GRASPING THE LOGIC OF PRACTICE: THEORIZING ......basic form of developing knowledge about the world; and (3) the logic of practice is constituted by the epistemological subject-object

GRASPING THE LOGIC OF PRACTICE:THEORIZING THROUGH PRACTICAL

RATIONALITY

JORGEN SANDBERGUniversity of Queensland

HARIDIMOS TSOUKASUniversity of Cyprus and University of Warwick

There is an increasing concern that management theories are not relevant to practice.In this article we contend that the overall problem is that most management theoriesare unable to capture the logic of practice because they are developed within theframework of scientific rationality. We elaborate practical rationality as an alterna-tive framework and show how it enables development of theories that grasp the logicof practice and, thus, are more relevant to management practice.

Practice has a logic which is not that of the logi-cian (Bourdieu,1990: 86).

The gap between theory and practice hasbeen a persistent concern in the applied socialsciences (Argyris & Schon, 1974; Lawler et al.,1999; Lindblom & Cohen, 1979; Lupton, 1983;Shapiro & Wagner DeCew, 1995). In organiza-tion and management science, in particular,there has been an increasing dissatisfactionwith management theories’ capacity to be rel-evant to management practice (Bartunek,Rynes, & Ireland, 2006; Ghoshal, 2005;Markides, 2007; McGahan, 2007; Starbuck, 2006;Tushman & O’Reilly, 2007; Van de Ven, 2007;Van de Ven & Johnson, 2006; Vermeulen, 2007).Growing evidence suggests that organization-al and management research produces knowl-edge that is distant from management prac-tice, rather than knowledge that helpsadvance that practice (Bennis & O’Toole, 2005;Ghoshal, 2005; Hambrick, 2007; Mintzberg,2004; Rynes, Giluk, & Brown, 2007; Schon, 1983;Van de Ven & Johnson, 2006). Repeated callshave been made to bridge the gap between theformal knowledge produced by managementscholars and the applied knowledge practition-

ers need (Cohen, 2007; Pfeffer, 2007; Saari, 2007;Van de Ven, 2007).

Except for the researchers who believe thetheory-practice gap cannot be bridged be-cause the system of scholarly knowledge pro-duction is radically different from businessorganizations (Kieser & Leiner, 2009) or itought to remain different (Grey, 2001), thereare two main explanations for the gap (Sha-piro, Kirkman, & Courtney, 2007; Van de Ven &Johnson, 2006): the “knowledge transfer prob-lem” explanation and the “knowledge produc-tion problem” explanation. The former claimsthat the theory-practice gap can be reducedvia better ways of communicating between ac-ademia and practice. The latter contends thatthe gap can be mitigated via more collabora-tive forms of research between scholars andpractitioners (Hodgkinson & Rousseau, 2009;Novotony, Scott, & Gibbons, 2001; Van de Ven,2007), better research designs (Lawler et al.,1999), and appropriate academic career incen-tives and editorial policies (Pfeffer, 2007).

While these explanations and the ensuingrecommendations are insightful and useful,they do not question the basic ontological-cum-epistemological (hereafter “onto-episte-mological”) premises underpinning the frame-work of scientific rationality within whichmost organization and management theorieshave been developed. This is problematic, be-cause if the theories we develop do not reso-nate with practitioners, what does this tell us

We thank guest editor Cynthia Hardy and the three anon-ymous reviewers for their constructive and insightful com-ments. This paper would not have taken the shape it didwithout the guest editor’s perceptive editorial commentsand the reviewers� helpfully challenging questioning.Thank you all.

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about our theories and the ways we developthem? What do practitioners experience “outin the real world” (John Reed, former CEO ofCitigroup; quoted in Weick, 2003: 453) that wefail to reflect in our theories (Chia & Holt, 2008;Mintzberg, 2005)? Could it be that the onto-epistemological assumptions we make aboutthe phenomena we investigate “artificialize”(Bruner, 1990: xiii) our objects of study, “stripout most of what matters” (Weick, 2007: 18),and lead to sterile research outcomes, typi-cally in the form of “mainstream journal arti-cles [that] are written as if they apply to somedisembodied abstracted realm” (Zald, 1996:256; see also Starbuck, 2006)? If so, why andhow does this happen? More important, howcan this problem be overcome?

