Article

Journal of Information Science

38(2) 176–188
An exploration of the practice approach Ó The Author(s) 2012
Reprints and permission: sagepub.
and its place in information science co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0165551511435881
jis.sagepub.com

Andrew M. Cox
University of Sheffield, UK

Abstract
A number of cognate disciplines, such as science and technology studies and media studies, appear to be turning to practice theories
as a theoretical perspective. Using Schatzki’s work as a starting point, this conceptual paper explores the practice approach, and its
actual and potential application to different fields in information science. The paper begins by discussing definitions of practice, and
charting differences in how authors have emphasized different aspects within the theory, such as the body, materiality, routine and
knowing. Examples drawn from a study of family photography illustrate the discussion. The paper also locates a familiar concept, com-
munities of practice, in the wider development of the theory. It then evaluates the practice approach as a perspective. The last sec-
tions of the paper examine the ways in which the practice approach has begun to be used in the study of information behaviour. The
paper concludes that recasting this field as the study of information in social practice – in other words, as about exploring how infor-
mation activities are woven through social practices – could be a highly productive perspective.

Keywords
communities of practice; information behaviour; knowledge management; practice theories

1. Introduction
The book The practice turn in contemporary theory [1] identifies a broad move to adopt a practice approach across many
disciplines, including philosophy, sociology, anthropology, and science and technology studies. Rather than there being
one definitive account of practice theory, there are a range of positions and continuing debates about emphasis [2–5].
However, in general, practice theory ‘decentres mind, texts and conversation [while] it shifts bodily movements, things,
practical knowledge and routine to the centre of its vocabulary’[3, p. 259]. The work of one of the editors of the book,
Theodore Schatzki, has done much to develop the debates at a philosophical level, and to clarify what practice theories
are, and what they are not, as social theory [2, 6–8]. The continuing value of a turn to practice is signalled by its use
across a number of authors about consumption [e.g. 9–11], and by an important reconsideration of it for media studies
published in 2010 [12].
Although not mentioned in The practice turn, the community of practice concept is the most familiar of practice the-
ories known in the information science (IS) field, even if it is not always recognized as an application of a more general
approach (or a theory at all). It has been one of the most distinctive concepts of knowledge management (KM) in organi-
zation studies. It has also been influential in the literature of education, be it taken from the work of Lave and Wenger
[13], Brown and Duguid [14] or Wenger [15]. In these fields the phrase ‘community of practice’ is very heavily cited,
even if it remains somewhat elusive, and is much critiqued [16–20]. Commentators have often focused on the immediate
history of the term among researchers at the Institute on Research for Learning [e.g. 21, 22] and internal differences
between seminal authors [23, 24]. Less well developed is an understanding of it in the wider context of practice theories
[23], a notable exception being the work of Gherardi, who has done much in recent writings to identify and explore the
character of the broad range of work in the ‘bandwagon’ of ‘practice-based studies’ [4, 5, 19, 25–28]. Within this she
locates (and historicizes) the contribution of the community of practice concept.

Corresponding author:
Andrew M. Cox, The Information School, University of Sheffield, Portobello, Sheffield, S1 4DP, UK.
Email: a.m.cox@sheffield.ac.uk

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The purpose of this theoretical paper is, first, to explore the main features of the practice approach, partly as under-
stood in KM, and in particular within the concept of communities of practice, and in so doing to develop a discussion of
the strengths and limits of such an approach. Second, the paper explores how the approach would treat the area of infor-
mation behaviour or information practice, drawing out an alternative conceptualization of information in social practice
that recognizes information activities being woven through most practices, but rarely the primary centre of social actors’
attention. Thus while many cognate disciplines, such as STS, workplace studies and educational research, have been
touched by practice ideas, the purpose of this paper is to draw out a contrast between two areas of mainstream informa-
tion thinking, one of which has not been heavily influenced as yet, for Savolainen [29–31], Talja [32] and Lloyd [33–
35] are among only a few writers working in the information behaviour area to have drawn on practice theories. The
paper takes as its starting point Schatzki’s Site of the social [7], because this work clarifies practice theories philosophi-
cally relative to other social theories.
The paper proceeds as follows. First, practice theories in general are explored, starting with Schatzki’s 2002 work and,
in particular, how he clarifies what practice theories are not, distinguishing them from individualism or theories premised
on notions of abstract social structure. A number of definitions of practice are then compared to identify key themes and
differences of emphasis between authors, such as around open-endedness, embodiment, materiality and routine. Key
points are illustrated throughout the paper from Rose’s account of the practice of family photography [36]. The paper
then locates a detailed discussion of Wenger’s ideas relative to these debates [15]. Some of the strengths and limits of the
practice approach, specifically for information science as a discipline, become apparent in this process, and are developed
in the following section of the paper. Attempts to adopt the practice approach in the information behaviour area are dis-
cussed in the final section.

2. ‘The site of the social’

In the practice ‘family of theories’ [3, p. 244] the names of Wittgenstein, Bourdieu and Giddens recur as a first generation
of theorists [37]. Immediately this indicates that the turn is a broad church of writers with some common ways of think-
ing, rather than one systematically propounded viewpoint. Various theories, such as actor network theory and activity
theory, are often included as practice theories [4]. Prominent among the second generation of practice theorists is the phi-
losopher Theodore Schatzki. Thus one starting point for thinking about the practice approach is to examine his book The
site of the social [7]. The purpose of Schatzki’s book is to explore the nature of social existence and change. Schatzki
considers that the social order consists of people, artefacts, organisms and things. These different entities are linked by a
number of types of relationship, including spatial, causal, intentional and prefiguring relations. The meaning of the enti-
ties (including the meaning of people, their identities) arises from their position within this changing, complex and inde-
terminate set of relations. Practices are central for Schatzki, because these relations are shaped by a vast, complex,
changing nexus of social practices.
Schatzki is a philosopher, and some of his conceptualizations may seem too abstract [9] – Gherardi’s work may better
capture the feel of practice [e.g. 28] – but they do have the virtue of precise and explicit definition. The strength of the
2002 book is the clarity with which his own precisely articulated version of a practice theory is positioned. In particular,
one of the most useful clarifications that Schatzki’s work offers us is in defining what a practice approach is not: that is,
‘intellectualism, representationalism, individualisms (e.g. rational choice theory, methodological individualism, network
analysis), structuralism, structure-functionalism, systems theory, semiotics, and many strains of humanism and poststruc-
turalism’ [2, p. 2]. Critically, he shows how the practice approach moves away from individualist accounts of action –
ones based on things going on in people’s minds (‘cognitivism’) or rational decision making and linear, purposeful
behaviour – and equally away from explaining things through abstract social structures, such as class or gender. Actors
operate within expectations or ‘the accountability of a shared way of doing’ [5, p. 277] set up in a practice. Thus, for
example, in the practice approach, ‘practices, rather than individual desires, we might say, create wants’ [9, p. 137].
Structure is experienced via pre-given, but potentially malleable, somewhat indeterminate social practices.

