UC Irvine
UC Irvine Previously Published Works
Title
Theorizing Practice and Practicing Theory
Permalink
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8g33n86c
Journal
Organization Science, 22(5)
ISSN
1047-7039 1526-5455
Authors
Feldman, Martha S
Orlikowski, Wanda J
Publication Date
2011-10-01
DOI
10.1287/orsc.1100.0612
Peer reviewed
eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library
University of California
Organization Science
Vol. 22, No. 5, September–October 2011, pp. 1240–1253
issn 1047-7039 eissn 1526-5455 11 2205 1240
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/orsc.1100.0612
© 2011 INFORMS
Theorizing Practice and Practicing Theory
Martha S. Feldman
School of Social Ecology, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, California 92697, feldmanm@uci.edu
Wanda J. Orlikowski
MIT Sloan School of Management, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142, wanda@mit.edu
T
his paper describes the emerging field of practice theory as it is practiced in relation to organizational phenomena. We
identify three approaches—empirical, theoretical, and philosophical—that relate to the what, the how, and the why of
using a practice lens. We discuss three principles of the theoretical approach to practice and offer examples of how practice
theory has been used in the organizational literature and in our own research. We end with a discussion of the challenges
and opportunities that practice theory affords organizational scholarship.
Key words: practice; practice theory; genres; resourcing; routines; technology in practice; sociomateriality
History: Published online in Articles in Advance February 23, 2011.
Introduction
In this paper we discuss the value of practice theory
for issues of concern to organization theorists. We are
motivated to write this by our own experiences, primar-
ily our experiences as researchers and teachers but also
our experiences as editors and reviewers of papers that
investigate practices empirically and use practice ideas
theoretically. Central to a practice lens is the notion that
social life is an ongoing production and thus emerges
through people’s recurrent actions. We have become
intrigued by the capacity that such a lens affords for ana-
lyzing social, technological, and organizational phenom-
ena, and we write this piece with the intent of sharing
our understanding and interest in that capacity.
We believe that a practice lens has much to offer
scholars of organization. And we believe this is espe-
cially the case today. Contemporary organizing is
increasingly understood to be complex, dynamic, dis-
tributed, mobile, transient, and unprecedented, and as
such, we need approaches that will help us theorize
these kinds of novel, indeterminate, and emergent phe-
nomena (Barley and Kunda 2001, Child and McGrath
2001, Ciborra 1996, Law and Urry 2004, Stark 2009).
We believe practice theory, with its focus on dynamics,
relations, and enactment, is particularly well positioned
to offer powerful analytical tools to help us here.
We begin by positioning the practice lens as a spe-
cific approach to understanding the world. We discuss a
number of core principles of practice theory and offer
a few illustrations of current organizational scholarship
that is informed by these principles. We then describe
some experiences of using practice theory in our own
research practice so as to ground its use in the details of
specific projects and intellectual histories. We end with
a brief discussion of some of the challenges faced by
practice scholars, as well as the value that can be derived
from engaging in practice scholarship.
Positioning a Practice Lens
In our consideration of practice theory, we situate it in
relation to three ways of studying practice (Orlikowski
2010): an empirical focus on how people act in organi-
zational contexts, a theoretical focus on understanding
relations between the actions people take and the struc-
tures of organizational life, and a philosophical focus on
the constitutive role of practices in producing organiza-
tional reality. All three of these foci are salient for orga-
nizational scholars using a practice lens, though in any
particular piece of scholarship researchers may empha-
size one focus over another.
The first empirical approach to practice recognizes the
centrality of people’s actions to organizational outcomes
and reflects an increasing recognition of the importance
of practices in the ongoing operations of organizations.
