Practice-focused ethnographies of Higher Education: Method/ological corollaries of a social practice...

P.Trowler European Journal of Higher Education

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PRACTICE-FOCUSED ETHNOGRAPHIES OF HIGHER EDUCATION: METHOD/OLOGICAL COROLLARIES OF A SOCIAL PRACTICE

PERSPECTIVE. Paul Trowler1, Department of Educational Research, Lancaster University, UK.

Keywords: praxiography; praxiology; ethnography; social practice theory; method/ology

Abstract Social practice theory addresses both theoretical and method/ological agendas. To date

priority has been given to the former, with writing on the latter tending often to be an

afterthought to theoretical expositions or fieldwork accounts. This paper gives sustained

attention to the method/ological corollaries of a social practice perspective. It both

describes method/ological approaches that have already been deployed and makes some

suggestions for a fully practice-focused ethnographic research style.

Introduction

There is a well-developed understanding of social practicei theory (sometimes referred to as

‘praxiology’ or ‘praxeology’) but only a partially developed approach to deploying it in

ethnographic-style research into higher education. Such a method/ologicalii approach has

been called “praxiography” (Mol 2003). Though that word is not much used, there is a small

body of literature in which it is applied at least partially and a much larger body explicating

practice theory from which method/ological implications can be deduced. What both

traditions suggest is, in summary, a particular ‘take’ on ethnography which sees the world in

a specific way, one which renders accounts with a different focus from ‘traditional’

ethnographies, and one which has clarity about how and why interventions for change are,

and are not, successful; something often missing from other forms of ethnographic study

(Finch 1988).

Situating the method/ological approach which is the focus of this paper as ‘ethnographic’

requires a definition of that term. This is not a straightforward task because ‘ethnography’ is

not a single entity with clear, agreed, characteristics: it a highly contested term. As Atkinson,

Coffey and Delamont (2011, 27) point out, there never was "a traditional, hegemonic

ethnographic order"; it never was a stable entity and so it cannot be unproblematically

defined. Despite the attempt by Lincoln and Denzin (1994) to depict a series of stages of

development, there is no clear chronology of method/ological tradition either (though of

course there is a variety of ‘flavours’: realist, interpretive, critical and so on (Cunliffe 2010).

1 Email: [email protected]


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Acknowledging this, I offer a definition of practice-focused ethnography specifically. That

flavour involves:

fine-grained, usually immersive, multi-method research into particular social activities

aimed at developing ‘thick description’ (Geertz, 1983) of the structured behavioural

dispositions, social relations, sets of discourses, ways of thinking, procedures,

emotional responses and motivations in play. Beyond that descriptive agenda the

approach seeks to uncover broader reservoirs of ways of thinking and practising which

are being differently instantiated locally.

Ethnography has a long and distinguished history, beginning in anthropology and working

outwards to other disciplines. It has by now a long tradition in the study of education,

primarly in the school sector (Pole and Morrison 2003). My main focus is on ethnography as

applied to higher education, though I do stray beyond that.

Filling the ontological vacuum in ethnography

In his well known book What’s Wrong With Ethnography Hammersley (1992) suggested that

ethnographers were caught in a bind between relativism and realism, being forced to

choose between one pole and another, or even worse, adopting a confused and vacillating

position. His task as he saw it was to elaborate the ontological and epistemological basis,

currently rather shaky, upon which ethnography rested. In addition he wanted to clarify its

“incoherent conception of its own goals” (Hammersley 1992, 11) and to improve upon the

confused and inadequate (as he saw it) relationship between data and theory development

in ethnography. Hammersley claimed to be offering a way out of this, developing an

ontological and epistemological position which he called "subtle realism" and which could

be applied to improve ethnography and ethnographies.

Banfield (2004) however critiques this solution:

All Hammersley’s subtlety offers is ambiguity with endless possibilities for the

epistemological shopper who is free to select abstractions and generate explanations

of the social world to fit fashionable or practical purposes. (Banfield 2003, 57).

