Practice, praxis and practitioners

The concept of practice has been at the centre of numerous social theory formulations. While a full discussion of practice theories is beyond the scope of this dissertation, I will elaborate my

understanding of ethics as practice by focusing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Michael Lambek and scholars within the field of strategy-as-practice studies.

Practice, according to Lambek (2015b:10), is the ‘relatively unmarked flow of action, including the habitual; it is action viewed or experienced as ongoing and, in effect, intransitive, the doing rather than the done’. Drawing on the, the Aristotelian notion of ‘practical wisdom’, Lambek further views ethics as constituted by and expressed through practice (Lambek 2010b).

In order to grasp the nature of this connection between practice and the ethical, Bourdieu’s (1977) definition of practice as a nexus between embodied, structuring conditions of the social order (habitus) and practical actions that simultaneously express and enforce that order, is useful. Bourdieu

emphasizes the way in which ordinary, intuitive practices express and reinforce these structuring structures of the individual (Bourdieu 1977:79–80). Although Bourdieu points toward ordinary practices as part of an argument about the somewhat determinant effects of the habitus, to which I do not subscribe in this dissertation, it is nonetheless noteworthy how he emphasizes the importance of ordinary practices as expressions and co-creators of norms within a community. It is such ordinary practices that I will be focusing on in this dissertation.

Within strategy research, a practice-based view has long prevailed, and a broadly based research agenda has explored strategy as a practical, fluid and co-constructed endeavour rather than perceiving it as a stable entity. As noted by Rasche and Chia (2009), the theoretical heritage of the strategy-as-practice research has been shaped significantly by neo-structuralist and neo-interpretive perspectives.

While neo-structuralist theories of practice emphasize the schemes of interpretation that simultaneously shape and are shaped by individual action (such as Bourdieu’s ‘habitus’),

neo-interpretive theories of practice assign more agency to the individual actor, whose actions contribute to constituting these implicit schemes (e.g. Goffman’s ‘frames’). However, regardless of whether emphasis is placed on the individual or on the tacit knowledge schemes that guide the individual’s action, and

46 whether the collective or the individual is considered the main contributor to such schemes, the

common understanding of practice theory approaches is that an individual’s practices and her

structures for thinking and acting are mutually constitutive. Moreover, practice theory emphasizes the need to elucidate these tacit structures by studying practices as verbal and bodily actions as well as manifestations of the material world (for an example, see Bourdieu’s studies and descriptions of the Kabyle house, Bourdieu 1977:89–92).

As Jarzabkowski et al. (2007:6) write, following Johnson et al. (2003), strategy ‘is not something that an organization has but something its members do’. The intention of drawing on practice theory to explore strategy is to develop a closer connection between context and individual action (Whittington

2006:617). In order to study strategy as it unfolds in practice, many scholars within this stream of research distinguish between three interconnected levels of analysis: practices, praxis and practitioners.

As defined by Whittington, practices refer to ‘shared routines of behaviour, including traditions, norms and procedures for thinking, acting and using “things”, this last in the broadest sense’ (Whittington 2006:619). ‘Praxis’, on the other hand refers to the actual activities that people do, their concrete, situated actions (Golsorkhi et al. 2010:4). Practices are thus the tacit norms for doing, whereas praxis refers to the acts of doing. Of course, following the logics of structuration theory, praxis is embedded within practice, and the concrete actions thus express – and constitute - the norms on which they build.

As noted by Jarzabkowski et al. (2007:9), practices provide ‘behavioural, cognitive, procedural, discursive and physical resources’ through which actors act and interact. Practitioners draw on these resources in routinized and patterned ways that can be studied.

Practitioners are those individuals who draw upon the practices (routines, norms, etc.) in their everyday praxis (concrete action). Thus, the three concepts are closely interconnected and cannot be explored as separate objects of study.

The strategy-as-practice research agenda emerged in response to widespread research that tended to define strategy as a top-down process and focusing on the executives formulating the strategy rather than on the organizational actors practicing the strategy. The strategy-as-practice approach thus broadens the view of who is involved in ‘strategizing’, such that middle managers and employees can also be involved in strategy-making and execution (Jarzabkowski et al. 2007:12).

As mentioned earlier in this chapter, within the business ethics literature, the prevailing focus has been on determining whether a program works or fails, whether it has been ‘implemented’ or not. Little attention has been paid to how a program works or fails in practice among those employees and

47 managers who are the targets of such programs. However, a similar widespread turn to practices, as has occurred within the strategy research approach, and a research agenda focused on business ethics-as-practice is yet to be seen, despite the obvious advantages of exploring the embedded micro

processes of business ethics. The task is not only to understand whether an ethics program is in place or not, nor is it to determine its component elements. Rather, the task is to determine how internal organizational actors conceptualize and define the right thing to do and how they act to pursue it.

One exception to the dearth of literature on ethics as practice is Mollie Painter-Morland (2008), who criticizes many business ethicists’ tendencies to dissociate business ethics with certain situated

practices. Understanding ethics as practice, she writes, obviates the problem of having to deal with the divide between theory and practice, on which many theories about ethical decisions and actions a re based. ‘To approach ethics as practice requires that normative priorities and commitments be

integrated with the context of their application. (…) Instead of an abstract cognitive exercise, ethics as practice is all about participation, relationships and responsiveness’ (Painter-Morland 2008:87).

