Danish University Colleges
Between practices and situations – praxeological methods exposed praxeologically
Poulsen, Bo Klindt; Lund, Jens H; Larsen, Verner; Buch, Anders
Publication date:
2021
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Citation for pulished version (APA):
Poulsen, B. K., Lund, J. H., Larsen, V., & Buch, A. (2021). Between practices and situations – praxeological methods exposed praxeologically. Abstract from After Method in Organization Studies IV (AMOS), Vâsterås, Sweden.
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1
Between practices and situations – praxeological methods exposed praxeologically.
Bo Klindt Poulsen, Jens H. Lund, Verner Larsen & Anders Buch VIA University College
Denmark
E-mail: bokp@via.dk
A central question in practice-based studies is how practices emerge as an object of research, or rather, how the constitution of practices in research processes can be understood (Gherardi 2020). In this paper, we suggest that social activity can be studied as research objects through a combination of three analytical and methodological approaches informed by the works of Schatzki (2002), Nicolini (2009), and Clarke et al.
(2018).
From Schatzki we build our preunderstanding of the components of practices; practical understanding, rules, teleo-affective structures, general understanding, and material arrangements that prefigure social practices. (Schatzki, 2002). These components make up a guide of issues that require special attention in the analytical conception of practices.
Nicolini provides us with a method for engaging with practices, the ‘interview to the double’ (Nicolini 2009), which lets interviewees’ accounts of their activities stand in as a proxy for the detection of social practices.
In this part, we methodologically zoom in on how the interview person performs in her context based on her discursive account.
In an analysis of data from interviews to the double, we draw on Clarke’s notion of ‘situational analysis’
(2018). Clarke’s approach allows us to expand the perspective from singular practices to the overall situation that the practices are part of and constitute in their nexuses. Through situational analysis, we identify the different elements that the interview persons bring forward in their accounts, such as
discourses, ideas, non-human actors, sociocultural aspects, individuals, etc. These elements both figure in the concrete practices and in the overall situation.
This combination of different analytical and methodological approaches allows us to think comprehensively and exploratively of the process of data construction and data analysis in praxeology with an analytical focus on practices and situations. Moreover, it makes it possible to oscillate between the particular level of practices and the more encompassing level of total situations.
In our paper, we want to illustrate this methodological perspective drawing on experiences from a practice- based study on knowledge practices in Danish university colleges. In this study, the broader situation of knowledge production, knowledge circulations, and identifying different types of nexuses between research and education were in focus.
Through our experiences with this study, in this paper, we will highlight and discuss the tensions and potentials between the methodological perspectives of PBS and situational analysis respectively, when the purpose is to expose knowledge practices viewed in context of normativities.
2 References:
Clarke, Adele, Friese, Carrie & Washburn, Rachel (2018). Situational Analysis. Grounded Theory After the Interpretive Turn, Los Angeles: Sage.
Gherardi, Silvia (2020). How to Conduct a Practice-based Study: Problems and Method, 2nd edition, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing.
Nicolini, Davide (2009). Articulating Practice through the interview to the double, Management Learning, 40(2), 195-202.
Schatzki, Theodore (2002). The Site of the Social. A Philosophical Account of the Constitution of Social Life and Change, Pennsylvania: Penn State Press
