Paper presented at the Higher Education Close Up Conference 2, Lancaster University, 16-18 July 2001
Hinge and Bracket: Practice Theory and Sensemaking in Further and Higher Education
John Reynolds, Lancaster University
and
Christine Tyler, Eccles College
Hinge & Bracket: Practice Theory and Sensemaking in Further & Higher Education John Reynolds and Christine Tyler
“We cannot turn the background from which we think into an object for us”. We face a new task … (that of attempting “to articulate the background of our lives perspicuously” … where, as Wittgenstein puts it, ‘a perspicuous representation (the provision of an apposite metaphor or image) produces just that understanding which consists in seeing connections’.” (Shotter 1993, p 142, quoting Taylor C. 1985).
“… practice theorists … note that long before an architect could draw up plans for a house, constraints on (its) design were built into taken-for-granted practices ….. Like the composer who seeks to write music for which there are no instruments (Becker 1982) architects are unable to build houses that require materials no one can make.” (Swidler, in Schatzki et al (Eds) 2001).
“… a practice may be recognised as a language of self-disclosure ……. It comes to an agent as invitations to understand, to choose and to respond. It is composed of conventions and rules of speech … and is continuously invented by those who speak it; … It is an instrument to be played upon, not a tune to be played. ….. (Oakeshott 1975 p 58).
The second and third quotations are defamiliarising examples of the ways in which practice theory hopes to stimulate reinterpretations of the experience of institutional change. The quotations insinuate different ways of making sense of what is happening. In particular, practice theorists hope to redress modes of thinking that interpret such fields in terms of conjunctures or aggregations of individual actions mediated through roles, institutional norms, systems, ideologies, etc. Of course, practice thinkers acknowledge the reality and significance of interactions between agents, their structuring through hierarchies of power, conflicts and convergences of interest, the influence of market forces, etc. However, they argue for the illuminative potential of an ontological ‘hinge’, the use of a shift in perception (or gestalt) of everyday phenomena so that people’s actions and interactions are recognised as “embedded in practices just as individuals are constituted within them” (Schatzki 2001 p3). In other words, it is postulated that practices are the primary social entities, the entities on which mutual understandings and essential routines depend.
Practice theory raises awareness of how conventions of language usage restrict reflexive understanding of what we are about in everyday doings and responses to others’ doings. In that respect, it is a reaction against the contemporary tendency to explain what people do in terms, primarily or exclusively, of individual self-interest and goal directedness. Thus, as we later argue in more detail, practice theory offers an alternative to what now passes as streetwise common sense about institutional management in a competitive, globalised environment. It offers a critique of that common sense which, as Fevre (2000, p 15) puts it “sees itself as our faculty for knowing about people, about their thoughts and behaviour… (which) claims to tell us what human behaviour will really be in any situation.” This populist common sense has a strong affinity with more specialist, self-conscious forms of what we term ‘managerialist common sense’. We define this as a mode of thinking premised on the belief that practices are always subordinate to goals, and thus ‘delivery’ of means to ends, and are constituted by the skills and motives which agents bring to the achievement of those ends. Managerialist common sense brackets out (i.e. suspends from consideration) the normative and habituated but creative nature of practices. Insofar as it considers practices a significant entity, they are seen as constraints rather than resources.
1. Practices as Social Instruments?
To counteract the stunted sensibility of this common sense, early philosophers of practice, such as Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Oakeshott argued for other ways of articulating human being, of how we handle everyday life. They drew out its dependence upon the routine experiencing of and engagement in tasks and transactions. In doing so, they brought out the sense in which most of what we do inheres in given ‘forms of life’, and depends on prior socialisation and immersion into the mutual dependencies, implicit conventions and shared understandings that constitute practice at the most basic level of engaging with others in varied settings. Given this perspective, practice theorists point up and claim to clarify how people meet a non-explicit but essential social imperative: that of being able to follow rules and conventions without reflection but also being able to improvise according to the particular circumstances. Thus it is illuminating to understand Wittgenstein’s account of how it is that practitioners (teachers, managers, researchers) can perform “blindly” but “thinkingly” (Bloor in Schatzki 2001 p 97). They do so by subscribing to the conventions of a practice, conventions that cannot be reduced to simple means to ends - though of course practices exhibit intentionality or purposive orientation. Using this ontological hinge, Oakeshott’s metaphor of a practice as “an instrument to be played upon” and Becker’s ironic image of “music for which there are no instruments” can be used to reinterpret managerialist illusions about the malleability of practices.