In light of the above, our purpose in thisarticle is to explore the following question:How can organizational and management the-ories be developed so they better reflect theway actors enact their practice and, thus, aremore relevant to practice? To do this we firstidentify the key onto-epistemological assump-tions that have guided mainstream theory de-velopment in organization and managementscience. Those assumptions, we argue, derivefrom the framework of scientific rationality,which we describe and critique. In particular,we show that the scientific rationality frame-work prevents researchers from developingtheories that capture “the logic of practice”(Bourdieu, 1990). The result is that theoriesgenerated within the scientific rationalityframework (what we call here “scientific ra-tionality theories”) are not able to connect withorganizational practice and its practitioners.

Second, and more significant, we provide thealternative framework of practical rationality,which is largely based on the existential ontol-ogy of Heidegger (1996/1927) and those philoso-phers who broadly follow his line of thinking,such as Taylor (1985a,b), Dreyfus (1991), Polt(1999), and Schatzki (2002, 2005), together withinsights from the practice turn that is takingplace in organization and management scienceand the social sciences more broadly (Bourdieu,1990; Orlikowski, in press; Polkinghorne, 2004;Reckwitz, 2002; Sandberg & Dall’Alba, 2009;Schatzki, 2005). Practical rationality offers a co-herent onto-epistemological framework for gen-erating what we call “practical rationality theo-ries”—namely, theories that, insofar as they

explore how organizational practices are consti-tuted and enacted by actors, capture essentialaspects of the logic of practice. Practical ratio-nality theories, therefore, make it possible tosignificantly reduce the theory-practice gapwithin management and organization science.Moreover, the framework of practical rationalityprovides fresh insights into how recent practice-based organizational and management theoriz-ing (Gherardi, 2000, 2006; Jarzabkowski, Balogun,& Seidl, 2007; Nicolini, Gherardi, & Yanow, 2003;Orlikowski, in press; Tsoukas, 2005; Whittington,2006) may be further developed.

It should be noted that contrary to the possibleimpression that scientific rationality is merelyconcerned with theory (ignoring practice) andpractical rationality merely with practice (ignor-ing theory), they are equally concerned withboth theory and practice. Where the two frame-works differ is in their assumptions about howtheory and practice are related. If practical ra-tionality better captures the logic of practice, aswe will show in this article, it is not becausepractical rationality deals with practice whilescientific rationality allegedly does not (thatwould be a tautological argument to make). In-stead, it is because practical rationality, bymaking particular onto-epistemological as-sumptions concerning the relationship betweentheory and practice, makes theory a derivativeof practice and, thus, more reflective of the “rich-ness” of practice (Weick, 2007: 14). In contrast,scientific rationality, by making distinctly differ-ent onto-epistemological assumptions about thetheory-practice relation, makes practice deriva-tive of theory and, thus, practical relevancemore abstract and less rich.

The paper is organized as follows. We beginby outlining the main onto-epistemological as-sumptions underlying modern scientific ratio-nality and show why management theorizingthat is predicated on those assumptions fails toconnect with practitioners. Thereafter, we elab-orate practical rationality as an alternativeframework for theory development and showhow it enables the development of theories thatstay close to practice. We do so by presentingtwo main strategies for developing theoriesthrough practical rationality: the search for en-twinement and the search for temporary break-downs. Each strategy is illustrated with exam-ples from management research. We thendiscuss what contributions the practical ratio-

2011 339Sandberg and Tsoukas

nality framework makes to organization andmanagement research, its implications for the-ory development, and the benefits theorizingthrough practical rationality offers organization-al practice and theory. Finally, we concludewith a brief comparison between scientific ra-tionality theories and practical rationality theo-ries.

