Toward a Social Practice Theory of Relational Competing

This paper brings together the competitive dynamics and strategy-aspractice literatures to investigate relational competition. Drawing on a global ethnography of the reinsurance market, we develop the concept of micro-competitions, which are the focus of competitors’ everyday competitive practices. We find variation in relational or rivalrous competition by individual competitors across the phases of a micro-competition, between competitors within a micro-competition, and across multiple micro-competitions. These variations arise from the interplay between the unfolding competitive arena and the implementation of each firm’s strategic portfolio. We develop a conceptual framework that makes four contributions to: relational competition; reconceptualizing action and response; elaborating on the awareness-motivation-capability framework within competitive dynamics; and the recursive dynamic by which implementing strategy inside firms shapes, and is shaped by, the competitive arena

Numeracy as Social Practice: Global and Local Perspectives

Edited by Keiko Yasukawa, Alan Rogers, Kara Jackson and Brian Street Routledge, London and New York, 2018, 260 pages. ISBN 978113828444

“‘Suicidology as a Social Practice': A Reply to Tom Widger.”

In recent years, a growing body of critical literature has emerged that challenges the dominant norms and practices of mainstream suicidological research. Concerns over epistemology and methodology, the (political) rationales that determine how suicide is researched and responded to, and the lack of measurable advances in knowledge and prevention, are, for a growing number of scholars, symptoms of a more widely felt paradigm crisis in contemporary suicide research. Tom Widger (2015) crystallises the incommensurability between the globalising paradigm of ‘scientific’ suicidology and the meanings and nuances of self-inflicted death in specific cultural contexts, extending the concerns raised by our article ‘Suicidology as a Social Practice’ (2014). While recent debates have largely focused on issues of methodological pluralism as a way of moving suicidology forward, Widger questions the degree by which any study of suicide can truly subvert the suicidological paradigm when it produces both the subject and object involved. As he says, the very concept of suicide is suicidological

Assessing concept possession as an explicit and social practice

We focus on issues of learning assessment from the point of view of an investigation of philosophical elements in teaching. We contend that assessment of concept possession at school based on ordinary multiple-choice tests might be ineffective because it overlooks aspects of human rationality illuminated by Robert Brandom’s inferentialism––the view that conceptual content largely coincides with the inferential role of linguistic expressions used in public discourse. More particularly, we argue that multiple-choice tests at schools might fail to accurately assess the possession of a concept or the lack of it, for they only check the written outputs of the pupils who take them, without detecting the inferences actually endorsed or used by them. We suggest that school tests would acquire reliability if they enabled pupils to make the reasons of their answers or the inferences they use explicit, so as to contribute to what Brandom calls the game of giving and asking for reasons. We explore the possibility to put this suggestion into practice by deploying two-tier multiple-choice tests

Diagramming social practice theory:An interdisciplinary experiment exploring practices as networks

Achieving a transition to a low-carbon energy system is now widely recognised as a key challenge facing humanity. To date, the vast majority of research addressing this challenge has been conducted within the disciplines of science, engineering and economics utilising quantitative and modelling techniques. However, there is growing awareness that meeting energy challenges requires fundamentally socio-technical solutions and that the social sciences have an important role to play. This is an interdisciplinary challenge but, to date, there remain very few explorations of, or reflections on, interdisciplinary energy research in practice. This paper seeks to change that by reporting on an interdisciplinary experiment to build new models of energy demand on the basis of cutting-edge social science understandings. The process encouraged the social scientists to communicate their ideas more simply, whilst allowing engineers to think critically about the embedded assumptions in their models in relation to society and social change. To do this, the paper uses a particular set of theoretical approaches to energy use behaviour known collectively as social practice theory (SPT) - and explores the potential of more quantitative forms of network analysis to provide a formal framework by means of which to diagram and visualize practices. The aim of this is to gain insight into the relationships between the elements of a practice, so increasing the ultimate understanding of how practices operate. Graphs of practice networks are populated based on new empirical data drawn from a survey of different types (or variants) of laundry practice. The resulting practice networks are analysed to reveal characteristics of elements and variants of practice, such as which elements could be considered core to the practice, or how elements between variants overlap, or can be shared. This promises insights into energy intensity, flexibility and the rootedness of practices (i.e. how entrenched/ established they are) and so opens up new questions and possibilities for intervention. The novelty of this approach is that it allows practice data to be represented graphically using a quantitative format without being overly reductive. Its usefulness is that it is readily applied to large datasets, provides the capacity to interpret social practices in new ways, and serves to open up potential links with energy modeling. More broadly, a significant dimension of novelty has been the interdisciplinary approach, radically different to that normally seen in energy research. This paper is relevant to a broad audience of social scientists and engineers interested in integrating social practices with energy engineering

Reading as social practice: the Beyond the Book research project

Beyond the Book (BTB) is a trans-Atlantic collaborative interdisciplinary research project that analyses mass reading events and the contemporary meanings of reading in the UK, the USA and Canada. This article gives an overview of the origins, aims, scope and methods of the project