3. Defining ‘practice’
The variant flavours of the practice approach are apparent when different definitions of practice are compared. Schatzki
defines the basic unit of activity as ‘doings and sayings’ [6] or ‘bodily doings and sayings’ (7, p. 72). Thus practice is
about things being acted out in the world, about doing things, but gives weight to speaking (or not speaking) as perform-
ing action too. The meaning of an action is defined within a practice; the same action can mean something different in
another practice. A practice can be defined minimally as ‘a set’, ‘a nexus’ or ‘an array of activity’ [2, p. 2]. The terms
such as ‘array’ imply some sort of organization, so a practice is ‘an organized bundle of human activity’ [7, p. 59].

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Schatzki argues that basic actions can be further organized as tasks and projects: ‘a practice thus embraces a set of hier-
archically organized doings/sayings, tasks and projects’ [7, p. 73].
In earlier work, Schatzki [6] differentiates between dispersed and integrated practices, but the 2002 book barely men-
tions dispersed practices, so what follows relates to his concept of integrated practice. Schatzki’s core definition explains
that, for him, ‘a practice is a temporally evolving, open-ended set of doings and sayings linked by practical understand-
ings, rules, teleo-affective structure and general understandings’ [7, p. 87]. Thus it is about actions and socially given (if
renegotiable) meanings, knowledge, and expectations. Practical understandings are ‘knowing how to X, knowing how to
identify Xings, and knowing how to prompt as well as respond to Xings’ [7, p. 77]. So they seem to be a set of skills,
and understanding of when to use them. A practical understanding is the ability to do some things appropriate to a situa-
tion. Rules are explicit statements of how to carry on the practice that people participating take account of – both explicit
directives and instructions generally. Teleo-affective structures are ‘a range of normativized and hierarchically ordered
ends, projects, and tasks [.] allied with normativized emotions and even moods’ [7, p. 80]. So practices are sets of
things we do – tasks and bigger projects – that are linked to what are considered appropriate ends. These are further
linked to accepted or expected emotional states. For Reckwitz, a practice implies a ‘routinized mode of intentionality’
and emotionality [3, p. 254]. ‘Wants and emotions thus do not belong to individuals but – in the form of knowledge – to
practices’ [3, p. 254]. It is a reversal of the account that locates the spur of action in individualized motives. General
understandings are general beliefs that find expression across many practices in how the activities are carried out, such
as a religious belief in the value of work finding expression in many work practices.
These concepts may be clearer in relation to a particular example. For this purpose, Rose’s account of family photo-
graphy [36] is used throughout the paper. It was chosen because it takes a practice approach (referencing Schatzki [2]
and Reckwitz [3]), and offers an illustration of aspects of the theory through a familiar mundane practice. The example is
also suitable to show how, within a familiar but not obviously information-related practice, what is understood as infor-
mation and how it is created, used and shared is shaped by that particular practice, decentring notions of information
needs, and seeking and suggesting the value of recasting the field as information in social practice. Family photography
consists of such ‘doings’ as taking photos of certain people on certain types of occasion, dating prints or printouts, and
sticking them in albums – as well as things people say (or do not say) on these occasions. Doing family photography
involves practical understandings of how to frame a photo in a view finder, recognizing someone else is taking a photo,
knowing how to get someone to smile (by saying ‘cheese’), and also how to respond when asked to smile (to compose
oneself and give a particular type of smile). So it is partly a skill; and partly understandings of social expectations. A
camera handbook would contain rules in the form of directions on how to use the camera, and guidelines about how to
take photos. A task might be made up of activities of taking photos or creating an album. The projects of family photo-
graphy are things such as creating an album, or collecting a complete collection of images of the family for a frame in
the hallway. The end that this achieves in the case of Rose’s interviewees is ‘doing togetherness’. For Rose, creating a
collection of photos of the family elicits largely happy feelings; the mood of looking through old photos is happy and
reflective. An example of a general understanding might be general beliefs about the family that are reflected or negoti-
ated in family photography, but also in many other social practices in society.

3.1. Variations of emphasis between authors

In an earlier definition, Schatzki describes practice as a ‘temporally unfolding and spatially dispersed nexus of doings
and sayings’ [6, p. 89]. Thus an important aspect of practice is that it is a process – a spatially and temporally organized
set of activities. In the context of the 2002 book’s focus on explaining social change, a concern in the definition is also to
acknowledge practice’s ability to change, and so its ‘temporally evolving and open-ended’ quality. Warde suggests that
practices are ‘internally differentiated and dynamic’ [9, p. 131]. Not only do they change, at the empirical level they are
also practised differently by different proponents – another indication that they are not simply socially given. He writes
of the differences between ‘long-standing participants and novitiates, theorists and technicians, generalists and special-
ists, conservatives and radicals, visionaries and followers, the highly knowledgeable and the relatively ignorant, and the
professional and the amateur’ [9, p. 138]. Postill also brings out variation in practice in his definition: ‘Practices are the
embodied sets of activities that humans perform with varying degrees of regularity, competence and flair’ [37, p. 1]. It is
perhaps neglect of such variation in how people perform a practice that makes philosophical accounts such as Schatzki’s,
at times, hard to transfer to empirical contexts.
Whereas the 2002 definition, described above, is his own usage (at least in the context of the questions addressed in
the book), Schatzki’s definition in The practice turn seems to represent an attempt to present a more consensual defini-
tion across the whole approach: ‘embodied, materially mediated arrays of human activity centrally organized around
shared practical understandings’ [2, p. 2]. There is less emphasis on open-endedness and evolution here, and greater

