Where does practice collide?

In social theory, a practice is the basic building block of social life: a routine, embodied way of doing and saying things that many people carry out in shared ways, such as cooking, queuing, or working. Andreas Reckwitz's 2002 article Toward a Theory of Social Practices gathered this view from Bourdieu, Giddens, and others, and placed the practice, rather than the individual mind or the text, at the centre of what counts as social. Pierre Bourdieu's Outline of a Theory of Practice tied practices to habitus, the dispositions people take on from their place in society and then enact with little conscious thought. The referent here is a pattern of collective activity that reproduces social order, studied by describing how the doing is organised, not one person honing a skill, a workplace, or the drills a learner repeats. This meaning treats practice as a unit for analysing the whole social world.[1][2]

Unit

A routine, shared way of doing and saying things, taken as the basic unit of social life

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Studied by describing and comparing how a practice is organised and carried out, through observation, interviews, and ethnography

In the study of learning, a practice is the shared activity of a community that a newcomer joins, and learning is understood as growing participation in that activity rather than the pouring of facts into a head. Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger's 1991 book Situated Learning described this as legitimate peripheral participation: an apprentice starts at the edge of a community's practice, doing small real tasks, and moves toward full membership as competence grows. Here practice names what a community of practitioners does together, tailors, midwives, or engineers, along with its tools, language, and standards. The referent is taking part in a living community, and knowledge lives in that shared doing rather than in any one person. This meaning overlaps with the social-theory one, since both centre on shared activity, but it is aimed at how people come to know by taking part.[3]

Unit

Taking part in a community's shared activity, from the edge toward full membership

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Traced by studying how newcomers move from peripheral tasks to fuller participation within a community over time

In the psychology of skill, practice is repeated activity aimed at improving performance, and not all of it counts the same. Anders Ericsson, Ralf Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Römer's 1993 article The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance argued that expert skill grows chiefly from deliberate practice: effortful, well-designed drills with clear goals and prompt feedback, sustained over years, rather than mere play or idle repetition. The wider literature also records the power law of practice, in which the time to complete a task falls steadily as the number of repetitions rises. The referent is a person's own rehearsal of a skill, counted in hours logged and measured by the gains in performance it produces. Unlike the social-theory meaning, this is about one individual getting better at something, not a pattern that binds a society together.[4]

Unit

Repeated, effortful rehearsal of a skill, counted in hours and sessions

Recovery means

Skill fades without upkeep, so gains are sustained only by continued rehearsal

Measured by

Measured by logged practice hours and by improvements in speed, accuracy, or expert performance on the trained task