Banfield appears to be right; Hammersley’s efforts have not taken ethnography much

further forward. In terms of the relationship between theory and the ethnographic data

generated, the approach is still in the situation described in 2011 by Van Maanen:

...there is, I submit, a good deal of social theory - indeed a brain-numbing amount -

well advanced in the social sciences on which to draw. We read, listen, converse with

others, ruminate about different but attractive concepts and theories, try them out,

judge them in accordance to what is currently going on in our respective fields, and

then attempt to put them to use in the context of the work we are doing. This usually

requires tinkering with them ever so slightly to make for an arguable fit between

theory and data. Some work for us, some don't, and we move on. In practice, theory


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choices (the rabbits we pull out of our hats) rest as much on taste as on fit. (Van

Maanen 2011, 223).

Instead of Hammersley’s solution, Banfield recommends the adoption of a Marxist inspired

critical ethnography, underpinned by a critical realism, as elaborated by Bhaskar’s work

(1989).

Whatever the merits of Banfield's critique, and of his suggested alternative position, he and

Hammersley are certainly right that ethnographers do face epistemological and ontological

challenges. These have so far met with a rather jumbled set of responses. Hillyard (2012, 13)

argues that ethnography "has been caught dozing in its ontological comfort zone whilst

important (and potentially damaging) debates have taken place". Like many others

(including Schatzki 2012), Banfield does not develop his position to offer detailed guidance

to ethnographers beyond a few very general statements of implications for method/ological

practice (2003, 62). Both Hammersley and Hillyard resist the call for a ‘new’ ethnography for

the 21st-century, but Hillyard does suggest that we need to develop an "inclusive

ethnography"; one which looks to theoretical and method/ological innovation and new

technologies for data collection perhaps borrowed from other areas in social science. Again,

we are offered few details.

Social Practice Theory (Praxiology)

As already noted, in addition to Hammersley’s subtle realism there are other candidates for

undergirding ethnography with a social theory which will give it robust explanatory power

and stable ontological and epistemological roots. Marxism has been a front runner in that

contest for some time (Banfield 2003; Beach 2012), but here I want to explore the

method/ological implications of social practice foundations to ethnographic enquiry. For me

a practice approach (some versions of which are compatible with some interpretations of

Marxism) is particularly congruent because both that approach and ethnography are best

applied at the meso level: at the level of relatively small groups engaged in their everyday

activities. A praxiographic approach emphasises contextual contingency, and this privileges

close up, in-depth, case study-based research designs of the ethnographic sort. As

Miettinen, Samya-Fredericks and Yanow (2009, 1312) say, social practice theory is

“ethnographic in its sensibility”

I will not engage here in a full exposition of social practice theory; that has been done

extensively and well elsewhere (for example by Reckwitz 2002, 2012; Turner, 1994; Schatzki

2002, 2012). I will simply outline some of its key features.

A practice perspective re-centres and re-focuses our attention away from the individual

actor on the one hand and impersonal social structures on the other, focusing instead on

situated practices which are extra-individual in a number of senses. One sense is that a

practice is an organised constellation of different people’s activities: it is a social

phenomenon (Schatzki 2012). Another is that the co-constitution of meaning is occurring, as


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is the enactment of mutually constructed (but circumscribed) realities. A third is that

practice is always relational, involving patterned forms of social interaction (Kemmis 2009).

Reckwitz’s definition of a practice has almost achieved the distinction of becoming the

standard one, though taken alone it omits the social, relational, character of practice:

a routinized type of behaviour which consists of several elements, interconnected to

one other: 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. (Reckwitz 2002, 249).

