INTRODUCTION

This paper started from a simple impulse, to explore what has come, after several decades of ethnographic work in and for businesses and organizations, of the concept of “practice”. My initial sense was that we have made good use of the concept as theoretically explored by Pierre Bourdieu and others, or at least many parts of it. Indeed, whether intentionally or not, the notion of practice forms the basis of much of our work, shaping our research designs and informing many of our insights. We explore and expose the unfolding of consumer experiences as people identify, select, acquire and use goods. We discover and interpret the routines and actions of workers engaged in technology-mediated tasks, reveling at their creative work-arounds to get the job done. We analyze these practices to create experience models and evaluation frameworks, rendering useful representations with a flare! But the question remains, what have we learned about practice in the process? And what, if anything, does it offer back to the traditions of scholars following and debating the likes of Bourdieu, who take “practice” as a framing concept for understanding human action vis-à-vis social order? This work began from a desire to explore if and how the work performed by ethnographers in industry has done anything to refine, critique or advance theories of practice.

Such an exploration demands accounting for the contexts in which we¹ work – a view Rick Robinson exhorted us to in the inaugural EPIC conference in 2005 (Robinson 2005). That is, to recognize that as practitioners (albeit, practitioners skilled in ethnographic methods and approaches and formed, at least in many cases, through traditions of critical, social and cultural theory), there is something rather specific expected of us. We are “there” at behest of clients, internal and external, to have an impact, to provide results, and to offer insight in order to affect change. “This process of matching the model we make of the situation with theirs [clients’]” Robinson suggests, “of engaging them in conversation so that what emerges from the process Beer calls “rigorous formulation” is useful as well as accurate is, I think, one of the defining characteristics of this domain with which theory (here) must engage.” (2005: 5) So the question shifted to include not only how “we” use and understand practice and what it means to us, but to explore what it means to our business counterparts, stakeholders and partners. How does it frame their expectations of what we offer? In other words, in order to appraise the value of the concept of practice to ethnographic praxis in industry and with that, to reassess our contributions (perhaps latent) to theory, I needed to turn my attention to the cusp of theory and business practice. This paper aims to summarize the conclusions I’ve come to thus far.

A CONUNDRUM OF PRACTICE, OR A PRACTICE CONUNDRUM

So what did I find? In brief, there is indeed often considerable overlap between our theoretically buttressed and anthropologically-resonant notion of practice and the action-oriented, practical ones of our business counterparts. At some level, both are concerned with how things are actually done, with the realities beyond the formal and official accounting of steps and actions. The recognition that there is a “more” that exceeds the boxes and borders of rationalized business constructs is humbling and is often embraced with a hopeful spirit of humanity.

At times, however, there appears to be at times significant misrecognition, a slippage of meaning that can create a disconnect between what the ethnographic practitioner produces and what our business partners think they will get. One of the core features of a theoretical orientation to practice is that actions and meanings are constructed by actors in relation to specific social orders (Ortner 1984), that they are constructed relationally (Osterlund and Carlile 2005). “All of these routines and scenarios are predicated upon, and embody within themselves, the fundamental notions of temporal, spatial, and social ordering that underlie and organize the system as a whole” (Ortner 1984: 154). Consistent with a practice-based perspective, our work often leads us thus to conclude that the realities that matter on the ground (and thus to the products, services and organizational efforts we and our business partners aim to effect) need to be understood as situated, dynamic, and often negotiated and even contested. “Practice theory goes a step further than other theories focusing on interactions or relations. It looks not only at the recursive dynamics of a given relation but places everyday practices as the locus for the production and reproduction of relations” (Osterlund and Carlile 2005: 92). This “recursive dynamics” leads us to conclude that things vary. They require flexibility. What is important in understanding experience, ethnographers in industry often exhort, is the journey not the map. Our “implications for design”, to the extent that we become prescriptive at all, lean towards recommendations of ways to build for flexibility and adaptability. We become, consequently, particularists, because it is in the specific ways of building for flexibility and adaptability that design (of products, of strategies, of policy, of organizations) matters.

