1. PRACTICE-BASED STUDIES AND THEIR DIFFUSION: brief history
Insightful Encounters - Regional Development and Practice-Based Learning
PRACTICE-BASED STUDIES AND THEIR DIFFUSION: brief history
Silvia Gherardi
Research Unit on Communication, Organizational Learning and Aesthetics (RUCOLA)

2. Practice-based theorizing
Silvia Gherardi
Research Unit on Communication, Organizational Learning and Aesthetics (RUCOLA)

3. Practice? A polysemic term…..
Practice as a learning method: engaging in an activity again and again….
‘practice makes perfect’
Practice as an occupation or field of activity…..
‘medical practice’
Practice as the way something is done…
‘canonical practice’
1 the dynamic of practice: doing again and again is’ repetition sans repetition’. Change and persistence as refinement of practical knowledge
2. Not only professions, but also regional development, public policies…innovation…
3 how insititutionalisation takes place? Judgements: on efficacy, ethic and aesthetics

4. IN-BETWEEN CONCEPT
Habit Action

5. IN-BETWEEN CONCEPT
Knowedge Action

6. NEITHER/ NOR…..or BOTH/AND
Habit Action
Knowing Doing
Knowing and doing = knowledgable way of doing
No separation between doing and knowing

7. “practice” within the learning and knowing literature
This focus on practice is intended as a way out both from the mentalistic vision of knowledge, considered as the explicit and mental attribute of an individual subject and from the knowledge management conception of commodification of knowledge.
Knowledge as a situated activity, as knowing-in-practice, practice as the locus of knowledge enactement.

8. A confusion in the field due to two ways of understanding practice.
practices identified with regularities or commonalities among the activities of social groups:
‘arrays of activities’
practices characterized in terms of normative accountability of various performances:
‘respond to norms of correctness and incorrectness ?

9. Two approaches
One more objectivist/deterministic = practices as regularities, patterns of traditional actions, ’what people do’
One more subjectivist/ constructionist = the way people collectively sustain a certain way of doing things together, practices as emergent constantly refined, ‘how people do’.
1 perspective exogenic
2 perspective endogenic (endogenous and exogenous)

10. Practice as epistemology
A distinction is done between theories of action and theories of praxis (Cohen, 1996):
Theories of action locate the source of significant pattern of action in subjectively meaningful action and intentionality (Weber, Parsons)
Theories of praxis in the way conduct is enacted, performed, or produced (Dewey, Mead, Garfinkel, Giddens)
1 more volitional, start from actors and their actions
2 more ecological, start from actions and relations of association between human and non human

11. Two important implications:
social action and social knowledge must be regarded as activities inseparably woven together;
knowledge cannot be viewed as a conscious activity involving meaningful acts, for it presupposes only presumed or indirect references to norms, meanings and values that it claims to apply or to follow.

12. And a first conclusion……
Study of the practical organization of knowledge, in the form of methods of reasoning and acting, the association of human and non-human elements, and the normative accountability of practices, is one of the most important directions taken by empirical studies which use the practice-based approach.

13. ‘PBS studies are interested …
To the process trough which people acquire new knowledge and skills (knowing-in-practice),
On-the job, in interaction with their closest colleagues and in networks of practice.
Knowing-in-practice is enacted in the materiality and relationality of the context of work,
Which provides resources for people to refine their practices.

14. ‘PBS’ are well suited …
To the study of the transmission and development of practical knowledge,
Since people acquire and develop knowledge that cannot be fully articulated
because it is contingent to their context of work, it has the form of the ‘logic of practice’ and difficult to transfer outside it.

15. ‘PBS’ are well suited … To the study of the dynamics of practice:
Continuous change (repetition without repetition, change as refinement),
And stabilization (anchoring in the materiality of objects and technologies, in norms, in culture)

16. A metaphor as conclusion (Bauman, 2000:82)
“Derrida invites his readers to think in travel – or, more exactly, to ‘think travel’. That means that unique activity of departing, going away from chez soi, going far, towards the unknown, risking all the risk, pleasures and dangers that the ‘unknown’ has in store (even the risk of non returning).”
We may think practice