For the people performing complex practices it is difficult to express these in words, partly

because those practices are usually normalised, invisible to them, partly because they are

embodied, involving emotions and assumptions as well as behaviour, and partly because

they feature characteristics that are inexpressible. These deploy what Giddens (1984) calls

“practical consciousness”, simply knowing how to ‘go on’ in daily life without conscious

attention to how the performance is done. The latter involves acquiring and deploying a set

of dispositions, perceptions and actions which give people who are immersed in them a ‘feel

for the game’, an intuitive understanding of what is ‘right’: what Bourdieu calls “habitus”.

Individuals develop a “practical sense” which they deploy through the “practical skills” they

acquire (Bourdieu, 1990).

A practice perspective attends to the role of artefacts in practice performance, to material

mediation and particularly to mutual inscription operating between artefacts and humans.

The accomplishment of social practice always involves artefacts of one form or another, the

engagement of materiality, and there is a mutual entanglement of artefact use and practice

accomplishment. As artefacts change, so do practices, but practices are also inscribed on

artefact useiii.

Nowadays in media-rich contexts this extends into much greater attention being given to

the significance of virtual worlds and their permeability with the physical world. Artefacts

and practices are mutually permeable, and so are the virtual and physical words. This makes

attempting to draw boundaries a priori into an artificial and essentially fruitless task.

Practice theory stresses the situatedness of knowing, saying, doing and relating.

Understanding and explaining the social world, and the manyfoldedness of objects within it

becomes a fundamentally complex task, and one which has limits because of the situated

nature of cognition and of practices: what is known and practised in one context does not

apply in another. Achieving transfer between social contexts is not a simple enterprise.

Moreover, practices are always emergent; there is a historicity to them so that the past,

present and future are all evident at any one time, and this too is situated (Boud 2012).

So social practice theory looks at the social world as ensembles of practices; regular sets of

behaviours, ways of understanding and know-how and states of emotion that are enacted


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by groups configured to achieve specific outcomes through their activities. These are

reproduced and to some extent transformed by social agents, but the social realism of

practice theory generally stems from an insistence that there is more to social reality than a

relativist social constructionism; that social structures exist and have significant effects on

practices, even though social agents may not be aware of them or their power. Practices

always have a material dimension, and one which periodically involves an uneven struggle

for control of resources, power and discursive and knowledge practices. The work of Archer

(1995), Bourdieu (1990), Giddens (1984), Schatzki (2002), Warde (2005) and others

illustrates this to a greater or lesser extent.

Both consensus and dispute (or at least unspoken difference) characterise these different

dimensions of motivation, emotion, understanding, knowledge and appropriate bodily

practices in most contexts. Yet as Archer (2007) points out, there is a usually a common set

of contextual concerns which shapes agendas and priorities for everyone involved in mutual

activity.

The implications of practice theory for change initiatives are quite profound. A practice

perspective involves a shift away from the ‘ABC’ theory of change (Shove, Pantzar and

Watson 2012), from a concentration on individual Attitudes, Behaviours and Choices,

towards the enactment of practices. In one sense each enactment is unique: while people

draw on and enact practice reservoirs (learned and commonly understood and deployed

practices) practice theory also recognises individual and group repertoires (Bernstein 1999):

specific ways of accomplishing different types of practice that are particular to the

individuals involved. The background knowledge and motivating characteristics of each

person in the social field are significant in determining specific outcomes and levels of

success of an innovation, as are the resources to hand, the affordances available (Barnes

2001; Shove, Pantzar and Watson 2012). These unique ‘murmurings of the everyday’ (De

Certeau 1984) are very significant, and are one reason why practice theory stresses the

significance of context for social science analysis.

Because of this the analytical distinction between ‘practice-as-entity’ (the reservoir of

understood practices) and ‘practice-as-performance’ (their situated instantiation in the

social world) is important: practice-as-performance always involves a unique configuration

of know-how, resources, affordances and purposes. But practice-as-entity offers a template

within which this reconfiguration is accomplished, and has much greater longevity than any

particular configuration. To develop an effective theory of change it is necessary to move

beyond ethnographies of situated practice, such as those produced in actor network theory,

and to show how practice-as-entity changes, not only differences in, or the ability to re-

shape particular instances of practice-as-performance. While Warde (2005, 140) rightly

argues that “the source of changed behaviour lies in the development of practices”, the

word "practices" should be understood to mean practices-as-entities. Changing local,

temporary performances represents an achievement, but one that is unlikely to last or to


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spread. Change-oriented praxiography focuses on reservoirs of practice that lie behind local

examples of performance.