Painter-Morland’s plea for understanding ethics as practice builds on a comprehensive review of previous business ethics research as well as societal and corporate trends and their philosophical underpinnings. Hence, she criticizes the underlying assumption among many business ethics scholars and practitioners that individuals in organizations act only as rational agents capable of operationalizing rational protocols for ethical conduct. She argues that individuals’ sense of moral agency is shaped by tacit knowledge which emerges over time, through multiple interactions. Her argument for viewing ethics as practice is certainly an improvement over the research which concentrates on gaps between ideal principles and behaviour. However, Painter-Morland does not dive into nor exemplify such individual actions and interactions, and her book lacks an empirical underpinning that could give depth to her claims.

With this dissertation, I seek to provide this kind of empirical depth by examining how business ethics unfolds as practice.

In order to operationalize my ethics-as-practice approach, it is helpful to return to the strategy-as-practice research. Encouraged by the tripartite approach to strategizing (Jarzabkowski et al. 2007;

Whittington 2006), which highlights the relations between practices, praxis and practitioners, in this dissertation, I explore what happens when practitioners enact and constitute ethical practices through their daily praxis. Instead of pre-defining actors as ‘moral agents’ grappling with a set of ‘moral issues’, an approach typical of the ethical decision-making literature mentioned earlier, I conceptualize

organizational actors as practitioners whose situated actions as practices can help us understand how

48 ethics is embedded within the most mundane daily praxis. In this approach, the actors are always ethical, but they are ethical on their own terms, rather than being judged in terms of their adherence towards predefined definitions of what is ethical. The presumption here is not that anything actors do is ethical. Rather, it is the actors themselves who - sometimes explicitly, often times not - define what is ethical and what is not. It is ethics from the actor’s perspective rather than the researcher’s or the philosopher’s.

Within the strategy-as-practice literature, researchers have tended to explore employees’ and middle managers’ strategizing by following these actors in activities related to a predefined field of ‘strategy’

(strategy meetings, strategy workshops, town hall meetings, etc.). The weakness of this approach is that the researcher has already defined the empirical contexts in which ‘strategy’ can be found. The sites of strategizing are thus artificially limited, and instances of practical strategizing may be

overlooked or neglected. Moreover, studies with this kind of focus tend to define strategy practices as deliberate, conscious and intentional, overlooking the unplanned, unintended and non-deliberate practices that invariably emerge outside the contexts labelled as strategy-related⁷ (cf. Chia and Rasche 2010). Following Chia and Rasche (2010), an alternative approach that views strategy as immanent in the mundane and unspectacular practices of the everyday opens up for a deeper understanding of the workings of strategies (Chia and Rasche 2010). Just as there is strategizing outside ‘strategy meetings’, there is ethical behaviour outside formalized ethics program activities. Hence, if we were to truly study ethics as practice, we need also to understand daily practices outside the formal ethics meetings and workshops. We need to escape the predefined notions of where ‘the ethical’ might be located and look into everyday action. This means that ethical discourses, dilemmas and practices might appear in sites and situations that we normally do not regard as the domain of ‘the ethical’, in the nuts and bolts of everyday organizational life and in the routines of getting things done. It is what I call ‘ordinary ethics’.

Thus, I propose to take ethics as practice one step further than the strategy-as-practice literature and to expand not only the view of who might be involved in shaping ethical orientations but also to broaden the empirical scope for what ethics in practice might consist of and how it takes place in people’s daily activities. Of course, one reason why strategy-as-practice scholars have defined certain empirical contexts as strategy-related, and thus relevant for strategy-focused inquiries, is that it might otherwise

7 Some exceptions exist, where scholars have studied e.g. strategy as everyday narrative practices (Fenton and Langley 2011; De La Ville and Mounoud 2015) and strategy as discursive practices (Ezzamel and Willmott 2008, 2010; Knights and Morgan 1991), as well as the continuing sensegiving practices of managers and sensemaking of employees in strategy processes (cf. Cornelissen and Schildt 2015).

49 seem arbitrary and difficult to argue that one has indeed studied strategy. However, this argument conflates emic and etic notions of strategy. This kind of approach studies strategy as an empirical object, but it also applies a theoretical apparatus that takes its point of departure in empirically-based definitions of what a strategy is and where strategy-making is located. What is required, however, is a stricter separation of the actor’s from the analyst’s view, i.e., the emic and etic. In this dissertation, I distinguish between business ethics activities as an empirical phenomenon, where I explore Ferring’s ethics program and follow ethics officers in their activities, basing my analysis on the framework of

‘ordinary ethics’, to which I will turn shortly, as a theoretical approach to understanding ethics-as-practice.

Moreover, the distinction from the strategy-as-practice literature between practice, praxis and

practitioners is not easily replicable in empirical inquiry, as it seems challenging to explore e.g. practices without praxis or praxis without practitioners. The concept of ‘ordinary ethics’ is thus a means to operationalize the notion of ethics-as-practice.