This approach answers the “what” of a practice lens—a
focus on the everyday activity of organizing in both its
routine and improvised forms. This approach is, to some
extent, a reaction to an earlier emphasis in organizational
theory that focused primarily on structural features while
neglecting the agentic capacity of human action. Many
scholars of contemporary organization theory recog-
nize the importance of human agency in organizational
life while making theoretical contributions to fields not
necessarily associated with practice theory or practice
philosophy. Dutton and Dukerich (1991), for example,
develop and use identity theory in their study of the
practices of employees of the New York Port Authority
toward the homeless. Dougherty (2001, p. 615) proposes
an emergent image of differentiation and integration in
innovation by focusing on “the actual work of sustained
1240
Feldman and Orlikowski: Theorizing Practice and Practicing Theory
Organization Science 22(5), pp. 1240–1253, © 2011 INFORMS 1241
product innovation.” Weick and Roberts (1993) locate
their study of distributed cognition within the practices
of the crew of an aircraft carrier. These and many other
studies emphasize the importance of human agency in
producing organizational reality without explicitly draw-
ing on practice theory or practice philosophy.
The second theoretical approach to practice explicitly
takes on board the apparatus of practice theory. Although
it includes a focus on everyday activity, it is critically
concerned with a specific explanation for that activity.
This approach answers the “how” of a practice lens—
the articulation of particular theoretical relationships that
explain the dynamics of everyday activity, how these are
generated, and how they operate within different con-
texts and over time. Key theorists who have advanced
specific practice-based theoretical relationships include
Bourdieu (1977, 1990), Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992),
de Certeau (1984), Giddens (1976, 1979, 1984), and
Ortner (1984, 1989). Their work has been influenced by
ideas from Heidegger (1962) and Wittgenstein (1967),
as well as Schutz (1967, 1970) and Garfinkel (1967).
More recent influences on contemporary practice theory
include the works of Latour (1987, 1992, 2005), Lave
(1988), Engeström (1999), and Schatzki (2001, 2002,
2005). As we discuss below, working with the specific
theoretical ideas of practice theorists requires researchers
to engage with the core logic of how practices are pro-
duced, reinforced, and changed, and with what intended
and unintended consequences.
The third philosophical approach to practice entails
the premise that social reality is fundamentally made up
of practices; that is, rather than seeing the social world
as external to human agents or as socially constructed by
them, this approach sees the social world as brought into
being through everyday activity. This approach answers
the “why” of a practice lens—a focus on everyday activ-
ity is critical because practices are understood to be the
primary building blocks of social reality. Such an ontol-
ogy may be more or less explicit in researchers’ use
of practice theory. For Schatzki (2001, p. 3), for exam-
ple, practice theories represent a distinct social ontology:
“The social is a field of embodied, materially interwo-
ven practices centrally organized around shared practical
understandings.” Some researchers use a practice ontol-
ogy to question the status of the phenomenon they are
studying (e.g., Gherardi 2006, Lave 1988). They do so
by making the ontological primacy of practice—that is,
that practices are fundamental to the production of social
reality—a focal aspect of their research agenda (e.g.,
on learning and knowledge) and then use it to recon-
sider and respecify the phenomenon of interest (e.g.,
in terms of collective doing and cognition in practice).
Other uses of practice theory may be simply consistent
with a practice ontology without making the fundamen-
tal status of the phenomenon under investigation core to
their research question.
These three approaches represent three different foci
that researchers may emphasize in their use of a prac-
tice lens. In the rest of this paper, we focus primarily
on the middle approach, practice theory. As a theoretical
paradigm, practice theory is still a relatively unsettled
intellectual landscape with multiple sources, influences,
and instances. As such, there is no definitive cannon of
practice theory that is widely accepted by most schol-
ars (Schatzki 2001, Gherardi 2006). What we hope to
do here then is to outline some principles based on
how practice theory is currently understood and applied
within organizational research so as to provide a point
of reference for scholars reading this research and those
choosing to engage with it in their own research practice.
Practice Theory Overview
Although practice theory is a broad intellectual land-
scape, there are a few recognizable features that have
emerged and that are relatively common to the schol-
ars working within the terrain. Here, we sketch the out-
lines of some core principles of a practice theory. We
then offer a few brief illustrations of how scholars have
applied these core ideas within organizational studies
before turning to our own experiences.