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stress is laid on embodiment and the material, a focus mirrored in other definitions. For example, the importance
of embodiment is reflected in definitions such as Reckwitz’s ‘the regular, skilful ‘‘performance’’ of (human) bodies’
[3, p. 251], or Postill’s description of practice theories as ‘a body of work about the work of the body’ [37, p. 11]. For
Postill, the body as a nexus of practices is the common ground across practice theorists. The turn to practice is away
from mental – especially cognitive – states, including rationally driven action, and towards a concern with bodily action,
skills and habits. Practices shape how we use our bodies, and in so doing how we have a role in defining our sense of
our own bodies – thus the theory’s concern with ‘the socialized, inscribed, trained, habituated, and conditioned sentient
human body’ [38, p. 13].
Also, by stressing the ‘materially mediated’ aspect of practice in his 2001 definition, Schatzki points to the impor-
tance of objects and artefacts in shaping and being shaped by human practices. This is less apparent in the 2002 defini-
tion as such, yet much of that book is concerned to puzzle out the difference between his position and that of actor
network theory, and its treatment of any object or organism as a potential actant. Schatzki places human action central
to his theory, because of the special quality he accords to human intentionality and planning. Nevertheless, the impor-
tance of the material world in shaping practice is apparent: ‘Practices are intrinsically connected to and interwoven with
objects’ [7, p. 106]. ‘Objects, tools and artifacts embody knowledge; they anchor practice in their materiality; they inter-
rogate humans and are extensions of their memory’ [26, p. 354]. Thus man-made and other objects’ uses or affordances
are central to concrete practices. They have a role in shaping practices, because of the way they prefigure what can be
done. Objects have their own force and ability to do things. While practices are spatially dispersed (Schatzki’s earlier
term, quoted above), they are also likely to be dispersed in regular ways, particularly in activity spaces. As processes
they are likely to have a particular spatio-temporal character.
In one of the chapters of The practice turn, Thevenot writes that the practice approach ‘contrasts sharply with the
model of rationally calculated action. ‘‘Practice’’ brings into view activities which are situated, corporeal, and shaped by
habits without reflection’ [39, p. 56]. Again, Swidler writes of practices as ‘routine activities (rather than consciously
chosen actions) notable for their unconscious, automatic, un-thought character’ [40, p. 74]. Reckwitz also stresses the
habitual, ‘routine’ nature of social practice [3]. He uses variations on the word ‘routine’ many times. Practices are ‘a
routinized way in which bodies are moved, objects are handled, subjects are treated, things are described and the world
is understood’ [3, p. 250]. Thus routine and habit are often important themes of the practice approach. How things
become routine, and the way that recurrent activities ironically become less visible through this process, are common
concerns. This implies a link to the mundane and ‘everyday’. This is a theme less apparent, however, in Schatzki’s defi-
nition [7], where he stresses that a practice can include unusual and infrequent activities and also new doings and say-
ings. Similarly, Shove and Pantzar stress the dynamic way that new recruits to a practice reinvent it [11].
Reckwitz defines practice as ‘a routinized type of behaviour which consists of several elements, interconnected to one
other (sic): forms of bodily activities, forms of mental activities, ‘‘things’’ and their use, a background knowledge in the
form of understanding, know-how, states of emotion and motivational knowledge’ [3, p. 249]. This summarizes many of
the key concerns of practice theorists, but there are tensions between the different flavours of practice theories, for exam-
ple in the relative stress on routine.

3.2. Knowing
Naturally, how the practice approach treats information and knowledge is of central importance for IS. The word ‘infor-
mation’ does not fit the vocabulary of practice theories well, and rarely appears. It is redolent of a notion of knowledge
as objective. Yet a practice is based on understanding or knowledge. Especially for Gherardi, a particular view of knowl-
edge or knowing is central to her practice theory. A conceptualization of knowledge as a possession, as cognitive struc-
tures, is superseded by a sense of ‘knowing [.] as an activity, as a collective and distributed ‘‘doing’’’ [27, p. 353].
Such knowing is not an object to be captured in mental schemes, or simply codified; rather it is a ‘practical and collective
activity, and it is acquired not only through thought, but also through the body and sensory and aesthetic’ means [27, p.
354]. The skilled body knows. The stress in the practice approach is typically on practical knowing how to get things
done: ‘shared embodied know how’ [2, p. 3]. Ways of knowing things are ‘largely implicit and largely historically–
culturally specific’ [3, p. 253]. Knowledge is embedded in routines and in objects, and is relative to a particular practice
and context. Indeed, since ways of desiring and feeling are partly coded into a practice, they are also seen as something
understood, a form of understanding or knowing. Gherardi describes knowing as ‘collective, situated and provisional’
[28, p. 535]. Since it is bound up in more or less coordinated activities of a number of individuals, and based in social
conventions, it is collective. Knowledge is salient only to a particular context of its use. Furthermore, it always has the
potential to be re-evaluated. In sum, knowing can be said to be ‘situated, negotiated, emergent and embedded’ [27, p.
357]. Such a conceptualization, developed by Gherardi and by others [e.g. 41], has been important to one strand of KM

