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Theorizing Practice and Practicing Theory


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Martha’s Story

I became interested in practice theory through my study of organizational routines. Routines were foundational to the research on decision-making I had done for my dissertation. They were, as March and Simon (1959), Cyert and March (1963) and Nelson and Winter (1982) had noted fundamental to the way work is accomplished in organizations. They were also predominantly seen as associated with stability and inertia. While change took place, it was considered an aberration. Nelson and Winter used a genetic metaphor and referred to change as mutation. Following on my dissertation research that showed the continuity of report writing practices even in circumstances where the participants did not articulate the reasons for the continuity (Feldman, 1989), I was intrigued by the mechanisms of this stability. Because I study phenomena ethnographically for the most part, I could contribute to our understanding of stability in organizational routines by exploring the micro-processes that produced this stability.

I chose a research site that the participants assured me had routines of mind-numbing stability that also provided me as much access as I wanted to the day-to-day operations of the organization. I embarked on my ethnographic research and followed five routines of the organization for four years. The organization provided housing for undergraduates at a large state university. The routines were budgeting for the entire organization, hiring student staff, training student staff, opening the residence halls at the beginning of the year and after breaks and closing the buildings at the end of the year. While each of these routines has an annual cycle, they also take place through multiple actions throughout the year. During the course of the research I began to notice that I had a problem. The mechanisms of stability were not the only thing I would have to explain. Indeed, every one of the routines I was following was exhibiting some change and several of them exhibited considerable change over the period of observation.

Of course, others have noted that routines change and that routines are implicated in organizational change. One explanation for change in routines was the existence of “exogenous shocks.” These are things like budget crises and new technologies that considerably alter the context that routines operate in. The context the organization operated in during this period, however, was very stable. Moreover, change had been theorized as the opposite of stability. For example, one common explanation of the process of routine change is provided by punctuated equilibrium theory (Tushman and Romanelli, 1985; Gersick, 1991). This theory suggests that routines enable people to ignore small changes in the context until they accumulate into really big problems and the routines have to be abandoned or overhauled to reflect and respond to the new context. This punctuated change, however, did not describe what I was seeing.

I was not able to understand what I was seeing using the theories I had available to me at the time. Luckily, I had a sabbatical year and an opportunity to find new theoretical tools. Wanda Orlikowski suggested a look into practice theory. I spent a year reading Giddens (1976, 1979, 1984) and Bourdieu (1977, 1990; Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990; Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992), thinking about my data and writing memos. I found the framework of structuration theory most immediately applicable, and most related to a foundation I already understood based on Schutz’s phenomenology (1967, 1970) and Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology (1967; Heritage, 1984). Bourdieu’s relational framework and the concept of habitus were also intriguing and important for thinking about the way people enact routines on a day-to-day basis. Later, I incorporated some of Latour’s ideas (Latour, 1986, 2005; Sevon, 1996), or my interpretation of these ideas. This stew of theories provided a foundation for a new way of conceptualizing routines and a way of understanding the relationship between stability and change as a result of the internal (or endogenous) dynamics of the routine.

I have theorized routines as practices. The three principles we describe in the introduction can be used to explain what it means to theorize routines as practices. The consequentiality of action means not just that routines are created through action and do not exist without action, but also that the development of the routine occurs through the enactment of it. There are two primary dualities engaged in theorizing routines as practices: action/structure and stability/change. Both of these dualities are relational and mutually constitutive in the context of theorizing routines as practices. Actions — often referred to as performances or performative aspects — and structures — often referred to as patterns or ostensive aspects — are not oppositional but mutually constitutive. Stability and change are different outcomes of the same dynamic rather than different dynamics. Moreover, change, from this perspective, may be engaged in order to promote stability, and stability may be essential to bringing about change.

My initial discussion of routines as a source of continuous change (Feldman, 2000) argues that routines have an internal dynamic that cycles among the actions people take, the ideas or ideals they hold in relation to these actions, the plans people make to enact these ideas/ideals and the outcomes they observe based on their actions. The cycle provides the possibility for both effortful and emergent accomplishments as people take different actions and create and recreate connections (Feldman and Rafaeli, 2002) in the course of enacting multiple iterations of a routine. Pentland and Rueter (1994) articulate the notion of routines as effortful accomplishments and note the work that goes into reproducing a relatively stable routine. Conceptualizing routines as emergent as well as effortful involves noticing how the work of reproduction subtly or dramatically alters the routine (Feldman, 2000; Jarzabkowski, Mathieson and Feldman, 2010). People can repair the cycle so that it continues to produce outcomes that are similar to the ones that have been previously produced (effortful accomplishment). Alternatively, people can strive to enact new outcomes that more fully realize their ideas/ideals or people can expand (or contract) their notions of what actions and outcomes are possible (emergent accomplishments).

