Introduction

This sense of wonder is the mark of the philosopher. —Plato, Theaetetus, §155d At the foundation of well-founded belief lies belief that is not founded. —Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §253 Philosophy is the self-correction by consciousness of its own initial excess of subjectivity [ … ] The task of philosophy is to recover the totality obscured by the selection....

Practice Theory

The purpose of this chapter is to articulate the philosophical underpinnings of the perspective commonly known as “practice theory.” The latter originates and has grown out from the long-standing philosophical critique of the logic of scientific rationality, which underlies a large majority of theories within organization and management theory, and social science more generally. Practice theory aims to capture the basic understandings manifested in how actors and materials are entwined in a relational whole over time. Seeing actors as embedded in practices orients researchers to explore how actors follow rules and handle their experiences in enacting the practices they partake in. This chapter explores the philosophical underpinnings of practice theory, with a particular focus on Wittgenstein and Heidegger, and distinguishes three approaches to the study of practice: commonsensical theories, general theories, and domain-specific theories.

The “Metaphor” Metaphor

This chapter revisits Gareth Morgan’s seminal book Images of Organization and considers its main thesis—that organizations have no essence, but we can bring out their features through the metaphorical lenses we see them through—in the context of pragmatist-hermeneutical philosophy. Morgan’s “metaphor” metaphor approaches organizations as texts, inviting readers to become sophisticated readers of organizational life. Images of Organization, rather than providing ready-made answers, provides its readers with the resources to search for answers, thus enabling readers-practitioners to refine their ordinary practices of understanding, and become phronetic practitioners who must simultaneously maintain what Dewey called “a state of doubt” while searching for better candidates of belief.

Don’t Simplify, Complexify

This chapter argues that, rather than theory development aiming at simplifying complex organizational phenomena, it should aim at complexifying theories—theoretical complexity is needed to account for organizational complexity. Defining the latter as “nontrivial” action, it explores a complex “system of picturing” of organizations as objects of study that provides an alternative to the dominant disjunctive style of thinking. Complex theorizing is conjunctive: it seeks to make connections between diverse elements of human experience through making those analytical distinctions that will enable the joining up of concepts normally compartmentalized. Insofar as conjunctive theorizing is driven by the need to preserve the “living forwards–understanding backwards” dialectic, it is better suited to grasping the logic of practice and doing justice to organizational complexity. This argument is illustrated with several examples from organizational and management research.

Making Strategy

This chapter argues that to appreciate what strategy-as-practice (SAP) has to offer strategy researchers, and to fully realize its potential, it needs to be grounded on an onto-epistemology that acknowledges the various ways through which strategies qua practices may develop, as well as the various modes of intentionality and language use that, crucially, underlie strategy-making. A fully developed Heideggerian onto-epistemological framework provides a coherent way for different types of strategy-making to be researched from a practice perspective. A Heideggerian lens on SAP first brings intentionality under scrutiny and shows how it is constructed in strategizing episodes through practitioners drawing upon particular sociomaterial practices. Secondly, it shows the “inherited background” from which practitioners engage in coherent practical coping, and explores how aspects of this “inherited background” are brought to explicit awareness in the face of breakdowns.

The Power of the Particular

This chapter elaborates on how singularities (unique, first-time/once-occurrent events) may be thought of in organization science, and how an organization science of singularities may be possible. Organizations are designed to generate regularities. Historically oriented towards capturing regularities, organization science has treated organizations as abstract systems, devoid of the idiosyncrasies of human agency. However, while organizations categorize and generalize, insofar as people in organizations act, they inevitably create and encounter differences. Difference indicates uniqueness implicit in the particularity of things, and the repetitiveness of regularities in organizations does not indicate the reproduction of sameness, since repetition is an occasion for generating difference. An organization science of singularities is concerned with bringing to attention the unique features of organizational life that create new possibilities. Such a science is performative, seeking to provide action-oriented accounts of organizational life from within.

Craving for Generality and Small-N Studies

This chapter addresses the question: “How can findings from case studies and ethnographies be generalized?” It advances an epistemological defence of small-N studies in the context of organization and management theory by drawing on Wittgenstein, and argues that the distinctive theoretical contribution of small-N studies stems from seeing particular cases as opportunities for further refining our conceptualization of general processes. Theorizing is an analogical process: small-N studies researchers notice analogies with processes described in other studies and, in an effort to account for the specificity of the particular case under study, draw new distinctions and thus further refine what is currently known. It is not so much analytical generalization that small-N studies aid as heuristic generalization (or analytical refinement). By doing so, the craving for generality is the craving for a clearer view. They aid generic understanding without annihilating the epistemic significance of the particular.

Grasping the Logic of Practice

There is an increasing concern that organizational theories are not relevant to practice. This chapter contends that the overall problem is that most organizational theories are unable to capture the logic of practice because they are developed within the framework of scientific rationality. The latter, along with the accompanying representational view of theory, are grounded on an entity-based ontology that foregrounds the subject-object separation. Drawing on Heidegger and his interpreters, existential ontology is suggested as an alternative, which is spacious enough to allow that a practice world shows up to beings who are absorbed in it, and that human beings can engage with the practice world in variously detached ways, through which its components appear to them. Accordingly, practical rationality is elaborated as an alternative framework, and shown to enable development of theories that grasp the logic of practice, and thus are more relevant to organizational practice.

Theory as Therapy

This chapter argues that a representationalist view of theory in an applied or practical science, such as Organization and Management Theory (OMT), is unrealistic and misleading, since it fails to acknowledge theory’s ineradicable dependence on the dynamics of the lifeworld within which it has its “currency.” It explores some of the difficulties raised by the use of representational theorizing in OMT, and the nature of a more reflective form of theorizing. Reflective theorizing invites practitioners to attend to the grammar of their actions, namely to the rules and meanings that actors draw upon in their participation in social practices. It works to draw their attention to aspects of people’s interactions in organizations not usually noticed; to bring to awareness unconscious habits, confusions, prejudices, and pictures that hold practitioners captive. This view of theory—as perceptually reorienting rather than as cognitively explaining—is illustrated by looking at Karl Weick’s sensemaking theory.

What is Reflection-in-Action?

How does an administrator, manager, or other practitioner know how to do what she does while she does it? Building on the work of Donald Schön, this chapter proposes a phenomenological theory of practice and of reflection-in-the-course-of-practice that transcends what is seen as Schön’s cognitive orientation, as well as some other limitations in his theorizing. The theory includes: an appreciation for the evaluative dimensions built into competent practice that encourage, if not require, reflecting; a further theorizing of the character of surprise; and a fuller delineation of the character of improvisation in relation to practice and its surprises. Schön’s arguments are reframed in phenomenological, especially Heideggerian, terms, and these discussions are illustrated with vignettes from the world of practice drawn from field research.