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thinking. Recording, capturing or encoding such dynamic and transitory knowledge is likely to be partial at best. Given
the situated character of knowledge [25], sharing it across boundaries and communities is also highlighted as highly pro-
blematic [23].
The practice approach view of knowing can be further illustrated by returning to the example of family photography.
The meaning of family photography could be quite specific: for young mums in southern Britain around 2000 (the popu-
lation Rose studied [36]) it was about ‘doing togetherness’ through how photos were used, including where they were
placed about the house, or how a mother talked about the photos with her children. Looking through a photo album with
one’s children, as Rose’s interviewees all did, is an active process in which understanding of the relationships within the
family are defined. It is an active process of creating knowledge about the family, rather than a static process of reprodu-
cing some facts about family members. Rose found that specific ways of touching and handling photos were important
to the use of family photos. The photos are material, be it print (a glossy print in a beautiful album, or a dog-eared one in
a wallet) or digital form (file size, format for viewing). Thus our knowing can be seen as embodied and embedded in
material objects. The seemingly routine habit of looking at photos is highly significant. Family photographic practices
are also situated. The home is where our personal photos are displayed, in frames in the kitchen and bedroom (and per-
haps online), but they would not be put in other spaces such as the garage or the front door. Indeed, Rose shows that what
counts as domestic space is effectively produced by the practices involved in using snaps. But also time/space is con-
structed in a complex way by images and their use: for example, how the divide with absent family members or images
of the past are negotiated. Knowing in family photography is not fixed; rather, the meaning of photos is negotiated each
time an album is got out. A photograph’s interpretation as representing a happy moment can be renegotiated: someone
can claim that a person on the photo looks or was unhappy, or our whole response to the photo would change if the per-
son died. So our knowledge is provisional. Also, a family photo would be interpreted differently in the context of another
practice – if, say, it appeared in a newspaper or photo book. For example, we might simply see it as a bad photo in the
context of our collection of ‘arty’ photos. Knowing through the family album is collective, not only in the sense of it hap-
pening through an interactive process; but also because many of the conventions and expectations are widely understood
social norms. Thus knowing in family photography has material, embodied and routine aspects; it is situated, provisional
and social.

4. ‘Communities of practice: learning, meaning and identity’

How does community of practice writing fit into the practice approach as a whole? The title of Wenger’s book [15]
directly identifies the key themes his theory of practice brings to the table, namely community, learning, meaning and
identity. These are terms that have not been seen in the discussion so far: thus it is apparent that Wenger’s contribution is
distinctive. In many aspects this reflects the influence of Jean Lave. Talja has recently written of Lave’s practice theory
[32]. To fully explore the community of practice approach one might well start with Lave and Wenger’s earlier colla-
boration [13]; indeed many, though not all, commentators [21] privilege that earlier account of the community of prac-
tice concept. However, in this paper Wenger’s 1998 book is used, because the concept is developed in more detail there,
as well as for simple reasons of space. This paper is concerned with community of practice as a theoretical construct.
The increasing managerialist use of the term and its application to virtual community are outside our scope, although
worthwhile literatures in their own terms [19, 20].
The nearest Wenger comes to defining practice formally is when he writes that it is ‘doing, but not just doing in and
of itself. It is doing in a historical and social context that gives structure and meaning to what we do.’ [15, p. 47] This is
consistent with the practice approach in general, yet writing of ‘communities’ immediately focuses on the social group
that can form through common active participation in a practice. The use of the term ‘community’ has always been con-
troversial because of its indefinability and positive overtones [e.g. 17]. Wenger is at pains to emphasize that a commu-
nity of practice is not a consensus; rather there is a sense of ‘mutual accountability’. Yet when he writes of people in
one practice having a shared discourse reflecting a shared perspective [15, p. 125] he slips into simplification, ignoring
the multiple repertoires of thinking and talking current in most communities. But, in its favour, using the term ‘commu-
nity’ has drawn attention to the common ground and perspective that people who engage in a practice (sometimes?) have
– an idea that has appealed to many subsequent authors. For example, this is echoed in Gherardi’s interest in taste and
aesthetics of practice [28]. There is a recognition in practice writing that doing is not simply carrying through a task;
rather there is an awareness of ‘the intellectual, passionate, ethical and aesthetic attachment that ties subjects to objects,
technologies, the places of practices and other practitioners’ [28, p. 538]. Gherardi explores how a practice has a collec-
tive ‘taste’, a style of performance. This cannot be explained easily to newcomers, but is learned through experience,
and talked about through metaphor. Using examples from wine tasting and flute making, Gherardi explores the ‘emo-
tional way in which knowledge is transmitted through evocative, expressive modalities which recall a state of mind by