Method/ological Corollaries: A Practice-Focused Ethnography

Ontological and epistemological issues

Probably the best known ethnographic application of social practice theory is Mol’s The

Body Multiple. Mol’s main interest is not method/ological; it is primarily concerned with the

account of the illness as well as issues of ontology and epistemology. Those latter issues are

very important: they have method/ological corollaries of significance.

The first corollary concerns the nature of the ‘objects’ of research. If the objects of practice

are constituted by arrays of behaviours, artefacts, knowledge resources, and meanings that

are configured to accomplish to accomplish performances, then research processes need to

be open to multiple understandings of what those objects ‘are’. Mol’s extended case of

arthrosclerosis shows the multiple nature of that object, while at the same time recognising

connections throughout that multiplicity:

The atherosclerosis enacted in the outpatient clinic contrasts with the thick vessel wall

that can be observed through a microscope. But the outpatient clinic is no natural

unit. It forms a unity in contrast to pathology. When it is approached a little more

closely, the clinic appears to be full of contrasts that, in their turn, may be singled out

for further investigation.(2003, 50-51)... [But] the manyfoldedness of objects enacted

does not imply their fragmentation. Although atherosclerosis in the hospital comes in

different versions, these somehow hang together. (2003, 84)

Mol (2003, 157) says that in studying disease, for example, a praxiographic approach

“encompasses molecules and money, cells and worries, bodies, knives, and smiles, and talks

about all of these in a single breath." Elsewhere (Trowler 2013) I have shown how academic

disciplines are similarly situated in their character, enacted differently in different contexts

yet still recognisable to the observer as somehow ‘the same’ even across multiple

manifestations. I will not rehearse that argument here, but point instead to the implications

for praxiography of taking a view of individual disciplines, like other objects, as multiple.

Such a view means that research can pick out the factors at play in conditioning the

enactment of discipline in one site, and offer conceptual clarity about the kinds of factors

that are significant, what others could be in other circumstances, and why. Such research

can offer findings which are illuminative in nature and so allow improved conceptualisation

of the factors at work in other contexts. In more developmental research designs the claim

to significance may lie in the implications for practices from that which can be drawn out,

policies, structures and processes in the site of the research.

A second ontological and epistemological corollary relates to the stress on emergence

within social practice theory. This holds that current practices in any locale are permeated


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with the legacy of past practices and hold within them the seeds of future practices so that,

for example, any change initiative might bring about a different social reality, but it will be

one heavily influenced by current social practices. The significance of this lies in the issues

around synchrony and diachrony discussed by Archer (2010). She argues that it is not

enough to have a synchronic focus which sees the interplay of enacted and constructed

practices. Rather the researcher needs to be alert to and seek to understand the relations

and the elaboration of structures over time.

Bourdieu (1977, 73-4) critiques Satre for not recognising durable dispositions. The same is

true of some ethnographies:

Satre makes each action a sort of unprecedented confrontation between the subject

and the world... If the world of action is nothing other than this universe of

interchangeable possibles, entirely dependent on the decrees of the consciousness

which created and hence totally devoid of objectivity, if it is moving because the

subject chooses to be moved, revolting because [s]he chooses to be revolted, then

emotions, passions and actions are merely games of bad faith, sad farces in which one

is both bad actor and good audience.

So an emphasis on uncovering the changing nature of practices-as-entities through their

articulation in local performances is important in praxiography. This involves the researcher

in beyond immediate manifestations for durable dispositions, for the “rules and resources”,

as Giddens calls them, which operate more broadly. Ideologies and discursive dispositions

associated with neo liberalism and managerialism are examples, but they are often found in

mixes with the legacy of older rules and different resources.