From this ontological position, practices are prior to and hence more fundamental in human being than institutional norms or cultures. As Bruner (1987 p 90) put it,
“Culture is always richer than the traits recorded in the ethnographer’s accounts because its truth resides not in explicit formulations…. but in the daily practices of persons who in acting take for granted an account of who they are and how to understand their fellows’ moves.”
Or as Suchman (1987 p 57) affirms, “Our common sense of the social world is not the precondition of our interaction, but its product.” For example, people cope with their need for mutual intelligibility in ever-changing circumstances through interactions governed by implicitly understood practices, such as those of conversation within the family or of formal debate at board meetings. Understanding of the practice is usually gained by social transaction with members of the culture of which the practice is the source. As Collins (in Schatzki et al 2001, p 107) appositely comments, mastery of a practice is often indicated by ‘intuitive’ awareness of what is inappropriate: “…ceasing to commit faux pas during interactions with respondents is a good indicator…. (also) the nature of conversations with experts - if you can get them to listen to you seriously…”.
It is from this philosophical analysis of how people achieve a common sense of a shared situation that at this stage of the paper we directly address the “new task” recognised by Taylor and Shotter (introductory quotation), that is, of articulating “the background of our lives perspicuously”: by conceiving of practices as social instruments. More specifically, we argue that in interpreting ethnographic or fine-grained research on policy implementation in education, we should recognise practices as key entities, as the implements of the implementation process, but as implements rendered invisible by the blindspots of managerialist commonsense. If the metaphor of implements seems to jar, we suggest that it need do so no more than such metaphors as targets, strategy and delivery. Of course, the latter are so familiar as not to seem metaphors at all. As Mangham (1996) has pointed out, embedded, everyday metaphors like these have come to dominate managerial thinking and to desensitise perceptions.
2. Modes of Engagement and the Scope of Practices
This paper so far has brought into relief the routine- and mutual intelligibility- establishing function of practices. It has done so through a conceptual argument which, indirectly, clarifies the complex effects of imposed disjunctive changes of policy on prior mutual understandings and modes of coping. However, this clarification in no way implies that practices are static. They obviously do change, often, on the face of it, rapidly and without resistance or trauma. Adjustment of teaching practices to incorporate use of data projectors or hi-tech reprographics is an example. What is at issue for us is how best to interpret the interactive and organisational processes through which practitioners come to adapt their senses of what they are about so that they can routinely engage with tasks and other people. Here it probably helps to distinguish the essentially social model of change with which we are concerned from the model of personal change which Peter Taylor (1999) has expounded. While not incompatible with his emphasis on reflection on practice and “self-interested self-management” in the way academics come to terms with change, practice theory suggests that this psychologistic perspective reinforces the rationalistic bias of current policies and strategies. As argued earlier, that bias encourages managers to disown their dependence in coordinated action with practitioners upon mutual intelligibility derived from participation in shared practices and practitioners’ internal conventions of language use and propriety.
That said, practice theory has to make it clear how such a broad portmanteau-like concept as ‘practice’ can provide interpretive purchase on the wide range of actions and interactions that it embraces. As Thevenot comments:
“… the (very) felicity of the concept comes from its extraordinary breadth. It points equally well to agency of the most … intimate kind and to agency that is collective, public or institutional. But the cost… is that it hinders the detailed clarification of differences between types of agency ……….. (thus) theories of practice typically do not provide good accounts of our dynamic confrontation with the world” (Thevenot in Schatzki et al 2001, p 56).
This criticism applies, he maintains, to the two most widely quoted theorists of practice: to Giddens’ account (1984) of the neglected significance in social research of agents’ subconscious “practical knowledgeability”; and to Bourdieu’s account (1977) of ‘habitus’ as the socially-induced practical sense or strategic ‘sense of the game’ which practitioners draw upon to both sustain a social field and their standing within it.