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assonance’ [28, p. 546]. Nevertheless, one could argue that the existence of such a taste or common sense of practice is
sustained at a wider level than a single practice, as implied by Wenger’s terminology – that it is across a bundle of prac-
tices. That is, it is what Bourdieu would have called the doxa of a field [37] – perhaps it should therefore be a ‘commu-
nity of practices’ (plural).
One of the strengths of the use of the term ‘community’ is that, by seeing a practice as a relatively bounded, even
self-conscious entity, Wenger can more clearly identify processes around peripherality, trajectories through a practice
and boundary spanning; concepts through which Wenger talks about the internal differentiation of practice (similar to
Warde’s labelling of them as ‘Internally differentiated’ [9, p. 138]). Schatzki describes practices as arrays, nexuses,
blocks or bundles. He also perhaps sees them as much more closely interwoven. Because they are conceived as less
neatly defined entities, processes like boundary work are less salient than in Wenger’s work.
In seeing the practice as a social group, much of Wenger’s terminology focuses on interaction with others, be it via
the shared practice. For example, one of the defining features of a community of practice for Wenger is ‘mutual engage-
ment’. He talks about the community as being ‘a very tight node of interrelationships’ [15, p. 76] (‘nexus’ would be
more correct). Schatzki is clear that practices are social, because they are made up of social conventions and understand-
ings, and they are the context in which we encounter others, though not only those with whom we directly interact [7, p.
87]. Reckwitz is also at pains to differentiate practice from interaction [3, p. 52]. Again, Wenger’s ‘joint enterprise’
appears to be like a common-willed end. In contrast, in practice theories more generally, one would see the ends as
being an attribute of the practice, rather than of the participants. In fact, Schatzki says teleo-affective structures are not
commonly willed ends [7, p. 81]. What is shared in a practice is a common understanding of how the ‘game’ works
rather than a shared purpose, necessarily, although that is a possibility. Perhaps one could see communities of practice
emerging in those specific cases where there is a strong sense of common purpose and interaction, but see that as a spe-
cial case. The task then becomes to identify factors that produce ‘community’ around a particular practice. This might
be factors increasing interaction, such as co-location or technological mediation; it might be because the practice is new
or undergoing profound change; it might also be where the practice is stigmatized, and so is turned inward by external
definition.
Where Wenger sees the community as co-creating the practice, many practice theorists would give priority to the
practice. For Osterlund and Carlile the view of practice as either reproductive of a historic practice or productive in an
open-ended way is a key dimension of difference among practice theorists [23]. The former view focuses on the way
that practice has its own history and trajectory [9]. Indeed, Shove and Pantzar write about the potential to see people as
‘the carriers of a practice’, and even of practices as potentially to be understood as ‘vampire-like entities capturing
populations of suitably committed practitioners in order to survive’ [11, p. 166]. This sees the participants more as
agents of a practice, and as reproducing something with its own life and logic. Thus Reckwitz sees the individual as a
‘carrier of patterns of bodily behaviour, but also of certain routinized ways of understanding, knowing how and desiring’
[3, p. 250]. However, Shove and Pantzar go on to bring out an alternative view that is much closer to Wenger (and
Schatzki) in recognizing that, in participating in a practice, it can be renegotiated or changed. Adoption of a practice in a
new context involves its reinvention. This points again to the divergence in concepts of practice – the difference of
understanding of the degree to which a practice is able to be reshaped, or whether it exists as an unreflected habit, even
a permanent disposition, as in Bourdieu’s notion of habitus. As we would expect, then, the stress on routinization, com-
mon in many practice theories, does not seem to be so present in Wenger, who shares with Schatzki a concern with
change and evolution. Gherardi, too, writes of the way that practice is ‘in-between habit and action’ [27, p. 355], and
terms such as bricolage, articulation and tinkering refer to the leeway built into routine to adjust to particular contingen-
cies. Any pattern is provisional and emergent; indeed Nicolini et al. stress that ‘uncertainty, conflict, incoherence’ are
central to the vocabulary of the practice approach [38, p. 23].
Wenger’s primary concern in his book is to understand learning in a new way: to see it not as occurring solely in the
classroom but as a pervasive feature of social life – continuous, informal, social and open-ended. Learning for him is
active participation ‘in the practices of social communities and constructing identities in relation to these communities’
[15, p. 4]. Much of the influence of the community of practice idea has been in challenging the paradigm of learning as
acquisition [42]. Ultimately his purpose is to puzzle out how to design for the subtle, organic process of learning.
Arguably, like the term ‘community’, ‘learning’ is also a warm, inherently positive one.
It is rather unusual in practice theories to stress learning. For Wenger, learning is identified with participation, with an
active sense close to Gherardi’s use of ‘knowing’. Wenger writes of communities of practice that they can be seen as
‘shared histories of learning’ [15, p. 86], and that they ‘come together, they develop, they evolve, they disperse, accord-
ing to the timing, the logic and rhythms, and the social energy of learning’ [15, p. 96]. Thus learning is construed as the
driving force of practice. In contrast, for example, Schatzki is not much concerned with how we learn practices, and the
carrying through of a practice, however improvised within somewhat open-ended conventions, is not seen as ‘learning’.

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As we have seen, much of the practice literature is concerned with routine, unconscious activities and habits, and it is
surprising and powerful to see the acting through of a practice as learning. Whereas many practice theories focus on the
body and embodied knowledge and skills, Wenger does not say very much about this. Certainly, the emphasis lends the
whole theory a very positive, warm sense, in the same way that Schatzki’s articulation of a practice theory is also warmly
humanistic.
A third major theme of Wenger’s book, as reflected in its title, is meaning and identity. Focusing here on his account
of identity, he argues that in learning and participating in a practice we negotiate an identity. This can be partly under-
stood from our trajectory through the practice, be it towards the centre or across the periphery. Because we participate in
many practices, we have the identity stresses and strains of multi-membership. Warde says similar things about trajec-
tories and multi-membership, but has a stronger sense of how the many variations in practice allow room for us to
articulate different identities. The work of Hodges [43] points to the importance of an experience of dis-identification
with a practice in the case where it embodies values that conflict with prior experience and identity, perhaps our more
permanent unconscious dispositions acquired in early practices, i.e. habitus [44]. Although it is not a particular focus in
Schatzki, there is common ground between the authors in terms of a sense of multiple identity. But, ultimately, Schatzki
places his own account of identity close to the subject position notions of Foucault, which implies that a practice offers
up subject positions into which people fit, rather than an active and creative process of negotiation.
In summary, Wenger seems to be positioned with more recent trends among practice theories that stress the active role
of human beings in continuously reinventing social practices, as learning. This view tends to downplay the routine, embo-
died aspects of practice, and the active way that material objects shape practice. He tends to see artefacts fixing (reifying)
practice. His concept of community of practice is a powerful articulation of the way that common practice can underlie a
strong sense of groupness and common perspective, at least under certain conditions.
For Hughes et al. the community of practice concept is ‘one of the most influential concepts to have emerged within
the social sciences during recent years’ [18, p. 1]. Also, for Gherardi, although it has been harshly criticized, the commu-
nity of practice concept has had an important impact in powering the turn to practice across a number of fields of writing
within organization studies. It has established key ideas: ‘the situatedness and sociality of practices; the central impor-
tance of practical know-how for work; the existence of collective identities; the importance of learning processes within
a community of practitioners’ [19, p. 267]. Nevertheless, she sees the community of practice idea as having served its
use; it is a passed fashion. Murillo [20] seems to confirm this downturn in interest from patterns in citation. Certainly the
community of practice concept is often understood shorn of its more radical theoretical implications, i.e. as an empirical
object, or even something to be actively created. Gherardi suggests that the phrase should now be reversed – the empha-
sis should move to practice and away from community [19]. Because this avoids the consensual overtones and stress on
direct interaction, and because it brings the focus back to areas of common ground with other writers, her argument is
persuasive.