The concepts of ostensive and performative were introduced in the Feldman (2000) article to capture the difference between the routine in principle and the routine in practice. These constructs are central to the work I have co-authored with Brian Pentland (Feldman and Pentland, 2003, 2005, 2008; Pentland and Feldman 2005, 2007, 2008) in which we conceptualize routines as generative systems created through the mutually constitutive and recursive interaction between the actions people take (performative aspect of routines) and the patterns these actions create and recreate (ostensive aspects of routines). The ostensive aspects (routine in principle) are multiple rather than unitary because they depend on point of view and, therefore, are poorly represented by written rules or formal standard operating procedures. Performances of routines (specific actions taken by specific people in specific times and places) create, maintain and modify the ostensive aspects of routines (the abstract patterns) while people rely on the ostensive aspects to guide, refer to and account for their performances. The interaction between these two aspects of routines produces a generative system that is more or less stable depending on the variation of the performances and the points of view from which people create patterns out of those performances.

This theory of routines provides a way of understanding the processes that produce both stability and change, which we refer to as routine dynamics. Routine dynamics conceptualizes routines as engaging agency and subjectivity on the one hand and structure and objectivity on the other hand. This relationship of mutual constitution between performative and ostensive aspects of routines raises questions about how power asymmetries play out in specific contexts. Do power asymmetries influence which innovative performances are selected and retained in the ostensive aspects of routines? How does retention affect power asymmetries? Who has the discretion to create new performances? What role does management play in the creation of new performances and the generation of new ostensive patterns?

Conceptualizing routines as generative systems fits squarely in the category of practice theorizing. The practice ontology, the notion that social life comes into being through practices, is implicit in this theorizing, but it is not the main point. My research on resources deals more directly with the ontological status of practice. The question motivating that research was whether we can call something a resource before it has been used in some way. We have tended to identify resources as static, as things, as qualities or as processes that are innately resources. Viewed through a practice lens, however, they are just potential resources until somebody uses them. Moreover, they are different kinds of resources depending on how they are used in a particular instance. These two observations suggest that practice is not just implicated in the use of resources but that practices are essential to the ontology of resources (Feldman and Worline, 2010). The process through which resources are enacted have been largely overlooked in the discussion of resources. The term resourcing has come to be used for that process (Feldman, 2004; Feldman and Quick, 2009; Goldsworthy, 2010; Howard-Grenville, 2007; Howard-Grenville, Golden-Biddle, Irwin and Mao, 2010; Jaquith, 2009; Quinn and Worline, 2008; Wang, 2009).

Resourcing puts the emphasis on the process rather than the entities. Indeed, from a resourcing perspective, things are only resources while they are being used. More important, however, it is the ways that they are used that makes things into particular resources. The term resources-in-use denotes that it is the combination of thing and use that makes a resource. This move is very similar to the move Orlikowski (2000) has made in theorizing technology-in-practice.

Theorizing routines as practices and potential resources as requiring practices to bring them into use as resources allows scholars and practitioners to make some important realizations that remain obscure when these concepts are conceptualized more conventionally. Theorizing routines as practices emphasizes the consequentiality of the actions that people take while they are enacting routines and both the potential for change and the work that goes into stability. Moreover, distinguishing the ostensive from the formal rules has brought attention to the multiplicity and flexibility of the patterns we create as we enact organizational routines. In recent work these concepts have been useful in bridging the gap between mindful and less mindful perspectives on organizational learning (Levinthal and Rerup, 2006), in understanding the persistence of flexible organizational routines (Howard-Grenville, 2005), and in exploring the difference between pricing theory and pricing practice (Zbaracki and Bergen, forthcoming), the emergence of a new coordinating mechanism after a mandated reorganization (Jarzabkowski, Matthiesen and Feldman, 2010) and the development of an enacted organizational schema through trial and error learning (Rerup and Feldman, forthcoming).

