Giddens’ approach to practice

According to Giddens and Turner (1987, p. xx), ‘social practices’ can be understood as “skilful procedures, methods or techniques appropriately performed by social agents”. This indicates that (social) practices relate to what people (social agents) do

(performance) and that a practice is more than just repetitive, conditioned responses to particular stimuli, as the social agents employ skilful procedures, methods or techniques. In other words, a social agent could always have acted otherwise.

Giddens (1993, p. 81) further analyses practice into the following, interrelated, sub- components:

• acts: identified elements or segments of actions

• action/agency: the stream of actual or contemplated causal interventions of a corporeal being in the ongoing process of events in the world

• practices: when speaking of regularized types of act I shall talk of human practices, as an ongoing series of practical activities

This kind of conceptualisation of practice seems to have some similarity to the

hierarchical analysis of activity within activity theory (refer to activity theory below). Although there are remarkable differences in emphasis, Giddens’ conceptualisation also resonates with that of Bourdieu (1977). For both Giddens and Bourdieu the main

concern, in explaining social practice, seems to be what individuals do in their daily lives. Bourdieu, like Giddens, is of the opinion that social life cannot be understood simply as the aggregate of individual behaviour. Bourdieu’s (1977, p.60) argument that social practice is not ‘rule governed’ is in line with other thinkers on the topic but he

underestimates the importance of rules as one resource which contributes to the mix of freedom and constraints that characterises behaviour. Bourdieu reckons practice is not consciously - or not wholly consciously - organised and orchestrated. According to this, nothing is random or purely accidental but, as one thing follows on from another, practice happens. However, it would be wrong, according to Jenkins (1996), to suggest that Bourdieu thinks that practice just happens. Jenkins (1996, p. 70) has explained this view as Bourdieu’s most potent metaphor on ‘practical sense’ or ‘practical logic’, the centrality of 'a feel for the game':

the practical mastery of the logic or of the imminent necessity of a game - a mastery acquired by experience of the game, and one which works outside conscious control and discourse (in the way that, for instance, techniques of the body do).

This could be very true of the academically impoverished Malawian primary teachers— especially with regard to the fact that most people, most of the time, take themselves and their social world somewhat for granted: they do not think about it because they do not have to, what Bourdieu refers to as doxa or 'doxic experience':

…the coincidence of the objective structures and the internalised structures which provides the illusion of immediate understanding, characteristic of practical experience of the familiar universe, and which at the same time excludes from that experience any inquiry as to its own conditions of possibility. (Jenkins, 1996, p.14)

Bourdieu’s emphasis on the improvisatory nature of practice is well understood, and so is his identification of the ‘thoughtlessness’ of habit as a factor enabling individuals to go about their daily lives without having to consider every move they make. This is broadly in line with Giddens’ (1979) idea about the ‘routinised’ nature of practices except that he draws attention to the way in which agents draw upon rules and resources as part of their practice, and that in drawing upon rules and resources agents employ “practical

consciousness: tacit knowledge that is skilfully applied in the enactment of courses of conduct, but which the actor is not able to formulate discursively” (Giddens, 1979, p.59). He interprets rules as “techniques or generalisable procedures applied in the

enactment/reproduction of social practices” (Giddens, 1984, p.21), that are not determinative of social practice but instead must be interpreted and enacted as part of practice. Furthermore, he draws on Wittgenstein in suggesting that to know a rule, “is to 'know how to go on', to know how to play according to the rule” (p. 22). This is

important as it demonstrates the relationship between rules and practices. With regard to Bourdieu’s analogy of the rules of a game, Giddens finds this inadequate as a way of examining the rules which are an integral element of social practices:

Even those [rules] which are codified as laws are characteristically subject to a far greater diversity of contestations than the rules of games. Although the use of rules of games such as chess, as prototypical of the rule-governed properties of social systems is frequently associated with Wittgenstein, more relevant is what Wittgenstein has to say about children’s play as exemplifying the routines of social life. (Giddens, 1984, p.18)

Giddens (1984, p. 65) highlights the significance of rules as enacted in practice in stressing that “rules cannot be exhaustively described or analysed in terms of their own content, as prescriptions, prohibitions, and the like: precisely because, apart from those circumstances where a lexicon exists, rules and practices only exist in conjunction with one another.”

