Praxeology

A new feature has been added: a bibliography on theories of practice broadly understood. Based on the web 2.0 bibliographic network Mendeley.com the bibliography will be regularly updated. If you do have suggestions on literature please use the comments function….

Actor Network Theory and Theories of Practice are increasingly used to grasp political processes. At this years Interpretative Policy Analysis Conference in Grenoble, Henk Wagenaar, Steven Griggs and Richard Freeman, are organzing a series of panel on the contributions theories of practice can make to the study of policy making. While the majority of public policy scholars studies policymaking in the national realm (focussing on issues such as health policy, or local administrative reforms), there is an increasing interest in IRish themes , such as the transnational spread of ideas, or the practices of transnational cooperation. Moreover, given that approaches from public policy are increasingly adoptedt in IR (e.g. the garbage can model), and public policy researchers are equally interested in issues such as European Governance, Development Policy, or Statebuilding policy, the boundary between both disciplines is more and more free floating. In other words, the IPA Panel Series on Practice should be highly interested for any IR researchers concerned about what to do with theories of practice in IR. Please find the call for papers below….

Policy as Practice: What Do Policy-Makers Do?

Panel Chairs

Richard Freeman, University of Edinburgh (UK)

Steven Griggs, University of De Montfort (UK), sgriggs@dmu.ac.uk

Hendrik Wagenaar, University of Leiden (NL)

Abstract

We know little of the way policy-makers work, of what they actually do when they make policy. Our starting point in this panel is thus the work of policy (Colebatch, 2007). We are guided by a small set of classic ethnographic accounts of policy making (Heclo and Wildavsky, 1974), and by the standard ethnographic injunction to ‘follow the actors’.  But more than that we are interested not just in what policy makers do, but what they think they are doing, that is how they understand, explain and account for their everyday activity (Bevir and Rhodes, 2006).  Seeing policy as practice, we thus invite papers that address two broad areas of investigation.

Firstly, how do practitioners describe what they do, both to themselves and others?  Practices are available for investigation only to the extent that we have and make accounts of them. How is practice depicted, both formally for the public record and informally, among practitioners?  How do these accounts advocate, legitimate, defend and promote different ideas of practice?  What tensions exist between policy makers’ public and private accounts (Cornwell, 1984) of what they do? 

Secondly, how we study practice? Here we investigate the challenges and opportunities posed by ethnographic studies of the practice of policy-making. Panel participants will be invited to discuss the contribution of ethnography to the study of public policy and review and critique some of the key concepts of interpretive, practice-oriented analysis, including those of performance, narrative, text, translation, interpretation, discourse and governance. The challenge is to develop a vocabulary which is meaningful to both researchers and practitioners.  

The call for Papers is open until the 31. of January 2010. Further Information can be found here

 Summary of a 2 days workshop “practice of international governance”, November 2009, University of Antwerp, Belgium 

With articles published in the main journals of the discipline of international relations[1], theories of practices as a framework, approach or perspective for studying the international is gaining increasingly attraction. Theories of practice are best understood as a “family of theories” rather than a unified and coherent research program.[2] Indeed, what a practice entails, and how it relates to the other ‘stuff’ making life hanging together, remains contested. Also students of IR put different weight on the elements theories of practice foreground. That practice theories provide a rich and fruitful but also a diverse repertoire of concepts and directions and that a lot remains to be done in developing practice perspectives on international relations, was well indicated by a recent workshop hosted by the University of Antwerp. The workshop titled practices of international governance gathered early career and senior scholars together to learn and ponder about different ways of using practice theory in studying problems of international relations.

 A crucial reference point for debate was the work of Theodore Schatzki.[3] Such an ‘anchoring point’ is meaningful given Schatzki’s definition of practice as a bundle of doing and sayings – or more precise as composed of know how, rules and teleoaffective structures – has achieved quite some authority in the IR debate. Moreover, Schatzki’s fine-grained ontology of the social as bundles, meshes and nets of practice-arrangements offers one of the most prominent alternatives to Bourdieu’s vocabulary, which meanwhile makes the majority of practice-oriented writing in IR.

The second crucial anchoring point was the work of Iver Neumann, who participated in the workshop, introduced his work and opened up the debate. Neumann in many ways initiated a “practice turn” in IR by his 2002 article published in Millennium: Journal of International Studies in which he called for returning practice to the linguistic turn. Neumann opened the debate on acknowledging practice not through a reconsideration of “action” (as is the case for pragmatists, or those relying on “logics of action”) but through a reconsideration of discourse. Moreover, his work together with Ole Jacob Sending he triggered the debate of considering the international as a realm of governmentality. Neumann and Sendings understanding of governmentality – as expressed in their forthcoming book discussed at the workshop – is one of seeing governmentality essentially as expressed in and through practice.

