other to create a whole that is both different from, and greater than, any of its constitutive parts. These resources include many different kinds of lexical and syntactic structures, prosody, gesture, embodied participation frameworks, sequential organization, and different kinds of materials in the environment, including tools created by others that structure local perception. The simultaneous use of different kinds of resources to build single actions has a number of consequences. First, different actors can contribute different kinds of materials that are implicated in the construction of a single action. For example embodied visual displays by hearers operate simultaneously on emerging talk by a speaker so that both the utterance and the turn have intrinsic organization that is both multi-party and multimodal. Someone with aphasia who is unable to produce lexical and syntactic structure can nonetheless contribute crucial prosodic and sequential materials to a local action, while appropriating the lexical contributions of others, and thus become a powerful speaker in conversation, despite catastrophically impoverished language. One effect of this simultaneous, distributed heterogeneity is that frequently the organization of action cannot be easily equated with the activities of single individuals, such as the person speaking at the moment, or with phenomena within a single medium such as talk. Second, subsequent action is frequently built through systematic transformations of the different kinds of materials provided by a prior action. In this process some elements of the prior contextual configuration, such as the encompassing participation framework, may remain unchanged, while others undergo significant modification. A punctual perspective on action, in which separate actions discretely follow one another, thus becomes more complex when action is seen to emerge within an unfolding mosaic of disparate materials and time frames which make possible not only systematic change, but also more enduring frameworks that provide crucial continuity. Third, the distributed, compositional structure of action provides a framework for developing the skills of newcomers within structured collaborative action. Fourth, human tools differ from the tools of other animals in that, like actions in talk, they are built by combining unlike materials into a whole not found in any of the individual parts (for example using a stone, a piece of wood and leather thongs to make an ax). This same combinatorial heterogeneity sits at the heart of human action in interaction, including language use. It creates within the unfolding organization of situated activity itself the distinctive forms of transformative collaborative action in the world, including socially organized perceptual and cognitive structures and the mutual alignment of bodies to each other, which constitutes us as humans.

182 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors show how micromorphology is able to furnish information with the degree of precision necessary for analysing site formation processes and traces of activities in a variety of settings.
Abstract: The aim of this paper is to show how micromorphology is able to furnish information with the degree of precision necessary for analysing site formation processes and traces of activities in a variety of settings. Use of large resin‐impregnated thin sections allows contextual analysis of taphonomy and depositional relationships between sediments and artefact and bioarchaeological remains. We illustrate this by reference to results from a three‐year NERC project which examined depositional sequences in core domestic and ritual contexts in three early urban sites in the Near East in different sociocultural and environmental contexts. We discuss how micromorphology is able to trace different pre‐depositional, depositional and post‐depositional histories of components, before considering its contribution to detecting spatial and temporal variation in uses of space; enabling identification of single depositional episodes within secondary contexts. Together these capacities are providing richly networke...

181 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors examines and relates habitus and field in detail, tracing the former to the work of Erwin Panofsky and the latter to structuralist discourse semantics, and concludes that the principles of relative autonomy, boundedness, homology, and embedding apply to fields and their linkage to habitus.
Abstract: This paper synthesizes research on linguistic practice and critically examines the legacy of Pierre Bourdieu from the perspective of linguistic anthropology. Bourdieu wrote widely about language and linguistics, but his most far reaching engagement with the topic is in his use of linguistic reasoning to elaborate broader sociological concepts including habitus, field, standardization, legitimacy, censorship, and symbolic power. The paper examines and relates habitus and field in detail, tracing the former to the work of Erwin Panofsky and the latter to structuralist discourse semantics. The principles of relative autonomy, boundedness, homology, and embedding apply to fields and their linkage to habitus. Authority, censorship, and euphemism are traced to the field, and symbolic power is related to misrecognition. And last, this chapter relates recent work in linguistic anthropology to practice and indicates lines for future research.

181 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper examined the social construction of hereditary risk for one adult onset disorder, Huntington Disease, and found that Mendelian theories of inheritance seldom provide an adequate framework for describing the fluctuating relevance of risk as it develops within the nexus of familial relations.
Abstract: Recent approaches to the new genetics stress the importance of placing hereditary risk within the context of familial beliefs and dynamics. Nonetheless, few empirical studies on predictive genetic testing have explored the meaning and significance of hereditary risk within everyday life. Drawing upon in-depth interviews with 21 families, this paper examines the social construction of hereditary risk for one adult onset disorder, Huntington Disease. Highlighting the social, biographical and temporal factors that families consider when discussing risk and its modification through predictive genetic testing, we find that Mendelian theories of inheritance seldom provide an adequate framework. Such objectified knowledge makes sense on an abstract level but is ultimately inadequate for describing the fluctuating relevance of risk as it develops within the nexus of familial relations.

181 citations