There are two ways in which I worry for the significance of this state of affairs. One is simply a concern for the obvious – do we not already know this by now? Do we need more research to get to the same answers pointing to flexibility, adaptability, and situatedness? What is at stake here is the value of our work in business settings, and the possibility of our coming up short in having original and compelling insights and in turn, pointing to meaningful and non-trivial pathways to change.

The opposite state of affairs is also present and is equally problematic. This is that we so highlight the systems of “production and reproduction of relations”, the “social ordering” that we shift from a focus on the situated, dynamic and contested take on practice to default instead on fixed and agreement-driven views of practice. This is the case when we participate in the reducing of that which is dynamic to something stable. In the name of making things actionable, we succumb to the desire for standardization and codifiability, naturalizing notions of practice, treating practice and the orders produced as self-evident. The result of this is also a potential risk to the value of our work. It is a risk remarkably similar to the above, that what we produce we produce without the distinction promised from rendering meaningful and deeply informing understandings of social practice. The concern is that we bring instead a more general analytical capability and knowledge (in such areas as trend analysis, decision making, segmentation, or the logic of task decomposition and redesign), offered with a twist and sprinkled, predictably, with quotes and photos of people in the field.²

Exploring this conundrum requires exploring the uses and meanings of notions of practice in the worlds of theory and the worlds of business³. This high-level look at and rendering of the notion of practice at work in business and in scholarship aims to give dimension to consideration of our value to industry as well as our value to advances in social and cultural theory. This paper pivots primarily around the intersection of notions of practice that emphasize flexibly and situatedness with those that instead emphasize ‘codifiability’. This focus is intended as a means to constrain this dissertation-worthy topic to a conference-size paper. It is moreover selects because this particular intersection may help to crystallize some of the as yet unresolved tensions in the domain of ethnography and industry.

In order to explore this intersection, it is important to first establish where the notion of practice shows up both in the worlds of ethnographic practice in industry and in the business world more broadly. The next two sections endeavor to describe where practice does indeed show up in each setting.

PRACTICE IN AND AROUND ETHNOGRAPHY

In what ways does the notion of practice inform our work? For many ethnographers in industry practice has served as both the object of analysis as well as a framing perspective. The notion of practice is referenced in many dimensions of our work: from the way objects and tools are used to descriptions of everyday performances of work and consumption to a sense of “the informal” more generally. We center attention on the “everydayness’ of what people do, even if it is the everydayness of extreme or rarified contexts such as marathon runners or elite executives. The notion of practice is often mobilized to contrast with idealized notions of process, with processes being represented typically by (often overly) linear, branching, and step-wise flow diagrams. While such diagrams remain powerful in highlighting and reducing possible sites of action, they are also guided by assumptions of rationalistic, rule-bound behaviors. These, in turn, are often felt to be quickly exceeded by the realities of human action. In contrast, we use the notion of practice, then, to illuminate both the apparent messiness of what people do (and say and think), and to suggest the often unexpected and sublime order(s) of that messiness and we translate this understanding into recommendations, strategies and designs by identifying levers for support, adapting, or transforming those practices.

This approach to practice echoes much of what is suggested in traditions of practice theory common to the fields of anthropology, sociology, cultural theory and philosophy and whose development is closely tied to such theorists as Pierre Bourdieu (1977) and Anthony Giddens (1979, 1984). Commonly described as a theoretical orientation that arose in an effort to bridge the space between the social determinism of certain forms of structuralism and the psychological or cognitive determinism apparent in methodological individualism, practice theory has endeavored to reconcile influences of external social structures with subjective experiences. The aim was to make room for the role of the individual, for agency and subjective experience, without naively minimizing the powerful influence of social structures. The body is often central to definitions of practice. Following a trajectory through Bourdieu, Giddens, Foucault and the contemporary social philosopher Theodor Schatski, John Postill defines practice as “arrays of activity in which the body is the nexus” (2008). Importantly, however, the body is not just complicit with reigning social orders but plays a role in recreating these structures. Given that people-in-action feed back into the system, there is room for agency to reassert itself. People are neither passive dupes nor entirely free will-driven actors possessive of pure individual choice. “Relational thinking” (Osterlund and Carlile 2005) between agents and structures and among acting agents, frames the core analytical approach binding variations of practice theory.

