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Concept
Practice theory
Summary
Practice theory (or praxeology, theory of social practices) is a body of social theory within anthropology and sociology that explains society and culture as the result of structure and individual agency. Practice theory emerged in the late 20th century and was first outlined in the work of the French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu.
Practice theory developed in reaction to the Structuralist school of thought, developed by social scientists such as Claude Lévi-Strauss who saw human behavior and organization systems as products of innate universal structures that reflect the mental structures of humans. Structuralist theory asserted that these structures governed all human societies.
Practice theory is also built on the concept of agency. For practice theorists, the individual agent is an active participant in the formation and reproduction of their social world.
In 1972, French theorist and sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, published Outline of a Theory of Practice. Bourdieu's theory of practice emerged from his ethnographic field work in French occupied Algeria among the Kabyle at the outbreak of the Algerian War of Independence. The original goal of his work in Algeria was to understand the Algerian culture and its internal laws in the effort to understand the conflict. His aim was to find the underlying rules and laws in Kabyle society. Bourdieu later rejected the idea that culture and social life can be reduced to the acting out of rules and the primacy of social structures over the individual. Instead, Bourdieu argues, culture and society are more fully understood as the product of dynamic interactions between social actors and structure. Anthony Giddens and Michel de Certeau, who also wrote on practice theory in the late 1970's and 1980's, laid the foundation for the body of theory along with Bourdieu.
Bourdieu's theory of practice sets up a relationship between structure and the habitus and practice of the individual agent, dealing with the "relationship between the objective structures and the cognitive and motivating structures which they produce and which tend to reproduce them".
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