Some Principles of Practice Theory
Critical to practice theory is the relationship between
specific instances of situated action and the social world
in which the action takes place. Although various prac-
tice theorists emphasize different aspects of these rela-
tionships and elaborate distinct logics, all generally sub-
scribe to a key set of theorizing moves: (1) that situated
actions are consequential in the production of social life,
(2) that dualisms are rejected as a way of theorizing, and
(3) that relations are mutually constitutive. These princi-
ples cannot be taken singly, but implicate one another. In
the following, we try to make these very abstract prin-
ciples more concrete.
Practice theory argues that everyday actions are con-
sequential in producing the structural contours of social
life. Although this principle is worked out differently by
different theorists, the general principle of consequen-
tiality is found throughout practice theory. For Bourdieu
(1990, p. 57), the habitus is a “generative principle of
regulated improvisations which reactivates the sense
objectified in institutions.” For Giddens (1984), prac-
tices are those social actions that recursively produce
and reproduce the structures that constrain and enable
actions. For Schatzki (2002), the bundles of human
activity that constitute practices enact social orders.
MacIntyre (2007, p. 189–191) captures this consequen-
tial quality of practice when he describes the develop-
ment of portrait painting as driven not primarily by the
external demand for portraits but by the standards of
excellence created by practitioners through the practice
Feldman and Orlikowski: Theorizing Practice and Practicing Theory
1242 Organization Science 22(5), pp. 1240–1253, © 2011 INFORMS
of portrait painting. According to his view, what makes
portrait painting or any other activity a practice is that
the action of engaging in it is consequential for the
development of the activity. What is produced and how
varies across scholars: it may be social structures (Gid-
dens 1984), field and habitus (Bourdieu 1991), bundled
arrays of activity (Schatzki 2001), and so forth, but the
productivity or consequentiality of everyday practices is
a consistent theme.
That practice is consequential for social life is, for
many practice theorists, associated with a strong human-
ist orientation and the foregrounding of human agency
(Schatzki 2002). Recent work in a posthumanist vein,
however, has been strongly influencing practice theory
(Schatzki 2001). Such work—largely conducted by sci-
ence and technology scholars such as Callon (1986),
Latour (1987, 2005), Knorr Cetina (1997), Pickering
(1995), Pinch (2008), and Suchman (2007)—has articu-
lated the consequential role played by nonhumans, such
as natural objects and technological artifacts in pro-
ducing social life. Although these scholars differ as
to how they theorize the status of nonhuman agency
relative to human agency—for example, whether these
agencies are posited to be symmetrical (Callon 1986,
Latour 1987, Law 1987), intertwined (Pickering 1995),
or entangled (Suchman 2007)—their work has been par-
ticularly influential in helping practice scholars acknowl-
edge the importance of materiality in the production of
social life.
A second principle of practice theory is the rejec-
tion of dualisms and recognition of the inherent rela-
tionship between elements that have often been treated
dichotomously. These include such conceptual opposi-
tions as mind and body, cognition and action, objec-
tive and subjective, structure and agency, individual and
institutional, and free will and determinism (Reckwitz
2002). Bourdieu’s theory of practice, for instance, takes
as a central focus the deconstruction of the longstand-
ing notion that the subjective and objective are indepen-
dent and antithetical concepts. In addition, he singles
out several other “antinomies—which the concept of
the habitus aims to transcend—of determinism and free-
dom, conditioning and creativity, consciousness and the
unconscious, or the individual and society” (Bourdieu
1990, p. 55). In Giddens’s (1984) case, a primary pur-
pose of his work on structuration theory is to transcend
the dualism of agency and structure. As he writes, “The
constitution of agents and structures are not two inde-
pendently given sets of phenomena, a dualism, but rep-
resent a duality” (p. 25). Although analytical oppositions
are sometimes useful, practice theory encourages skepti-
cism toward these and the conceptual means to redefine
and reintegrate concepts that have been partitioned and
polarized in other theories. In particular, practice theory
enables scholars to theorize the dynamic constitution of
dualities and thus avoid the twin fallacies of “objectivist
reification” on the one hand and “subjectivist reduction”
on the other (Taylor 1993).
