Practice as collective action

Abstract

References to shared practices or to agreement in practice have long figured in the discourse of sociologists, but in recent years they have taken on an enhanced importance. Social systems have been characterized as ongoing, self-reproducing arrays of shared practices, and structured dispositions to generate such practices have been made central to the understanding of social and cultural phenomena of every kind. In extreme extensions of approaches of this kind, it may even be argued that as far as the sociologist is concerned practice is all there is to study and describe. An unkind account of this development might regard ‘practice’ as part of the debris produced by the disintegration of Marxism, a concept carried by refugee theorists who have found new homes in various ‘post-Marxist’ forms of sociology and social theory. But a much kinder account of the basis of the current interest in practice can be given, and should indeed be accepted. Accounts of societies as practices may be regarded as attempts to remedy the technical deficiencies of the idealist forms of theory that hitherto were dominant in this context.

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