Besides the discussion of Schatzki and Neumann’s work, four papers were discussed giving ‘practice’ quite different status and focusing on different objects. Two papers focused on international organizations (NATO, UN), one paper focused on practices of sovereignty and one pondered about whether there is a practice that can be dubbed “democratic peace practice”. Three core themes emerged during the workshop, which all are crucial challenges for practice researchers.

 1) This concerned firstly the relationship between discourse and practice. Neumann expressed some skepticism that his 2002 model, which saw the relationship between discourse and practice as mediated through narratives (which open up the space for practices, and if confirmed through practices, stabilize discourse) actually is useful. Neumman suggested that although discourse cannot survive without practice (and vice versa) the scholar has to choose whether he wants to focus on discourse or practice. He justified this claim by suggesting that he realized that sometimes you should only focus on practice. Jorg Kostermann and other participants argued that such a choice is not necessarily meaningful. At least if we follow the understanding of practice by Schatzki, part of any practice is a teleo-affective structure, which in many ways matches what other scholars understand as discourse. If a separation of discourse and practice is not meaningful in ontological terms, than the choice, Neumann suggests to be made, is rather on of which audience the scholar wants to address (the discourse theory people? The practice people?). The same concern was frequently re-raised in the two days. That the issue can be phrased differently became clear in the debate on sovereign practices. Here the question was phrased as an issue of whether one can focus on constitutional dimensions and practice simultaneously or whether a choice should be made.

2) A second concern was the question on how issues of power can be addressed within a practice-theoretical framework. That the issue was controversial was not surprising giving that the question of how to conceptualize power is one of the major dividing lines among theorists of practice. While Schatzki argues that power does not necessarily be the focus of analysis[4], theorists in the critical tradition (from Bourdieu to Focuault) tend to frame power as a play of domination and resistance, while those in the pragmatist tradition (such as Joas or Latour) understand power rather as the capacity to act (agency). Following these lines, the participants suggested that there are different possibilities to conceptualize power. Centrally the suggestion was to think along the lines of productive power – practice as bringing about sthg. – and power as a bundle of resources assembled by a practice and which are available to its participants.

3) A third major concern during the two days workshop was the issue of what “change” means from a theory of practice perspective. Often the order established by practice is interpreted as fairly stable reluctant to change, notably if the focus of a practice framework is centered on routine and tacit knowledge. Neumann introduced the case discussed in his 2007 article. As he suggests text production practice at a ministry of foreign affair is a case of a practice that is a routine operation in a way that it hinders/blocks any change. Trine Flockhart in her discussion of NATO presented a very different case and suggested that organizations are continuously changing. Her opponent argument was partially due to her wider scope (NATOs development in 60 years, Neumann focusing on the production of three speeches). Yet, both cases raise the larger issue on how stable and how delimiting we consider practices to be. As was suggested there are different ways to conceive of the change of practice. One ways is to see change as induced by the ‘outside’ of the practice (such as environmental pressures, or eventual ruptures causing the practice to fail). A second view is to consider that any practice needs to be adjusted to continuously changing situations in which it is performed, and hence is to a minor degree (let’s say 5%) continuously changing. A different view is to see the change in practice in relation to the emergence of new practices. As was suggested, new practices can emerge around new objects being invented.

While this is far from a representative summary of a rich and intense debate, these X issues are puzzles and remain to be addressed in further developing our concepts of practice in and for international relations.

 References:

Adler, Emanuel. 2008. “The Spread of Security Communities: Communities of Practice, Self-Restraint, and NATO’s Post–Cold War Transformation.” European Journal of International Relations 14(2): 195-230.

Adler-Nissen, Rebecca: Sovereignty as Practice: Post-Colonial Microstates in the Margins of Europe, workshop paper

Büger, Christian: International Organizations as Arenas of Practice: Authority, Dysfunctionality and the United Nations, workshop paper

Flockhart, Trine: NATO’s Finalité: Identity, Narratives and Practice, workshop paper

Kustermans, Jorg: Practice, Community, and Democratic Peace, workshop paper

Neumann, Iver B. 2002. “Returning Practice to the Linguistic Turn: The Case of Diplomacy.” Millennium – Journal of International Studies 31(3): 627-651.

Neumann, Iver B. 2007. “‘‘A Speech That the Entire Ministry May Stand for,’’ or: Why Diplomats Never Produce Anything New.” International Political Sociology 1(2): 183-200.

Neumann, Iver B. and Ole Jacob Sending. 2010. Governing the Global Polity: Practice, Mentality, Rationality, forthcoming ms.