A diachronic perspective is, arguably, particularly important and especially visible in

university life where annual patterns tend to be repeated but never in exactly the same

wayiv. It gives access to practice-as-entity, to the templates behind performances. The

‘academic year’ is a rather special beast and offers interesting research possibilities for the

practice-focused ethnographic researcher. Seeing how practices in different social contexts

(committees, lab teaching, seminars, the lecture theatre, the laboratory, the private study)

change, and how those changes are related to the elaboration of structure, offers much for

the researcher into higher education. Methods used can of course involve historical

research, secondary data and the rest as well as the better known array of ethnographic

methods including the best-known; participant observation. In terms of the significance for

change efforts, such research can show how attempts to change things will be scaffolded or

obstructed differently in different temporal locations.

Research design

Moving now to the corollaries for the research design of practice-focused ethnographies,

one of the difficulties ethnographers face – particularly insider researchers (Trowler 2012) –

is how to make ‘the normal strange’, and then to “reconstruct background knowledge”


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(Bueger 2011, 6). As Garfinkel (1967, 37) says "for…background expectancies to come into

view one must either be a stranger to the ‘life as usual’ character of everyday scenes, or

become estranged from them.” Involving outsider discussants in insider ethnographies can

help with this - an outsider can observe the situation and respond to the insider's

perceptions of it, helping to mitigate some of the disadvantages of insider research, offering

a different perspective on the social situation. Likewise, privileging newcomers to the

cultural scene means that the fresh eyes of a cultural neophyte can offer valuable insights

into contextual characteristics. A further possibility is giving particular attention to situations

in which those researched can see how people like them in other contexts do things, thus

rendering their own practices no longer taken for granted. An illustration is my study of a

newly merged institution in South Africa in which same-discipline departments from very

different pre-merger institutional contexts were forced to compare and negotiate (Trowler

2008).

Focusing on particularly contentious issues can be particularly valuable for exposing cultural

characteristics which are otherwise invisible. Complaints to universities can offer insights

into practices within departments. Another approach is to move outside the workgroup of

interest altogether and gather data from other sources who are familiar with the workgroup

but not strictly part of it. For example, in researching academic practices of various sorts,

administrators in a department are a particularly valuable (but often overlooked) resource.

Not themselves involved in teaching and learning, research and other academic practices,

they are nonetheless party to a variety of kinds of information about academic practices in

the department. Those in university learning support centres over the years gather a

considerable amount of information from their "clients" about departmental practices and

the differences across the university in terms of teaching, learning and assessment. Finally

students themselves who are studying across two or more departments (for example those

on combined degree schemes) gain valuable insights because of the variety of their

experience. The same is true of ex-students who, from the vantage point of their new

context, are able to look with fresh eyes on their learning experience and the practices and

attitudes that contributed to it. Naturally, who is the ‘insider’ and who the ‘outsider’

depends on the focus of the research. The general point is that, like institutional

ethnographies, practice-focused ethnographies move beyond the immediate practices they

are researching in order to research them.

Because of its focus on the materially-mediated nature of social life, a practice-focused

ethnography also attends to the interplay between the virtual and the physical worlds in its

research design, at least in media-rich contexts (as higher education institutions tend to be).

Though she has a quite unusual understanding of what ‘real’ ethnography isv, Hine (2000)

offers useful pointers to how this is accomplished. She makes illuminative distinctions

between ‘anthropological’ ethnographies and virtual ones, with the characteristics of the

former also applying to praxiography. She notes that the virtual dimension of ethnographic

work does not require the sustained immersion of the researcher in the field; he or she can


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dip in and out of the virtual world at will. Indeed, the very concept of ‘the field site’

becomes irrelevant, because such ethnographies are not geographically bounded, and as

noted above need anyway to move beyond just one locale. The focus of attention becomes

the network, connectivity and the nature of engagement. However, boundaries and

distinctions are important insofar as they are significant for actors, especially in terms of the

boundaries between the virtual and the ‘real’. The permeability of each, and the flow from

one to the other is of crucial importance in this area of research, but this can only be

accessed via the actors and cannot be assumed a priori.