5. Strengths and limits of the practice approach

A theory is useful or not useful. It will be more useful for one type of question than another. Gherardi has variously writ-
ten about a practice sensibility [38, p. 26], ‘viewpoint’ or a ‘field of interest’ [5]. She sees it as a successful ‘bandwagon’
(using that term in a technical sense) in terms of recruiting a body of work and a degree of institutionalization, but as yet
lacking a definitive definition [5]. Gherardi sees practice writing as unified by a turn away from something – specifi-
cally, a rational-cognitive view of knowledge. Interestingly, in making a turn in the same direction, media studies are
turning away from something rather different, i.e. a narrow focus on media texts and their immediate reception, and
towards the body and materiality. Although turning away from different things, the two fields are turning toward a new
common ground, which may be a fruitful area of interdisciplinary research. Yet because there is no one theorist to whom
one can turn for a definitive account of the practice approach, there is likely to be ongoing multivocality. Several authors
in Bräuchler and Postill’s collection [12] toy with the idea of practice as a paradigm; Postill himself rejects this idea,
and usefully opens up the question of where practice theories can say something new and where they perform less well
than existing theories [37]. Gherardi recognizes it as a perspective, but does less work on exploring the specific areas
where it can be most usefully applied, and on seeing it, as it were, from the outside.
Taking practice theories as a whole, the appeal of the approach lies in its sociological grasp of the context within
which social life unfolds, without turning that context into a totalizing structure, so allowing for individual action to
count, and also making room for change and contingency. The individual is a carrier of a practice, neither autonomous
nor a ‘dope’ of social culture. The practice vocabulary [38] conveys a sense of knowing as social, embodied, embedded
in routines and material objects and their arrangement, closely linked to purposes, feelings and taste, transitory and situ-
ated. This is a radical challenge to today’s common-sense assumptions about knowledge, based on rationalistic and

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cognitivist thinking. But it is in sympathy with postmodern and critical thinking, which has had a pervasive influence in
the social sciences. It has proved influential in the development of KM as a distinctive subdiscipline, because it clarifies
the problems arising from cruder attempts to codify or encode knowledge that have (it is claimed) marked technocratic
KM strategies. Knowledge is often embedded, transitory, local and owned by a particular group, not something that can
be unproblematically or apolitically ‘extracted’ or ‘encoded’ in a database [22].
Yet the practice approach has its specific issues. Schatzki’s book is illustrated primarily through examples taken from
the herbal medicine industry in Shaker villages in 19th-century America. The scale is appealingly human, but it is a
somewhat strange choice of example – a little atavistic. Presumably to counteract this impression, he does also take
some examples from a particularly modern practice, day trading on the Nasdaq. The Shaker choice in particular invites
the question whether it is easier and more applicable to use the practice approach to rather bounded social worlds. The
choice hints at limitations of the applicability of the theory to tackle a mass society. Similarly, the key examples devel-
oped by authors in the work edited by Nicolini et al. include hammering, flute making, roof tiling, and cooking in an
haute cuisine restaurant [4]. Wenger does refer to the work of insurance claims processors, but it has been argued that
the examples are not integrated to theory. All the examples reflect the influence of the ethnographic method, which pro-
duces rich accounts of the concrete, often invisible practices of work. Yet ethnography has only begun to develop meth-
ods that work or capture processes of cross-community knowledge sharing [23]. The justification for the examples that
practice writers seem to choose goes back to the familiar claim that attempts to manage knowledge in a rationalistic way
(capture and codify knowledge, ‘computerization’) are rather unsuccessful, because they are too reductive and dehuma-
nizing. But how much modern work does the characterization fit? It does seem to continue to have explanatory power
for a complex work of expert labour, such as the cooperative work of multiple professionals on a film set [45]. Skilled
professional and expert performance leverages tacit understandings and sensory experience to adjust to the contingencies
of a particular situation [33]. Some aspects of practice, such as bodily knowledge, may seem to be harder to illustrate
from modern office work, for example, but the shaping role of technologies seems highly relevant. However, all the
examples may mask the extent to which knowledge in many forms of work is able to be made explicit and be general-
ized; and it is possible this is of increasing importance. Practice writing typically exclusively talks about non-cognitive
forms of knowing, and less often about how abstract knowledge and local knowing are integrated.
One of the problems with applying practice theories is defining where one practice ends and another starts. For exam-
ple, Christensen and Ropke discuss problems at the empirical level marking the boundaries of a practice, since in the
modern world most practices are integrated with others. For example, the practice of shopping is dependent on transport
and banking systems etc. [46]. The concept of practice is somewhat elastic. Fuller identifies an issue of saying whether
the community of practice is a tight-knit group, or a much more hazy population loosely linked to practice. We can
choose between the two views, but they offer rather different perspectives [42].
Further, a common theme of chapters in Bräuchler and Postill’s collection [12] is that a practice can be understood
only in its context. A wider regulatory, infrastructural and institutional context shapes any practice [47]. The same prac-
tice can have a different meaning in a different country because of the different political/social/technological context
[10]. Yet, at an empirical level, it is quite hard to differentiate context and practice [46]. Similarly, Hughes [48] suggests
that one of the key failures of Lave and Wenger [13] is to deliver an analysis of the contexts of the practices they exam-
ine, despite stating the importance of doing so. Lave later herself acknowledged this error [49]. We can only understand
the relationships within the community by reference to wider social structures, such as capitalist economic relations or
patriarchal gender relations. Jewson, in the same volume [50], reiterates the point for Wenger [15]. This is a key aspect
of the authors’ failure to fully engage with the concept of power, a critique definitively developed by Contu and Willmott
[16].
The importance of understanding a practice in context can again be discussed through the example of family photogra-
phy. Normative beliefs about the family, and the relationships between the genders and between parents and children, are
effectively reproduced through family photography. The role of young mums in looking after the family albums obvi-
ously reproduces a highly gendered view of women as home makers. Such assumptions rest on and reproduce complex
economic and social structures. The practice approach brings out the active way this meaning is produced and potentially
contested. But it would be difficult to understand the practice without understanding this context. Indeed, Rose acknowl-
edges that a form of power is being exerted by mothers in how it is they who control use of the photos to define relation-
ships [36]. There is also a large (feminist) literature on the potentially repressive possibilities in how happy families are
constructed in the conventions of family photography [36, p. 8]. Thus it is essential to understand how practices relate to
other neighbouring practices, as well as the inside view.
Schatzki’s approach to context is the notion of a ‘site’: any practice is nested in a nexus of other practices and mate-
rial arrangements [7, 8]. This is his equivalent notion to Bourdieu’s concept of a field of practices (a specialist domain
with a set of practices with their own logic and common sense) [37], but there is a greater stress on contingency and