Pouliot, Vincent. 2008. “The Logic of Practicality: A Theory of Practice of Security Communities.” International Organization 62(02): 257-288.

Reckwitz, Andreas. 2002. “Toward a Theory of Social Practices.” European Journal Of Social Theory 5(2): 243-263.

Schatzki, Ted. 2002. “Social Science in Society.” Inquiry 45(1): 119-138…

Schatzki, Theodore R. 1996. Social Practices. A Wittgensteinian approach to human activity and the social. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Schatzki, Theodore R. 2002. The site of the social. A philosophical account of the constitution of social life and change. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Schatzki, Theodore R. 2005. “Peripheral Vision: The Sites of Organizations.” Organization Studies 26(3): 465-484.

[2] Cp. Reckwitz 2002.

[3] Centrally Schatzki 1996, but also his later works such as Schatzki 2002, Schatzki 2005.

[4] Cp. Schatzki 2002.

The recent issue of International Studies Review (11:3) presents a discussion forum on different expressions of pragmatism in International Relations. Edited by Gunther Hellmann, it collects short pieces from Joerg Friedrichs, Helena Rytoevuori-Apunen, Joerg Friedrichs, Rudra Sil, Markus Kornprobst and Patrick T. Jackson. Hellmann presents an introduction to the work of John Dewey and stresses the importance of creativity. Friedrichs and Sil present in short their arguments for “abductive reasoning” and respectively an “analytical eclecticism” developed more detailed elsewhere.  Kornprobst introduces his understanding of a “rhetorical pragmatism”, which he sees as crucial for studying diplomacy and language. Rytoevuori-Apunen bases her discussion on Pierce to argue for the primacy of practice, and Jackson makes a case for the priority of ontology and to read pragmatism as an ontological theory in the first place. 

The forum well documents that the introduction of pragmatism to IR, so far reflects primarily the philosophical side of a practice turn. To some degree paradoxically (or at least ironically) authors remain pre-occupied with philosophical and methodological issues (with maybe the exception of Rytoevuori-Apunen’s essay), rather than practicing pragmatism. Indeed it is demonstrated that pragmatism stands on weak grounds to offer potential research programmes, and has to be complemented with sociological and/or anthropological research frameworks. However, a forum of this character is a valuable primer, and might inspire future writings using pragmatism and mixing, combining it with others work to get closer to IR phenomena.

There always has been a tension between post-structuralist authors and theorists of practice. As frequently argued, discourse theorists have been overly concerned with structures, language and long term historical development, while agency and non-liguistic, material aspects have come out of sight. Arguably these tension between theories of practice and discourse theorists are easing. Firstly, the practice dimension of classical post-structuralist authors is more and more revealed and brought to the fore. For instance Foucault clearly argued in his later works, that “discourse is not life, regular, daily practice is”. Secondly, discourse theorists have aimed to better acknowledge for materiality and practice. Work in this direction is conducted by Laclau and Mouffe. Another example along these lines is the recent book by Ruth Wodak. Wodak an distinguished discourse theorist, associated with the Vienna School’s  Discourse Historical Approach, investigates in her recent book the daily life of European parliamentarians. Here’s the publishers description:

 Nowadays we have unprecedented levels of access to information; politics and the media share a closer relationship than ever before, and the more successful politicians acquire the status of quasi-celebrities. Despite this, there is widespread disenchantment with politics, a growing cynicism about the political process, and much concern about the so-called ‘democratic deficit’. And yet, how much do we actually know about the real world of politics? Is our eroding trust in politicians based on a lack of understanding about the activities they actually engage in?
 
In an extensive critical ethnography of the European Parliament, typical ‘orders and disorders of discourse’ are identified that illustrate the discursive mechanisms by which politics are organised in this and other (transnational, national and regional) arenas. The intricate complexity of ‘power-knowledge’ in the daily quest for hegemony is analysed in detail, carefully documenting politicians’ movement across many ‘communities of practice’, employing a huge range of genres, conversational styles, argumentative moves, and (in)direct pragmatic devices, as part of their ‘professional habitus’. Furthermore, the critical discourse analysis is juxtaposed with its fictionalised representation in the American TV soap The West Wing, which constructs an idealised version of this ‘backstage’, conveying to a global audience a highly simplistic account of what politics entails. This book goes behind the scenes of politics, uncovering the reality of daily ‘politics as usual’, and contrasting this with the glamorised, often sensationalised world of politics presented to us on television.