Data collection and analysis

Moving now to corollaries around data collection and analysis, a practice-focused

ethnography offers multiple possibilities. Few of them are new, rather they represent a new

take on established approaches – new bottles for some vintage wine. They build on

traditional ethnographic methods which continue to be of value, most obviously participant

observation and other way of enabling observation of practices such as the use of video.

The new bottles are created by the re-centring and refocusing of both the research design

and the viewpoint adopted which result from the practice turn.

Schatzki (2012) talks about what one might think are obvious methods in praxiography: oral

history, ethnography, discourse analysis. But he also suggests the use of statistics which, he

says “provide overviews of the quantifiable features of large classes of phenomena and

thereby contribute to the attainment of overviews of social affairs.” (26). However he

cautions about how they may be misused and about how far they can be taken, concluding

that they are "ultimately useful only in conjunction with some combination of ethnography,

oral history, history and theory." (26). Hutchings and Jarvis argue that a practice perspective

favours particular approaches to research narratively connected and particularised

through ethnography, case studies, participatory, emancipatory, and action research...

It starts with acknowledging the situational repertoire for understanding action

embedded in a whole background of character and experience and embedded social

processes; described as "practice architectures" by Kemmis (2009). It combines thick

description, hermeneutic discourses and notions of judgement and practitioner

expertise with methods of investigation they give due weight to the social contexts

and voices of practitioners, students and clients, as co-creators of knowledge.

(Hutchings and Jarvis 2012, 183).

Elsewhere (Trowler 2008) I have argued that a practice approach lends itself to the use of

hybrid methods, that is data collection and analysis techniques that combine two or more

approaches. Done well, hybrid techniques can get beyond the merely-palpable and uncover

the taken-for-granted. So, card-sorting techniques together with semantic or syntactic

methods can uncover hidden distinctions, meanings, associations. Cluster analysis or

multidimensional scaling can be used where quantitative (syntactic) approaches are used,

and software is available for this kind of analysis.


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Projective techniques can be used as well as or instead of card-sorting exercises. These

involve asking respondents to imagine themselves in issues of another person, or to imagine

alternative situations in which they might project their responses. Such techniques can also

access taken-for-granted knowledge.

A further example of hybrid methods is image-based data-gathering combined with in-depth

interviewing. Drawings of the way things might be working are produced by the researcher

for comment by respondents, as happens in Soft Systems Methodology (Checkland and

Scholes 1999). Photographs might be used in similar ways, to elicit a reaction. Alternatively

respondents may be asked to create sociograms, to depict their own social situation

graphically, or to comment on such drawings produced by others in their social situation.

Subsequent in-depth interviews allow the researcher to indirectly come at the meanings

and understandings captured in images or the interpretation of them, and to access those

meanings which might be only tacit for the respondents.

Projective techniques, as noted above can be very useful in uncovering differences in

perspective, competing positions and areas of tension. As well as combining them with

card-sorting exercises, other possible combinations include personal narratives, for example

asking the respondent to relate their own role in a critical incident that occurred in the

context of interest, as done by Entwistle and Walker (2000). Another possibility is the use of

specially-created vignettes as a catalyst for discussing the respondent’s reaction.

Practice-focused ethnographers may choose to use oblique questions in combination with

discourse analysis techniques. Oblique questions approach the issue of interest in an

indirect way, and the analysis is also inferential rather than direct. Thus, for example, one

might ask the respondent to describe the most professional academic they have ever met,

or to answer the question "was there ever a golden age in higher education?" The

responses to such questions can provide insights into notions of professionalism or their

idea of what constitutes preferred practices and situations. Combining this with discourse

analysis of the whole text produced by the respondent can offer even greater depth to the

analysis.

