Knowra Social practice Social practice A socially organized, recurring pattern of action through which people conduct everyday life. It brings together shared understandings, practical skills, and material arrangements.
Practice theory : A family of approaches that explains social life through routinized activities and their relations. It supplies the broader framework for treating recurring activity as the unit of social analysis.
Theodore Schatzki : An American philosopher whose practice theory analyzes organized bundles of doings and sayings. His account specifies how practical activity forms an intelligible, socially organized whole.
Pierre Bourdieu : A French sociologist who developed concepts including habitus, field, and forms of capital. His account links practical action to embodied dispositions and unequal social fields.
Consumption : The acquisition and use of goods and services to meet needs, express identities, and organize life. Consumption is understood as part of patterned activities, not simply as individual purchase decisions.
Methodological individualism : An explanatory approach that accounts for social phenomena through the actions and properties of individuals. Practice theory shifts attention from isolated actors to organized activity and shared conditions.
Habit : A learned disposition to respond in a regular way to familiar situations. Repeated action can become habitual without being purely automatic or private.
Practice as entity and performance : A distinction between a practice as a shared pattern and its particular enactments. It explains how performances vary while remaining recognizable as the same practice.
Anthony Giddens : A British sociologist known for structuration theory and analyses of modernity. Structuration theory treats recurrent practices as both shaped by and reproducing social structures.
Energy use : The consumption of energy by people, organizations, and technologies. Practice analysis connects household energy demand to routines, appliances, and expectations of comfort.
Rational choice theory : An approach that models action as choice among options according to preferences and constraints. It contrasts with explanations centered on embodied know-how and routines rather than calculated decisions.
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