Theorizing Practice and Practicing Theory

By Maryann P. Feldman, Wanda J. Orlikowski. Organ. Sci., 2011

1,604 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This 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.

Subfields: Management Information Systems, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/668378ed53e878c5caa4318c0f29f98aab0435e6

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Citations in the corpus

What Happens When Evaluation Goes Online? Exploring Apparatuses of Valuation in the Travel Sector (2014, methodology): “A practice-based perspective focuses attention on everyday activities and their structural contexts and outcomes (Feldman and Orlikowski 2011).”
Theorizing affective ethnography for organization studies (2018, background): “In the past 20 years, practice-based studies have contributed widely to bringing ethnography back to the fore, and we see that their main methodological suggestion for studying and representing practices is ethnography (Gherardi, 2012; Feldman and Orlikowski, 2011; Nicolini, 2012).”
The Concept of International Opportunity in International Entrepreneurship: A Review and a Research Agenda (2014, positive): “Although the entrepreneurial action as suggested by the effectuation logic and the latest international opportunity creation research is one element of the practice approach, we suggest taking the view further with theoretical and philosophical considerations on practice (Feldman and Orlikowski 2011”
Exploring the Role of Leadership in Enabling Contextual Ambidexterity (2015, background): “This resonates with recent trends in the organizational literature that focus on how strategy and performance emerge through micro level practices (Eisenhardt, Furr, & Bingham, 2010; Feldman & Orlikowski, 2011; Jarzabkowski, 2003).”
Dynamic Decision Making: A Model of Senior Leaders Managing Strategic Paradoxes (2014, background): “Three types of code emerged: (1) practices or leaders’ everyday activities (Feldman & Orlikowski, 2011; Jarzabkowski, 2005); (2) decision contexts describing how practices impacted the leaders’ understanding of exploring and exploiting (Corley & 1598 DecemberAcademy of Management Journal Gioia,…”
The Time and Space of Materiality in Organizations and the Natural Environment (2013, background): “Such work has diffused to technology studies (Leonardi & Barley, 2010), sense-making (Whiteman & Cooper, 2011), and strategy as practice (Feldman & Orlikowski, 2011), making both its reach and impact substantial.”
What is an Information System? (2015, background): “A socio-technical view of IS thus can overlook the importance of ongoing practice that questions this ontological separateness [32].”
“News comes across when I’m in a moment of leisure”: Understanding the practices of incidental news consumption on social media (2018, methodology): “We ask two main questions inspired by a practice theory approach (Couldry, 2004; Feldman and Orlikowski, 2011; Knorr Cetina et al., 2001; Reckwitz, 2002): (1) What are the practices that subtend this form of news consumption among young people? and (2) What are the main social consequences of these…”
Beyond Routines as Things: Introduction to the Special Issue on Routine Dynamics (2016, background): “…motivation, or cognition (e.g., Michel 2014), or focus on tracing associations between actants (Latour 2005), routine dynamics focuses on tracing actions and associations between actions , emphasizing the way actions constitute social order (Feldman and Orlikowski 2011, Pentland et al. 2012).”
Beyond Constraining and Enabling: Toward New Microfoundations for Institutional Theory (2017, neutral): “…actionhasinformedseveralstrandsoforganization theory,suchastechnology(DeSanctis&Poole,1994; Leonardi,2011;Orlikowski,1992,2000),practice theory(Feldman&Orlikowski,2011;Nicolini,2013), andorganizationalroutines(Feldman&Pentland, 2003).Aviewofstructureasorienting…”
Strategic opportunities (and challenges) of algorithmic decision-making: A call for action on the long-term societal effects of 'datification' (2015, background): “As we pointed out earlier in this article, knowledge develops cumulatively and, according to the practice perspective (Feldman and Orlikowski, 2011; Schatzki et al. 2001; Sandberg and Tsoukas, 2011; Whittington, 2014) knowledge equates with practice.”