Abstract
This chapter discusses two temporal approaches to social order that accentuate the role of novelty, change and temporality in accounts of social organization, activity and human action, namely, the pragmatist approach of George Herbert Mead and the practice theoretical approach of Theodore R. Schatzki. The chapter investigates how they conceive of novelty in their theoretical accounts. With this in mind, an empirical case from an organizational setting in the creative industry is introduced: the production of the film Antboy. To illustrate the points about novelty, the case is discussed with the conceptual resources put at our disposal by the two approaches to better understand how organizing for the future can in fact accommodate the processes of creativity that bring about novelty.
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This does not mean that normativity is absent in practice theoretical accounts—only that so-called regulist accounts of normativity are problematic. Joseph Rouse (2017) argues that practice theory must adopt a temporal conception of normativity: ‘What unifies a temporally extended social practice is not some feature that its individual performances have in common, but the mutual responsiveness of those performances over time.’
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Buch, A., Stjerne, I.S. (2018). What’s New? Temporality in Practice Theory and Pragmatism. In: Krämer, H., Wenzel, M. (eds) How Organizations Manage the Future. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74506-0_3
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