A third principle of practice theory is the relational-
ity of mutual constitution. Although sometimes the term
relational is taken to mean interpersonal, the meaning
intended here echoes that of Foucault (1978) and others
in viewing relational as stipulating that no phenomenon
can be taken to be independent of other phenomena
(Bradbury and Lichtenstein 2000, Østerlund and Carlile
2005). Phenomena always exist in relation to each other,
produced through a process of mutual constitution. The
specific interactions of phenomena entailed by relation-
ality vary among scholars. Giddens (1984) is well known
for theorizing the recursive relationship between agency
and structure. In this case, it is not just that recurrent
actions constitute structures, but that the enacted struc-
tures also constitute the ongoing actions. Such practices
are said to be recursive because they are “constantly
recreated by the same means whereby they express
themselves” (Gherardi 2006, p. 31). Though not using
the language of recursion, Bourdieu also proposes a rela-
tionality in which practice, habitus, and field produce
and reproduce one another (Gherardi 2006, Chia and
Holt 2006). The notion of mutual constitution implies
that social orders (structures, institutions, routines, etc.)
cannot be conceived without understanding the role of
agency in producing them, and similarly, agency cannot
be understood “simply” as human action, but rather must
be understood as always already configured by structural
conditions. The ongoing nature of this constitutive rela-
tionship indicates that social regularities are always “in
the making”; that is, they are ongoing accomplishments
(re)produced and possibly transformed in every instance
of action (Gherardi 2006, Reckwitz 2002).
Relations of mutual constitution are not to be confused
with feedback relations, often referred to as feedback
loops. Feedback involves the generation of information
about system conditions that flow back to the system to
control it. The notion of feedback recognizes the pres-
ence of distinct elements in a system that act on each
other through information flows. Although such inter-
actions can regulate or modify the ongoing operations
of a system, they are not seen to generate the sys-
tem themselves. Relations of mutual constitution pro-
duce the very system of which they are a part. Escher’s
1948 lithograph “Drawing Hands”—where the left hand
is depicted drawing the right hand, and vice versa
(Orlikowski 2002)—provides a visual depiction of this
relational constitution.
It is important to note that relations of mutual con-
stitution do not imply equal relations. Rather, these are
relations of power, laden with asymmetrical capacities
for action, differential access to resources, and con-
flicting interests and norms. Practice theorists differ in
how they theorize power. In Bourdieu’s (1977, 1990)
Feldman and Orlikowski: Theorizing Practice and Practicing Theory
Organization Science 22(5), pp. 1240–1253, © 2011 INFORMS 1243
work, for instance, power occurs through the objecti-
fication and institutionalization of subjective relations.
For Giddens (1984, p. 283), power is identified with the
agentic capacity to “make a difference” in the world and
is defined as the “the means of getting things done.” In
his formulation of the structuration process, power rela-
tions enact structures of domination over time. Power is
thus understood to have both constraining and enabling
implications for everyday action. The asymmetry of rela-
tions is fundamental to practice theorizing, and as such,
“the notion of power can often serve as a helpful tool for
identifying the relational force(s) at play in a particular
practice theory” (Østerlund and Carlile 2005, p. 94).
Some Applications of Practice Theory
Applications of practice theory have been gaining
ground within organization studies, and we offer three
examples here. In the first two examples—the fields
of strategy and knowledge—scholars are drawing sub-
stantively on practice theory to investigate the phenom-
ena of strategy making and knowing in practice. In
the third example—that of neoinstitutionalism—scholars
are drawing more lightly on practice theoretic ideas to
inform their theorizing of institutional maintenance and
change.
Strategy. A growing community of organizational
scholars studying strategy has begun to use practice
theory to understand the relational and enacted nature
of strategizing (Whittington 1992, 2006; Johnson et al.