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open-endedness. ‘Practices and orders are not just contingently but also incompletely and precariously packaged into
bundles’ [7, p. 154]. The practice approach asks us to look at concrete mechanisms through which practices interconnect
or compete, but there is potential for getting lost in an infinite recession of wider practices. The question of how some
practices may shape or ‘anchor’ others [40] becomes acute. At the very abstract level Schatzki is dealing with, there is a
lack of specificity about how exactly practices interconnect. He comments that ‘I am sceptical that the mesh of practices
and orders is broken up into worlds exhibiting unified styles’ [7, p. 153]. There is a useful hint in his suggestion of the
importance of ‘chains of action that pass through’ nets of practice [8, p. 476]. Yet he does not take up Swidler’s call to
look at how some practices – even though they may seem quite episodic, because they define key, controversial social
entities in a very public way – can ‘anchor’ many other practices. Or we might think that certain commonly much
repeated, deeply inscribed social practices create pervasive assumptions that work against our good intentions and are
ascribed to liberal beliefs; here the notion of habitus remains useful. But this does imply the importance of investigating
how practices are themselves clustered and coordinated, and returns us to the thorny issue of conceptualizing power
within practice theories.

6. From ‘information behaviour’ to ‘information in social practice’

In many areas of IS, such as information behaviour, such problems of thinking about wider structures’ impact on a partic-
ular practice are less salient, because the field is not very sociological. Rather it is the anti-cognitivist stance of the prac-
tice approach that may feel more problematic for its application to IS research.
Whereas the practice approach has been influential in the development of knowledge management, practice theories
and even the concept of community of practice have not been much adopted in the ‘information behaviour’ literature
[51]. Davies suggests that part of the reason may be that the writing is ‘wordy’ and the ideas difficult to operationalize,
which has some truth [52]. Quite a lot of writing about practice has a poetic feel, because it is trying to talk about the
aesthetics and taste of a practice, and this can be conveyed only through metaphoric language and analogy [26]. This
does not sit well with the scientific aspirations of some IS or quantitative research methods. The underlying relational
thinking in practice theories means that the meaning of any entity can be understood only by relation to other entities, so
the meaning or value of an object cannot be directly measured [23].
An obstacle to the adoption of practice ideas is the way that the information behaviour area of study has taken as its
starting point individualistic notions such as information needs, and that these are so deeply ingrained into this approach
that it is hard to incorporate ideas with such fundamentally different assumptions. However much authors write about
the emotion associated with information seeking, non-linear information search paths or even serendipity, the implicit
norm is the individual rational actor actively pursuing a pre-given cognitive need. This reflects the subdiscipline’s reli-
ance on theory from psychology, rather than from sociology or anthropology. The notion of an individual with pre-given
information need might be justly regarded as a foundational assumption, which will be influential so long as it is effec-
tive at generating new understanding of certain types of problem. It is especially effective in the context of the use of
closed systems, where indeed there is a designed, correct way to do things.
Yet it may also be perceived to be a persuasive perspective precisely because the effect is to imply a correct, expert
way to do things, such as searching for information, effectively empowering professionals in their role in directing users’
actions. The logic of practice theories is that what is information is specific to a practice. The information profession, as
custodians of the book – i.e. codified, cognitive knowledge – has a vested interest and symbolic place in an epistemic
order that privileges certain types of knowledge and learning over others, i.e. cognitive over embodied [35]. Perhaps this
underlies the failure of IS to adopt ideas, especially critical theories, from outside [34].
Yet there have been some writers who have begun to rethink the information behaviour field in practice terms. Of
these, Savolainen has been the most prominent. His Everyday Life Information Seeking (ELIS) model drew heavily on
an early practice theory, Bourdieu’s notion of habitus [29]. As we have noted, Bourdieu’s concept may seem a little rigid,
although it does continue to have resonance. More recently, Savolainen has begun to explore the concept of ‘information
practice’, especially in his book Everyday information practices: a social phenomenological perspective [31]. Here he
draws on the social phenomenology of Schutz and also Schatzki in an attempt to produce a ‘more sociologically and con-
textually oriented’ [31, p. 4] model of information activities. The focus on practice aspires to escape from seeing informa-
tion activities as governed by individuals’ information needs, and focus instead on active information seeking to solve a
problem, and it acknowledges its social nature. He expands the focus from information seeking to encompass information
use and sharing. Thus his core concept, information practice, ‘may be understood as a set of socially and culturally estab-
lished ways to identify, seek, use, and share the information available in various sources such as television, newspapers,
and the internet’ [31, p. 2]. They occur in work and non-work contexts. The approach is especially valuable in its under-
standing of how our desire for routine makes us rather conservative in our information use. His continuing focus on