In what way and why has industry and business cared about this terrain of thinking? This question at large, addressed under the rubrique of what I have coined “the corporate encounter”, has occupied my interest for some time. A particular set of historical confluences has contributed to the growth of interest in more practice-sensitive views within the business world. I explore several of the key factors in more depth elsewhere (Cefkin 2009). Amongst these are: increased confrontation with consumers’ (both individual and enterprise) meaning-making influences in varied, global contexts; the spread of the internet and the increased speed and ease of non-local production and consumption; and the shift towards a greater focus on services and experiences. At the same time, driven by concerns for scope and scale, typical business approaches lean towards largely abstracted understandings. Surveys, where people’s perceptions are solicited through already constituted frames of understanding, for instance, and process flows, conceptualized as linear, branching, and step-wise diagrams, speak to this tendency. Another factor at play, and at the opposite end of the above, is the fetish of the individual, the sense that tapping into an understanding of what people will do and how they might intersect with the organizations offerings requires ‘getting into their heads’. This paper points simply to the sense that the promise of ethnographic work is its ability to stem the distance between broad, macro-level perspectives of people’s actions and highly individualistic perspectives. This promise has particular salience vis-à-vis the industrial psychologists, economists, and human factors specialists who have been on the scene longer than ethnographers and whose viewpoints and approaches embody the kinds of perspectives just noted.

Ethnography is often poised to render something in-between these two extremes of faceless, broad generalizations and highly individuated understandings, and that is done in part through ethnographers’ renderings of the changing messy space of activity into meaningful chunks through a focus on practice. Practice is what we are looking at when we are observing. We look for how things unfold in varying contexts and in interaction with a range of conceptual, digital, or material objects and artifacts. When we describe everyday performances of work and consumption, we aim to encompass not just the conscious and articulated dimensions of those performances – or people’s explanations of them – but also what they do. We aim to expose the informal or the invisible, which we access, in theory, through a focus on practice. We may talk in terms of actions or behaviors, but in general, what differentiates ethnographic approaches from more cognitively or psychologically driven notions of behavior is that we are likely to foreground interpretations through a social lens, that there is cultural or social meaning framing individual’s thoughts and actions.

Donna Flynn (2009) brilliantly explores this dynamic at Microsoft in the context of IT in her work “My Customers’ are Different! Identity, Difference and the Political Economy of Design” where she describes the resistance she faced to the results of her study of server clients’ use of user documentation that identified significant commonalities in documentation usage. Her business counterparts insisted that their customers – defined in terms of server type – were different. In addition to a kind of exceptionalism invoked by employees’ singular identification with their customer group (in many cases because they had themselves come through those ranks), she traces the hold of this kind of thinking to what might be considered forms of methodological individualism instantiated in corporate processes. Amongst these she points to the performance review process, which, while gesturing towards the importance of collaboration, in fact is designed to reward singularly contributions, to the founder-worship of “billg”⁴, and to the popularity of the use of personas in the design practice and which focus attention on individual, representative, profiles of customers and users. The unit that matters most is singular, the individual. She uses this understanding to expose the particular political-economy of design in which her applied ethnographic research is engaged. And she demonstrates how this understanding informs her own ability to act and effect change in her organization.

PRACTICE IN AND AROUND BUSINESS

So if that is where the notion of practice shows up in ethnographic work in industry, where does it show up more broadly in business itself? A number of notions of “practice” are at play in the business world. Practice is recognized as the site of action, of doing something and “getting the job done”, as ex-eBay CEO Meg Whitman has adopted as a mantra in an effort to distinguish her suitability for the role of governor of California from her opponents. ‘Putting something into practice’ is considered a good thing in business. Practice here contrasts with theory and is highly valorized as a corrective to the kind of ‘analysis-paralysis’ felt to come with the ‘ethereal’ realm of theory.

Another way that the notion of practice comes into play is through ideas of self-development. Practice is identified as a form of learning, developing skill by rehearsing, or ‘practicing’. In this case, the dominant response by the organization has something to do with capability-building, and it often fits most squarely in the worlds of human resources and training for internal purposes, or user support and adoption for product use. Practice and practicing becomes a means of harnessing capability to improve organizational functioning, on the one hand, or a route to effective product use on the other.