Social Practice Theory

Bourdieu’s practice theory assumes a system of dispositions that conditions how practitioners perceive, think, or act. He refers to social practices as “regulated improvisations”: Actions can never be completely deterministic due to the unfolding contingencies of the situation at hand […] Nor can actions be completely random as they are predisposed by sedimented structures and regularities making up social practices.

This section reminded me of a project that I was working on a few years ago regarding the performative practices of cooking, and how a recipe is never the same, and the performative aspect of working on a recipe is never the same, but the final product is pretty much the same at the end. This is something that De Certeau and talks about in his practices of everyday life:

I already knew all the sounds: the gentle hiss of simmering
water, the sputtering of melting meat drippings, and the dull thud of the
kneading hand. A recipe or an inductive word sufficed to arouse a strange
anamnesis whereby ancient knowledge and primitive experiences were
reactivated in fragments of which I as the heiress and guardian without wanting to be.
[…]
Like all human action, these female tasks are a product of a culturalorder: from one society to another, their internal hierarchy and processes one social class to another, the techniques that preside over these tasks, like rules of action and models for behavior that touch on them, are transformed.

This idea of inherited tacit knowledge and a sensory-rich practice such cooking is a good example for what constitutes a social practices that is equally improvisational but also conditioned by the environment and the everyday life system. I find this very interesting to compare to the practice of doing laundry that Mylan and Southerton talk about in their paper, and how doing the laundry became an activity to accommodate the needs and shared practices embedded in personal relationships within a larger socio-economical structure of working hours, commute, and daily practices that are directly linked to social structures such as family composition and unit sizes.

in this sense, social practices are a continuous negotiation of performing tasks, being in the world, and adhering to certain dispositions that condition our way of functioning in the world.