Abstract
What is an actor? What does it mean to act? Questions of actors and agency touch upon the core interest of social sciences and have been addressed from different theoretical angles. This article aims to investigate the term ‘actor’ and proposes to (re)configure actors as well as agency as practically achieved. This contribution draws on practice theories by Reckwitz and Schatzki to show that actors are constituted in practices while being constitutive of them. It then argues for a conceptualisation of actors as ‘actors-enacted’ by referring to recent work in actor-network theory. Such practice-based understandings do not only provide a new perspective on actors in theory, but encourage us to take actors and their emergence themselves as a topic of empirical research. Next, I elaborate and reflect upon methodological implications of a practice-based investigation of actors: (1) the necessity to explore sites where actors and agencies are observably achieved and actorship itself is of central concern for practitioners and (2) the emphasis on praxiography as a research strategy. Finally, using an example from a detailed study on how actors and agencies are implicated in practicing a public debate on assisted reproductive technologies, I illustrate the work involved in enacting actors and by doing so, highlight the situated accomplishment of actors and agencies in practice. The article concludes by arguing for treating our own research as theoretical and empirical practices that configure actors in particular ways.
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Notes
- 1.
Andreas Reckwitz makes a similar point in his work on subjects, but introduces yet another distinction between actors and subjects. If we want to think about individuals in comparison to actors, we have to acknowledge that individuals or subjects participate in different practices. Reckwitz argues that ‘as every agent carries out a multitude of different social practices, the individual is the unique crossing point of practices, of bodily-mental routines’ (Reckwitz 2002, p. 256). Consequently, we find an understanding of individuals or subjects as fragmented in relation to each practice.
- 2.
They also differ in how they view the relationship between arrangements and practices. Whereas Schatzki conceptualises practices as the context of arrangements, John Law argues that ‘practices are detectable and somewhat ordered sets of material-semiotic relations’ (Law 2011, p. 157).
- 3.
Callon and Rabeharisoa (2004) provide an excellent example of such a site. They elaborate a specific type of construction of agency in a public interview by analysing a case of refusal of that agency.
- 4.
This example is part of the fieldwork for my Ph.D. thesis on the public bioethics controversy regarding assisted reproductive technologies in Austria. I conducted interviews with participants of the public debate, visited and took notes of meetings and events organised by different associations or public authorities and conducted an extensive document analysis.
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Pichelstorfer, A. (2017). (Re)Configuring Actors in 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_6
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