It is through action and interaction within practices that mind, rationality and knowledge are constituted and social life is organized, reproduced and transformed. During the past two decades, practice theory has emerged as a potent challenger to prevalent ways of thinking about human life and sociality, which have until now focused either on individual minds and actions or social structures, systems and discourses. The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory is the first volume to bring together philosophers, sociologists and scholars of science to explore the significance of practices in human life.

The essays focus on three overall themes: the character and establishment of social order, the psychological basis of human activity and contemporary posthumanist challenges. Philosophers such as Wittgenstein and Heidegger who have been influential in the shaping of practice theory are also discussed. In examining these themes and thinkers the essays document how practice theory stands opposed to prominent modes of thought such as individualism, intellectualism, structuralism, systems theory, and many strains of humanism and poststructuralism.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Introduction: practice theory
THEODORE R.SCHATZKI

Part I: Practices and social orders

1. Practice as collective action
BARRY BARNES
2. Human practices and the observability of the ‘macro- 37 social’
JEFF COULTER
3. Practice mind-ed orders
THEODORE R.SCHATZKI
4. Pragmatic regimes governing the engagement with the world
LAURENT THÉVENOT
5. What anchors cultural practices
ANN SWIDLER

Part II: Inside practices

6. Wittgenstein and the priority of practice
DAVID BLOOR
7. What is tacit knowledge?
H.M.COLLINS
8. Throwing out the tacit rule book: learning and practices
STEPHEN TURNER
9. Ethnomethodology and the logic of practice
MICHAEL LYNCH

PART III: Posthumanist challenges

10. How Heidegger defends the possibility of a correspondence theory of truth with respect to the entities of natural science
HUBERT L.DREYFUS
11. Practice and posthumanism: social theory and a history of agency
ANDREW PICKERING
12. Objectual practice
KARIN KNORR CETINA
13. Two concepts of practices
JOSEPH ROUSE
14. Derridian dispersion and Heideggerian articulation: general tendencies in the practices that govern intelligibility
CHARLES SPINOSA

Bibliography
Index

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