However, given that practice theory stresses the social nature of practice, methods that go

beyond the individual are important. A well thought-through approach to data collection

can serve to mitigate some of the well-documented problems with such techniques as focus

groups and instead foreground the advantages of collecting data in groups. These include:

the real-time discussion of alternative points of view, tensions and conflicts; the immediate

illumination of shared and conflicting understandings and discourse; the ways in which

subjectivities and the exercise of power differences become manifest even in simply

researching group dynamics.

Collective discussion of real-life episodes that respondents have shared is one possibility in

this approach. Such retrospective discussion can be extremely revealing of past and present


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orders of meaning, resources and behaviours. Alternatively, specially created fictional

accounts can be offered to groups of respondents for discussion, with prompts. A further

alternative is to use mediating artefacts such as pictures, case notes or documents as

catalysts for discussion. In this case it is often better to provide such artefacts to

respondents in advance so that they have time to reflect on them.

Another approach, often used in knowledge harvesting is to ask participants to demonstrate

practices and skills with a commentary, and in a group context the other participants are

able to do likewise and to comment on each other's performance.

Finally, it may be possible to encourage respondents to apply concepts and theories to make

sense of their experience, or at least to inquire about the extent to which theory can be

usefully applied. This involves introducing respondents to relevant concepts and theory in a

careful and appropriate way and then questioning them about their response to their

applicability to the situation at hand. This of course can be done in an individual as well as a

group context of data collection, and is in fact an approach derived from the individualistic

‘personal construct theory’.

Whatever methods of data collection and analysis are selected for a practice-focused

ethnography, they need, together, to be able to access the multiple dimensions of social

practice: saying; doing; relating; feeling; valuing.

Conclusion

The above discussion leads to the following characterisation of practice-focused

ethnography in universities. First, it adopts a level of analysis appropriate to unpicking the

intrinsic complexity of objects and of the social world: this is normally at the department

level or below, though comparative work is also valuable. Second, it has two levels of truth

claims and significance: one relating to the particulars of the practice performances being

researched, the other to more general reservoirs of practice, or practice entities. Its

research methods should be fit for both if its value is to go beyond depictions of practices in

specific places and times, mere snapshots. Third, it pays close attention to situated and

contested frames of reference, and their consequences. Fourth, it involves openness within

research methods to the multiple ways in which the object of attention is enacted, how it is

‘done’. Fifth, it uncovers the multiple ways in which virtual and physical realities intertwine

in media-rich contexts, making no a priori distinctions between them. Sixth, it gives

attention to how artefacts and human practices shape each other. Finally it involves

sensitivity to the multiple, emergent, entanglements in every significant action and object,

and so the necessity of keeping the situation under scrutiny unbracketed. These features

give praxiography particular purchase where there is a change-focused research agenda. Its

stress on contextual contingency and the historically situated emergence of practices are

significant features in this. Praxiography can help indicate what initiatives and change

strategies probably will, and probably will not, work well, and why, in specific locales.


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i There is an argument that the word ‘social’ is redundant in the phrase ‘social practice’. By using it I want to distinguish the theoretical tradition being discussed here from theories which locate ‘practice’ in individual behaviour. See Kemmis (2009) for a comparison of social and individual accounts of practice. ii This awkward term is used to refer both to data collection methods and to broader research approaches and

designs based on ontological and epistemological positions. iii As an interesting aside, if we consider ethnography in social practice terms, the tools ethnographers use will

mediate their research practices. iv I am grateful to Vicki Trowler for pointing out the significance of the repeating academic year.

v She underplays the need for interpretive flexibility in traditional ethnographic approaches and believes that

they involve “faithful representations of objective realities”. She also underestimates the significance of material mediation happening in the ‘real’ world.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1111%2Fj.1467-6486.2010.00980.x

http://dx.doi.org/10.1111%2Fj.1467-6486.2010.00980.x

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