Theorizing resources as ontologically connected to the practices that create them through use also opens new ways of understanding the processes that underlie organizational outcomes. In Feldman (2004), this theorizing provided an explanation for the emergence of resistance to a change in organizational practices that had been developed by the same employees that were resisting it. This situation mystified the managers, but made sense when the resourcing analysis showed that the change in routines made it very difficult for the employees to enact the schema they thought appropriate to their work. The employees were professionals who worked in university residence halls. They thought of themselves as educators, but the new practices created resources-in-use that would be more appropriate if they were landlords. They engaged in new practices, including practices of resistance, which would create a different set of resources-in-use. Similarly Quinn and Worline (2008) were able to use the resourcing concept to unpack the narrative processes that took place as the passengers of Flight #93 reconceptualized their hijacking as a suicide mission and enacted the resources necessary to bring down the flight that otherwise was headed for the US Capitol building. In the case of Flight #93, resourcing theory was useful primarily to the scholars. In the case of the residence halls, resourcing theory could have provided an important tool to the managers and employees of the organization.
Wanda’s Story

I became intrigued by practice theory through my interest in understanding technology in the workplace. When I first began studying this phenomenon, some 25 years ago, I was surprised by the representations of information technology evident in the organizational literature. As someone who had designed and programmed computer systems for a number of years, many of the assumptions underlying the dominant theories of information technologies in organization studies (which strongly mirrored theories of technology more generally) seemed quite distant from my own understandings and experiences of such technologies in practice.

On the one hand, the logic of technological determinism — which posits technology as an external, largely independent and irrevocable force for change — left little scope for human agency. Yet, my colleagues and I had designed and coded software that had altered (sometimes substantially) the performance of particular machines and thus the outcomes produced. On the other hand, the logic of strategic design — which posits technology to be a malleable resource that can be put to a variety of uses (with a range of effects) depending on some preferred strategy or ideology — placed undue weight on the rationality of managers and designers and their abilities to optimize the machine. These theories assumed that the technology that was planned and designed would be built, that the technology that was built would be used in particular ways, and that the technology that was used would produce specific anticipated and intended outcomes. But as my colleagues and I had discovered, not only could we not guarantee a perfect translation of requirement specifications to running code, we had no control over whether and how others would use the technology that we had built (both in the short term as well as over time), and we certainly had no way of knowing or anticipating the range of possible unintended consequences that might attend a technology’s use in practice and over time.

Missing from these dominant models of technology was the recognition that technology is not valuable, meaningful, or consequential by itself; it only becomes so when people actually engage with it in practice. The scope for human agency — in particular, the potential for humans to adapt technology (whether as developers or users) in multiple and contingent ways — was thus significantly understated in many theories of technology, as was the notion of technological construction — that technologies are artifacts whose operation and outcomes are neither fixed nor given a priori, but always temporally emergent through interaction with humans in practice. The search for theories that had greater resonance with my lived experiences with technology began, and it led me on a journey through Berger and Luckman (1966) and the social construction of reality, then the social construction of technology (Bijker, Hughes and Pinch, 1987; Bijker and Law, 1992; Woolgar, 1991), and on to Giddens’ structuration theory (1976, 1979, 1984). Interestingly, structuration theory has very little to say about technology, but its articulation of consequential, recursive, and mutually constitutive relations between humans and structures was very compelling. As a meta-theory of how the social world is performed in practice, it struck a deep chord.

Structuration theory helped me see how it is that through our actions we create the structures that shape us. And in understanding that we (re)produce our structures, there is an understanding both how structures seem to get away from us (become reified) and how they can be changed (through collective action). Giddens’ insights about the duality of structure seemed to explain my experiences with technology, and it led to my proposing a reconceptualization of the nature of technology in organization research (Orlikowski, 1992). Framed as “the duality of technology,” I advocated a structurational view of technology in practice as, on the one hand created and changed in ongoing human action, and on the other hand as objectified and institutionalized by recurrent action.

Further fieldwork that focused on the structured and situated practices through which people engage with particular technologies (Orlikowski, 1996), as well as the constructive critiques of many colleagues led me subsequently to modify my structurational view of technology. In this later version, the notion of practices (which had been conceptually backgrounded in the earlier work) became front stage, and I sought to actively theorize the relationship between everyday practices and technologies in use (Orlikowski, 2000). This revised view of technology in organizations suggests that through their regularized engagement with a particular technology (and some of its inscribed features) in their ongoing practices, users recurrently enact technology structures — what I term technologies-in-practice — that are (re)constituted in people’s ongoing interactions with the technologies at hand. It is thus not technologies per se nor how they may be used in general that matter, but the specific technologies-in-practice (enacted technology structures) that are recurrently produced in everyday action that are consequential for the shaping of organizational outcomes.