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non-work, especially mundane activities, is a valuable counterbalance to the great mass of information research, and its
focus on work contexts. Yet he has not really escaped the information-seeking paradigm [53]. His chosen empirical data
are heavily weighted towards information seeking as a discrete activity. His heavy referencing of Schutz’s idea of a proj-
ect reintroduces purposive action into the model. At least within Reckwitz’s classification, Schutz’s work is a form of
‘mentalist’ cultural theory, giving primacy to mental structures, and one to be conceptually differentiated from practice
theories, with their focus on concrete practices.
A more successful attempt to adopt a practice approach is in the recent work on information literacy (IL) by Lloyd
[33–35]. Lloyd builds on the insight of Touminen et al. [54] that since competence is negotiated and defined within spe-
cific practices, what constitutes literacy, including information literacy, must be situated, specific to a particular practice.
So her chief concern is to show that the nature of IL depends on the context: thus IL for practising ambulance officers is
quite different from conceptions generalized from the context of formal learning. In particular, embodied knowledge is
very important to the use of information within the skilled performance of the practitioner, whereas critical understand-
ing of texts, so important in the educational context, is less important [33]. Lloyd convincingly points to the neglect in
information literacy of corporeal information – that which is ‘experienced through the situated and sensory body as it
interacts with material objects, artefacts and other people that inhabit the same landscape’ [35]. Further, she begins to
explore how in the body that cognitive knowledge and know-how are integrated. A number of other authors have also
contributed to our understanding of how to apply practice theories to information questions. Veinot is particularly useful
for her exploration of the nature of rules in social practice, as indeterminate and requiring much judgement in their appli-
cation (specifically using the example of the blue-collar work of vault inspection) [55]. Haider explores the disconnect
between general information that people have (on environmentalism) and the daily practices and material objects (a
recycling bin, for example) in which people’s understandings of the issue are embodied [56]. McKenzie’s work is also
an important reference point in terms of deconstructing purposive information seeking, and thinking about the relation
between practice and discourse [e.g. 57]. Some of those with an interest in scholarly information practices explicitly use
practice theory [e.g. 58].
Savolainen [30, 31] has initiated a debate about whether ‘information practice’ might not be a better umbrella term
than ‘information behaviour’. Like Postill, he observes that the term ‘practice’ often crept into the language of scholars
without always very specific intent, so risking losing its critical edge [26]. Yet the phrase ‘information practice’ continues
to imply a focus on activities that are primarily about information. There may be value in a more radical approach. Hartel
has brilliantly demonstrated how information use, seeking and creation are woven through an activity – gourmet cooking
– without being its focus (which is preparing beautiful-to-look-at and tasty food) [59]. It could be suggested, therefore,
that the concept of ‘information in social practice’ would be a better term. All social practices involve information use,
creation and seeking, but this does not make them information practices, because only a few practices are specifically
information oriented. As Lee and Trace show, for example, rubber-duck collecting has much ‘knowledge interest’ (e.g.
about sources of collectibles, or about other collectors), but finding information is not the main purpose; it is a means to
an end [60]. Savolainen says much the same: ‘people seldom think of collecting, processing or using information as
something separate from the task or problem at hand’ [31, p. 3]. Those practices that are information centred may be par-
ticularly interesting to us as information scientists. But information activities are woven through all social practices, and
this is even more evident today through ubiquitous access to information resources through the internet. Thus we need to
look at the information aspect of all social practices. Escaping a narrow preoccupation with goal-oriented information
seeking, we need to first ask within any practice what, for social actors, constitutes information, and then how do they
find, use, create and share it.
The approach can be again illustrated from family photography. We often say that family photography does ‘docu-
ment’ our lives – recording what people and things, such as a house or pet, looked like; who was present at certain
events; or where the family went on holiday. There has been a long debate in photography theory about the ‘indexicality’
of photos – the idea that they have a direct relation to reality, as well as iconically looking like real things. We know
from notorious cases of manipulation in the media that photos are not objective records, yet we may feel that some
photographs have some sort of privileged relation to reality, especially with our family photos. So a specific set of beliefs
about the nature of information in photos may exist, relatively specific to that practice [36]. Although the information
the photos contain is important to their use, one would hesitate to see family photography as an ‘information practice’. It
is clearly more to do with building togetherness than with seeking or sharing information. Even less so hobby photogra-
phy, where the end product is not documentation but aesthetic. Yet we do seek and manage information in hobbyist
photography: for example, we search for information about new cameras, or tag our photos to retrieve them more easily.
Therefore it would seem more expressive to think about the role of information in a social practice. How the photo is
used as information (whether it is understood using that term, and its nature as information) is highly coloured by the
specific practice.

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7. Conclusion
This paper has drawn on philosophical developments among practice theories, as well as new applications of them in
consumption and media studies, and particularly in organization studies, to build up a picture of the practice approach,
and the differences of emphasis within it. The influence of practice theories in other areas related to IS, such as educa-
tional research and STS, invites further exploration. Wenger’s work [15] has then been positioned within this literature,
in order to help more clearly understand both his ideas and the practice approach as a whole. Examining this relatively
familiar version of the theory in depth has helped us think about the strengths and limits of the applicability of practice
theories to different areas of information science.
Thus there is no question of the value of the community of practice concept. It has effectively defined the practice
approach in information science for a number of years. Yet it has been a hard term to use, perhaps because it cuts against
familiar ways of thinking, such as individualism, but also because of contradictions between the connotations of the word
‘community’ and the role it is intended to play in the theory. Placing it within a wider practice approach does help to
clarify what aspects of its potential this version of the theory has tended to bring to the fore: continuous reinvention of
practice as learning; communal possibilities in practice and practice-as-a-perspective; the implications for identity of tra-
jectories of participation and multi-membership. In this version there is less concern with tacit knowledge, although that
has been a major topic in KM. The debate around communities of practice has drawn out some general problems with
the approach, such as its treatment of context and power. Given an awareness of these problems, moving to use the ter-
minology of practice is helpful. One area of IS, knowledge management, has already been heavily influenced by practice
theories; another, information behaviour, less so. But there are an increasing number of writers in the information domain
who reference practice theories. It may be that under the banner of practice, and with the attraction of offering common
ground with other social scientists, the influence of the practice approach will further increase. It may be more useful to
think in terms of information in social practice, rather than focus purely on information practices, since information is a
feature of almost all activities, but is rarely the centre of social actors’ attention.
As a concluding thought, one may reflect that the practice approach, with its concern with how knowledge is pro-
duced, would itself invite us to query why there has been a turn to practice theories now. What intellectual currents have
produced it? But also, how have changes in the institutions that produce knowledge (universities, disciplines) shaped its
development? (Is it perhaps linked to a growing concern with demonstrating ‘impact’ to funders?) Then, more generally,
how have wider social changes had a role in shaping its articulation? [61] For example, why does Bourdieu’s flavour of
practice theory, with its sense of constraint and ingrained, unreflected habit, seem less plausible today, whereas accounts
proliferate focusing on the way that ‘practices tend not to line up neatly. They exhibit sprawl, mutual contradiction, often
unplanned originality, undecidability [.]’ [62, p. 69]. Gherardi suggests that this is linked to the nature of the economy,
since management styles have turned to favour distributed leadership, networks for control, allowing a degree of individ-
ual autonomy and creativity [27]. If so, one could see it as a privileged perspective, in that in contexts of strong institu-
tional control or bureaucracy, or where poverty constrains action, it might that be older versions retain their plausibility.
Different flavours of practice approach reflect different problem spaces, and also respond to reflect social change. These
are interesting questions, beyond the scope of this paper to develop fully, yet this reflection does remind us that practice
theories are likely to continue to evolve. Connecting IS to this evolving debate is important to understanding it as a social
science.

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