In an article published in the recent edition of the Journal of international Relations and Development, Gunther Hellmann argues for the value of a pragmatist “theory of thought and action” by discussing research on German foreign policy after 1990. Hellmann relies on Albert Hirschmann, John Dewey and Hans Joas as theoretical resources and argues for what he calls a “contingency view of thought of action”, which he contrasts with a “systematicity view of thought and action”. For Hellmann, the latter “view” has been dominant in IR (as has become routine, KKV is taken as the scapegoat). Yet, the systematicity view has for Hellmann serious disadvantages. As it attempts to tailor research problms (such as the evolution of German foreign policy) “to the needs of scientific inference by specifying testable outcomes and by keeping causal variables to a minimum in line with disciplinary debates.” (Hellmann 2009, 278). As he claims to show such a view leads to “paradgimatist fixations”, which missed “some of the complexities that resulted from the radically changed situation [for German foreign policy] after 1990″.  Here is the abstract of the paper:

After unification in 1990, German foreign policy has received unprecedented attention from the most prominent journals of International Relations (IR) theory. This paper argues that this was due largely to the function which the German ‘case’ served in the discourse of IR/foreign policy theory. Realists as well as liberals and constructivists were heavily enticed by it since it seemed an excellent case for all of them to prove the worth of their theories. In doing so, however, the subsumtionist logic applied did not only foster identical exclusionist theoretical claims. It also cultivated a systematicity view of thought and action which was wholly unreceptive for potentially novel foreign policy practices to appear. The paper documents and critiques these trends as a typical phenomenon of a paradigmatic discipline. It then outlines an alternative pragmatist approach to foreign policy analysis which emphasizes the contingency and situated creativity of social action. It is argued, in particular, that this approach provides for a more adequate description of the changes which German foreign policy has undergone. Moreover, by drawing on the insights of allegedly incommensurable paradigms and by systematically integrating the inherent contingency of social action, it also shows how a logic of reconstruction can open up avenues for cross-paradigmatic dialogue.

For more on Gunther Hellmann see the Practice Turn(s)/Key authors in IR list…

A new page is available on the praxeology complementary pages. It lists key authors using theories of practice in IR. The page is filed under practice turn(s) key authors

A workshop on theories of practices and global governance is being organized at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. Iver Neumann will be the keynote speaker. Deadline for abstracts is the 15th of September. 

Here’s the Call for Papers:

Practices of International Governance, 27-28 November, 2009

Background: To the extent that societies are subject to processes of globalization, problems increasingly have to be dealt with “beyond the nation-state.” There is a growing need for international governance. This is not a new, and even less so a contested claim. Unsurprisingly, then, political salience gives rise to scholarly attention. How is it possible to understand the presence/absence, nature, and evolution of international governance? Scholarly accounts of international governance typically rely on diverging social theories. Rationalist social theory informs the dispute over relative versus absolute gains, whereas constructivist approaches address the importance of norm development and changing identities in the relationship between the nation-state and the plurality of actors the contemporary international game. From yet another perspective, discursive approaches can point to shifting loci and bases of authority in these governance structures. Their focus is on the conditions of international action.

In recent times, a range of academics has started to question the singular focus on discourse, and is instead suggesting a focus on “practices” (see e.g. Neumann 2002, 2007, 2009, Büger and Gadinger 2005, Müller 2008, Pouliot 2008). A major concern in this practice turn is how practices relate to discourse and its institutionalisation, and how they relate to social and cultural change. This workshop on the “practices of international governance” will both focus broadly on the practice turn in social theory, and its relevance for the discipline of political science, and explore its relevance for the study of changes in international governance specifically. Special attention will be paid to its methodological implications.

This two-day workshop will be convened by one of the key participants in the ‘practices of governance’ debate, prof. Iver Neumann ( Oslo University). Besides roundtable discussions on “the practice turn” in social theory and international relations, participants will present their research in panel sessions.

We are soliciting three types of papers: analyses that
» contribute to the theorisation of the practice turn in international governance; and/or
» develop methodologies to apply these (meta)theoretical insights to
» empirical studies of practices of international governance

Both junior and senior researches are invited to send a paper proposal. Contributions can take the form of a regular conference paper or of a research design. It is our intention to publish a selection of the papers either as a special issue or as an edited volume.

Deadline paper proposals (abstracts): 15 September 2009

Location: The workshop will be hosted by the University of Antwerp, Belgium

Fees: None. We have applied for funding to finance accommodation, lunches and dinner for participants. The organization of the workshop is conditional upon obtaining this funding (which excludes participants’ traveling costs).

Paper abstracts and information requests can be sent to
Jorg Kustermans (Jorg.Kustermans@ua.ac.be)
Tanja Aalberts (taalberts@fsw.leidenuniv.nl)

No blog that doesn’t start with a Hello world! statement. Why break with the tradition? The blog is now finally online. Yet much remains work in progress… (surprise, surprise…) However, enjoy!