Abstract
This article addresses the problem of adhering to ontology consistent with theories of social practice while conducting ethnographic research with focus on immersion and openness. As a partial solution to this contradiction, I formulate an outline of a ‘sensibility for practice’, a filtering and sense-making device to be used as a fieldwork tool. I believe this goes a long way towards producing a processual and experience-near account of sociopolitical life while remaining true to the theoretical commitments of practice theories. The sensibility for practice consists of four main principles derived from the theories of social practice and that enable us to hold those theories lightly: focus on what people actually do (and the materials they ‘converse’ with); focus on everydayness; focus on the work of assembling, structuring and ordering; and focus on reflexivity. For each of the principles, I identify three specific ‘loci of attention’ that can serve as sensitising concepts during fieldwork. Sensibility for practice represents a narrowed-down approach to ethnographic research that is able to accommodate various strands of practice studies, including the interpretivist, ‘wholist’ as well as associationist stream.
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Notes
- 1.
Note that ‘wholism’ here refers to studying practices as wholes, not to wholist ontologies of the social as in Schatzki (1996b).
- 2.
It bears further thought whether ‘we rarely know our ontological position/s in advance of a research project. These are not things that one decides on rationally, explicitly, and instrumentally’ (Yanow, personal communication).
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Acknowledgements
Part of the work on this chapter was conducted in the frame of the postgraduate program Sociology of Social Practices and thanks to the funding obtained from the Institute of Advanced Studies (IHS), Vienna. I thank all the participants of the Organizational Ethnography: Issues and Challenges seminar held on 8–11 July 2013 at the Department of Sociology, IHS. In particular, I thank Dvora Yanow for her patience in addressing my questions and her critical and useful remarks on the first version of this chapter. I am also thankful to Angela Wroblewski and Michael Jonas for their useful remarks on the previous versions of this article. The work on this aricle has been co-funded from a research project Knowledge utilization in production of policy documents in policy making process (Využitie poznania pri príprave dokumentov v tvorbe verejnej politiky), supported by the Ministry of Education of the Slovak Republic under the APVV grant scheme (no. APVV-0880-12). I would like to express my gratitude to the funders and the project co-ordinator Katarína Staroňová.
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Sedlačko, M. (2017). Conducting Ethnography with a Sensibility for Practice. In: Jonas, M., Littig, B., Wroblewski, A. (eds) Methodological Reflections on Practice Oriented Theories. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52897-7_4
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