Recursivity is central to this notion of technology-in-practice. As humans interact with technological artifacts they constitute a technology-in-practice through their recurrent use of the technologies. However, their actions are at the same time shaped by the technologies-in-practice they have enacted in the past. Thus, in their ongoing and situated action, actors draw on structures that have been previously enacted (both technologies-in-practice and other structures) and in such action reconstitute those structures. By drawing more explicitly on a practice perspective, I was able to identify various conditions (institutional, interpretive, and technological) that shape the recursive enactment of different technologies-in-practice, and to articulate how those different enactments reinforce or modify (both incrementally and substantially) the institutional, interpretive, and technological conditions in turn.

The distinction between technological artifacts and technologies-in-practice offers some practical insights to how technology may be introduced and managed. In organizations, people often focus on the technological artifacts with their tangibility, relative stability, and apparent predictability of performance, and downplay the technologies-in-practice that produce outcomes that are situated, dynamic, and emergent. For example, I studied a multinational consulting firm that had adopted a groupware technology to facilitate knowledge sharing among its global consultants. Focusing on the artifact, the managers concentrated their energies and resources on installing the technology within the firm’s infrastructure and on every consultant’s desktop. They viewed this deployment as very successful, as indicated by the measures they used (number of user accounts established, number of servers installed, number of databases created). Focusing their efforts and their metrics on the technological artifacts, these managers did not attend to or assess the technologies-in-practice — to what consultants were actually doing with the groupware technology in their everyday consulting practice. Such attention would have revealed that consultants were not using the technology much at all. In the context of this consulting firm, with its competitive “up or out” career path and individualistic work norms, to share knowledge was counter-cultural. Not surprisingly, there was only nominal adoption and use of the groupware technology in practice. As a technological artifact, the groupware technology could be seen to have the potential to facilitate knowledge sharing across the firm. However, what is consequential for organizational outcomes is not the artifact itself, but how it is used to get work done in specific contexts. And the consultants’ use of the technology in practice was simply not achieving knowledge sharing across the firm. By managing the technological artifact rather than its use in practice, this firm (like many others) failed to achieve the benefits of the technology they had deployed. The insights afforded by a practice lens on technology adoption and use have been further elaborated and extended by examinations of other technologies in practice, including enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems (Boudreau and Robey 2005), intranets (Vaast and Walsham 2005), web-based, self-service applications (Schultze and Orlikowski 2004), nomadic computing (Cousins and Robey 2005), and mobile email devices (Mazmanian et al. 2006).

My understanding of the relationship between practices and technology was deepened and elaborated in my collaborative work with JoAnne Yates. We were both interested in exploring the implications of electronic media for communication practices and so we conducted a series of empirical studies into the uses of various electronic media, including electronic mail (Orlikowski and Yates, 1994), online discussion boards (Yates, Orlikowski, and Okamura, 1999), groupware (Yates and Orlikowski, 2002), and PowerPoint (Yates and Orlikowski, 2007). Along the way, we blended my structurational interests with JoAnne’s literary and historical interests to rethink conventional understandings and treatments of the notion of genre (Yates and Orlikowski, 1992).

In particular, we proposed the idea of genres of organizational communication that we argued are “socially recognized types of communicative actions — such as memos, meetings, expense forms, training seminars — that are habitually enacted by members of a community to realize particular social purposes” (Orlikowski and Yates, 1994: 542). This enacted understanding of genre draws attention to the dynamic, yet recurrent and habitual nature of communicative practices, and provides a practice-based lens for studying the production, reproduction, and change of organizational communication. For example, in studying the electronic discourse of a group of computer scientists, we identified the repertoire of genres enacted by the participants over time and showed how their daily communicative actions reflected their collective purposes, the media at hand, as well as the shared norms and relations of their occupational community (Orlikowski and Yates, 1994). My more recent work in this area with Natalia Levina has addressed the question of power dynamics within and across organizations. Using critical genre analysis, we examine how conditions of novelty and ambiguity on consulting engagements produce discursive tensions that create liminal opportunities for marginalized agents to act. In particular, we find that such actors often choose to make discursive moves that deviate from established genre norms and communicative expectations in use within their organizations (Levina and Orlikowski, 2009). When such discursive moves succeed and are accepted by other actors, they may reconfigure established power dynamics and transform power relations within and across organizations.

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