The “Social Science of Practice”: An Introductory Summary and Analysis

Abstract

The “theory of practice” was developed mainly in order to rise above the common tendency to treat the subjective and the objective as an either/or binary. We might rely mainly on subjective presuppositions to arrive at our scholarly conclusions, or engage only in the compilation and accumulation of empirical evidence, but practice is unavoidably born of the interaction between the two dimensions. Precisely for this reason, we suggest that scholarly research proceed from actual practice, in order to rise above the either/or subjective/objective binary, and attend to both theoretical construction and empirical discovery, to focus deliberately on the inter-relating of the two. This article attempts to use actual scholarly practices as concrete examples to illustrate what is meant by the “social science of practice” approach to research.