Within Giddens’ theory of structuration, rules are one element (the other being resources) in the stabilisation of social relationships across time and space. He defines structure as “rules and resources recursively implicated in social reproduction; institutionalized features of social systems have structural properties in the sense that relationships are stabilised across time and space” (Giddens, 1984, p. xxxi). However, it has already been stated that social actors or agents do not ‘apply’ a rule or use resources in a simplistic or deterministic way (they are not cultural dupes who lack understanding of the social system within which they operate and, though may decide not to do so, they could always act otherwise) but instead apply sophisticated approaches as they apply rules in a given situation. Giddens (1979, p.68) emphasises this process of rule- instantiation by drawing upon the work of Garfinkel:

The operations of practical consciousness enmesh rules and the 'methodological' interpretation of rules in the continuity of practices. Garfinkel's conception of the interpretative work which is always temporally involved in accountability is very important here. What Garfinkel calls 'ad hoc' considerations - the 'etcetera clause',

'let it pass', etc. - are chronically involved in the instantiation of rules, and are not separate from what those rules 'are'.

Partly, it is this ‘interpretative work’ (employed by the in-service primary teachers and other educators) that we seek to examine as part of empirical analyses in Chapters 5 and 6. This we regard as particularly important in light of the considerable ambiguity surrounding the definition of interactive radio as a learning-object and how they should be adopted, further developed and used.

Amongst those elements considered to be crucial in the stabilization of social- relationships across time and space is resource(s). Reckwitz (2002) regards the integration of the notion of resources within Giddens’ theory of structuration with the concept of artefacts as a potentially worthwhile avenue of exploration:

Here it is possible to create a link with Anthony Giddens’s version of practice theory, presented in the form of his “theory of structuration”. In Giddens’s conceptual framework “the material” appears as “resources”, which are interpreted as necessary requirements for the existence of practices. These resources, however, are primarily understood as allocative or authoritative means of power, less as things/artefacts to be handled. (see Giddens, 1984, p. 58–62), (Reckwitz, 2002a, p.215)

It can be said that in Giddens’ theoretical framework resources are regarded as the means (or mode) through which allocative or authoritative power is exercised. In a way, this conceptualisation is useful in highlighting the underpinning importance of power and domination in social relations, but it is not a conceptualisation that is in line with the more common perspective of resources as the material or ‘things’ to be used in carrying on a social practice. For example, Schatzik et al (2001, p. 145) take issue with Giddens’

use of the term ‘resources’ on two grounds. Firstly, “it is not compatible with the functional specification of resources. The medium through which a capacity is exercised cannot itself be a capability; at the least, it must be the exercise of that capability. Secondly, the examples that Giddens offers as examples of resources (organization of activities, coordination of actors, aptitudes, capabilities, wealth, technologies, raw

materials, land) are wrong. If resources are capabilities, as Giddens asserts, then there is a considerable degree of inconsistency between this definition and the list of examples (apart from ‘aptitudes’ and ‘capabilities’) offered above”.

For the purpose of this thesis, the word ‘resource’ is used in its more usual sense to mean some kind of artefact employed as part of human activity. For the purpose of the present research, we regard Giddens’ attention to rules and resources (and how they are drawn upon by skilful or knowledgeable agents as part of a practice) as an essential aspect of illuminating the adoption of interactive radio in teachers’ in-service education and training system.

Another definition of the term ‘practice’ has been offered by Reckwitz (2002b, p. 249):

A practice (Praktik) is a routinised type of behaviour which consists of several elements, interconnected to one another: 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.

Although this definition bears similarities with that of Bourdieu and Giddens in its emphasis on the ‘routinised’ nature of practice, it develops that work further by emphasising that ‘forms of bodily activity’ (behaviour) and artefacts (things) and their usage, are an integral part of practices. Other alternative perspectives can also be drawn

upon to highlight and enhance Giddens’ ideas. In the following section, for example, attention is drawn to what could be considered as some similarities between Giddens’ thought and some aspects of activity theory.