2003, 2007; Jarzabkowski 2005, 2008; Golsorkhi et al.
2010). Strategy as practice is oriented to what actors do
as opposed to something that organizations have. This
is an understanding of “strategy in the making” as a
dynamic accomplishment rather than a static outcome.
Building on Mintzberg’s (1978) important identifica-
tion of emergent and deliberate strategy, the strategy
as practice stream of scholarship focuses in particu-
lar on how strategy is constituted through the every-
day actions of organizational participants. These scholars
are also interested in understanding how the result-
ing strategies serve to constrain and enable the actions
taken, and with what consequences. “Strategy as practice
shifts the analytic focus to how strategy is constructed
rather than how firms change, in order to understand the
myriad of interactions through which strategy unfolds
over time, each of which contains the scope and poten-
tial for either stability or change (Tsoukas and Chia
2002)” (Jarzabkowski 2005, p. 5). Mantere and Vaara
(2008), for instance, examine the discursive practices
that create more or less participatory strategizing pro-
cesses, whereas Kaplan (2008) explores the framing
practices that create and alter the meaning and legit-
imacy of strategic initiatives, highlighting the differ-
ent consequences resulting from practices that reinforce
existing collective frames and those that produce diver-
gent frames.
Knowledge. A number of scholars within organiza-
tion studies have turned to practice theory to help them
reformulate notions of knowledge commonly used in the
management literature. They have drawn particularly on
Giddens’s (1984) and Bourdieu’s (1990) insights into
human knowledgeability, as well as work by anthropol-
ogists such as Lave (1988) and Hutchins (1991, 1995),
who have argued for seeing knowledge as a conse-
quential activity grounded in everyday situated prac-
tice. Giddens (1984, p. 4), for instance, defines knowl-
edgeability as “inherent within the ability to ‘go on’
within the routines of social life,” and Bourdieu (1990,
p. 52) clearly identifies knowledge as constructed within
practice rather than passively recorded. These insights
have led to an understanding of knowing in practice as
the knowledgeability that is continually enacted through
ongoing action. Such an understanding rejects the tra-
ditional dualism set up between knowledge that exists
“out there” (encoded in external objects, routines, or sys-
tems) and knowledge that exists “in here” (embedded in
human brains, bodies, or communities). Rather, “know-
ing is an ongoing social accomplishment, constituted
and reconstituted in everyday practice” (Orlikowski
2002, p. 252). This enacted view of knowledge is
strongly evident in research on knowledge production
and sharing within organizations by such scholars as
Bechky (2003a, b; 2006), Brown and Duguid (1991,
1998), Boland and Tenkasi (1995), Carlile (2002, 2004),
Cook and Brown (1999), Gherardi (2006), Gherardi and
Nicolini (2000), Nicolini et al. (2003), Tsoukas (2005,
2009), and Wenger (1998). Although the specific ori-
entations of these scholars vary, their studies have in
common the idea that knowledge is not a static entity
or stable disposition, but rather an ongoing and dynamic
production that is recurrently enacted as actors engage
the world in practice.
Institutionalism. Institutional theory is a stream of
research that has also drawn ideas from practice theo-
rists, though it has not been the primary focus (Barley
and Tolbert 1997, Whittington 1992). The focus of this
stream is the creation of institutional fields and their
effects on individual actions and cognitions (Powell and
DiMaggio 1991; Scott 1995; Greenwood et al. 2002,
2008). This research views constraint as moving largely
from organizational fields to institutions to individu-
als (Bechky 2011), and thus the mutually constitu-
tive relationship between actions and institutions is not
actively theorized. Human agency is portrayed as pri-
marily shaped by macroinstitutional forces, and it is
largely in the presence of some exogenous shock to
the system that actors are seen to shift (usually sud-
denly) “from unreflective participation in institutional
reproduction to imaginative critique of existing arrange-
ments to practical action for change” (Seo and Creed
2002, p. 231). The role of everyday practices in both