While granting the value of their accounts in getting a generalised appreciation of the routinised but adaptive nature of practices, Thevenot highlights the need to recognise how and why practitioners have constantly to monitor and adjust the scope of their engagements with their environment. An academic, for example, has to shift the modes of practice on which she draws from (1) adapting her actions and responses in an individualised context to (2) actions and responses appropriate to a locale involving negotiation and coordination with students and peers, and also to (3) actions and responses attuned to external public requirements, such as those of QA mechanisms.
Thus evaluations of what counts as overall competence in, say, FE or HE practice depend upon meeting the pragmatic requirements of each mode or ‘level’ of practice. In each mode the practitioner has to learn different conventions of appropriateness in her engagement with the environment and others. In effect, the practitioner is accountable against different criteria of ‘the good’ in each mode. In the first mode, ‘the good’ is self-accountable, a matter of coming to terms with and being ‘at home’ with the material, technological and temporal environment. However, there is always an intersubjective aspect in as much as the practitioner’s personal engagement with the environment has to be potentially intelligible to others. In the second mode, ‘the good’ is determined by horizontal accountability, the need for rapport and coordination of action with peers or interactees (such as students). In the third mode, ‘the good’ is determined by ‘upward’ accountability, by external regimes of justification, in which the requirements are codified in the impersonal terms of a third party.
Thevenot’s analysis of these modes of engagement in relation to accountabilities indicates how context-specific modes of practice and tacit conventions emerge. Thus his analysis can bring selective focus to the otherwise over-generalised conceptualisation of practice which we have argued for, that is, for practices as social instruments or implements. As we explain more fully later in the paper, his analysis and our conceptualisation of practice enables clearer recognition of the different ‘levels’ of practice involved in educational processes, and thus of the scope of the interdependencies of levels of practice which FE and HE practitioners have to learn. More specifically, it strengthens the case for interpretive research which ‘captures’ the scope and interrelation of practices at micro-, meso- and macro- scales of institutional change.
3. Interpretive Argument and Practice Theory
The rest of this paper develops an interpretive argument, illustrated by case study research (Tyler 1999), which indicates how the implications of management of change perspectives and ethnographic studies of policy implementation in H/FE (for example, Saunders 1994, Trowler 1998, Prichard 2000) could be more robustly articulated. Practice theory, we believe, enables institutional ‘insiders’ and practitioners to present a much more cogent account to ‘outsiders’, such as policy-makers and employers, of the nature of their practices, and of the necessity for continuity as well as change. By clarifying the primacy of everyday practice over managerialist theory, practice theory offers a culturally conservative but, given today’s conventional wisdom, radical view of what is happening in H/FE.
By an ‘interpretive argument’, we mean (following Bernstein J 1995 p 215) an approach to the implications of socially-contexted research which focuses strongly on nuances in the fundamental ideas used in the field and their relation to cognate terms and metaphors. For example, an interpretive argument regards the meanings of key words such as practice as ‘open-textured’ and subject to continuous reinterpretation of meaning as the semantic potential of words used in the field undergo change and challenge. Bernstein (p 217) uses changes in the meaning of marriage as an example: “… we may disagree over the very idea of marriage …. and so what being a husband or wife and man or woman now means”. Thus “Interpretive arguments contest ethical spaces, attempting to shift patterns of inference and hence belief.” So it is, we suggest, with the very idea of practice and what being a teacher, researcher, faculty or college manager, etc, now mean or could mean.
Our motivation for emphasising the idea of interpretive argument is transparent: unease at the way in which current funding regimes and managerialist frames of reference screen out the effects of outside interventions on internally-evolved practices. Of course, both H/FE professionals as well as disinterested researchers point out the overlooked difficulties and unintended consequences of imposed changes to practice. The problem as we see it is less the shortage of evidence from fine-grained, close-up research studies, but rather the inference structures that policy-makers and senior managers use in interpreting what is going on. Common sense managerialism, and the semantic field of calculative rationality and competitive advantage which confirms it, enables those not directly engaged in teacher and research practices to sideline and bracket off the ways in which engaged practitioners articulate the effects of new regimes.