THE FRAMEWORK OF MODERN SCIENTIFICRATIONALITY

The scientific ideal of attaining objective andvalid knowledge about the world through de-tached observation and analysis (what Bourdieucalled “the scholastic attitude” [1998: 127–140])has been the driving force of modern science formost of its history (Mirowski, 1991; Rorty, 1989,1991; Taylor, 1985b; Toulmin, 1982, 1990). Fromsuch a perspective, the task of the researcher isto observe and theoretically represent the worldof objects, and to do so “from outside it” (Toul-min, 1982: 238). Specifically, modern scientificrationality can be seen as consisting of threeinterconnected core assumptions that have his-torically underpinned scientific inquiries, in-cluding theory development in organization andmanagement research: (1) human reality is con-stituted by discrete entities with distinct proper-ties; (2) the subject-object relation is the mostbasic form of developing knowledge about theworld; and (3) the logic of practice is constitutedby the epistemological subject-object relation.Below we unpack these three assumptions fur-ther.

First, human reality is thought to be made upof discrete entities with certain pregiven proper-ties. The entity assumption forms a cornerstonein the conventional Greek-Western philosophytradition, in which reality or, to be more specific,being is conceptualized as the is of things (Chia& Holt, 2008: 474; Inwagen, 2001; King, 2001). AsKing put it, “When Greek-Western philosophyspeaks of to be, it thinks of the is of a thing”(2001: 12). Saying that a thing is typically meansthat “things” such as trees, computers, organi-zations, culture, leadership, and so forth possesspregiven properties and exist independently ofan observer but can be captured (i.e., repre-sented) by the human mind (Rorty, 1991; Varela,Thompson, & Rosch, 1991).

Second, from regarding reality as made up ofdiscrete entities follows the assumption that the

most basic form of knowing is the epistemolog-ical subject-object relation. There are we, assubjects, on the one side and the world on theother. As Bartky remarked, the subject is seen as“originally wordless and isolated from the ob-ject, somehow leaps out of its domain and isable, through its own intellectual activity, to ap-propriate, certify or otherwise ’master’ the ob-ject” (1979: 217; see also Varela et al., 1991: Chap-ter 7).

Third, the epistemological subject-object re-lation is thought to constitute the logic under-lying practice. That logic is representational:practitioners face a world of discrete objectswhose pregiven features they represent throughcognitive activity (Varela et al., 1991: 134–135)and, on the basis of those representations, un-dertake action (Chia & Holt, 2008: 474). Hence,what matters most for practitioners to improvetheir ability to get by in the world is how accu-rately the knowledge they develop represents“what is outside the mind” (Rorty, 1979: 3). Like-wise, researchers face a world of contingentlylinked behaviors, inner mental states, and ob-jects, which they seek to scientifically representin order to ascertain certain regularities (Taylor,1985b: Chapter 1; Tsoukas, 1998: 790).

However, because of their closeness to prac-tice, it is assumed that practitioners’ represen-tational knowledge about organizational prac-tices is biased, subjective, and judgmental and,thus, rather imprecise and nonrational (cf.Bruner, 1990: 14). In contrast, the representa-tional knowledge about organizational practicedeveloped by researchers following the canonsof scientific method is typically seen as lesssubjective and, thus, more exact, precise, andrational (Robbins, 1989: 8–9; cf. Schon, 1983: 21). Itis therefore believed that organizational and,more generally, human practices can be mademore rigorous and will be substantially im-proved if they are based on—derived from—scientific knowledge developed through theepistemological subject-object relation.

For example, Hrebiniak and Joyce (2001: 612–613) argued that for research on strategy im-plementation to be useful to managers, theo-retical models, as well as being logical andparsimonious, need to include “manipulablevariables,” which are contingently linked inspecific ways, thus telling managers what todo. A contingency model is seen to be intellec-tually isomorphic with lay managerial think-

340 AprilAcademy of Management Review

ing: it represents at a higher (scientific) levelhow managers represent their world at theaction level. According to this view, both the-orists and managers deal with variables. Un-like managers, however, who are compelled toact without having formally tested their vari-ables, management theorists can test the con-tent and the interrelationships of the variablesthey study and, thus, offer scientifically vali-dated knowledge to practitioners for success-ful implementation (Chia & Holt, 2008). Hence,it is assumed that the more accurate scientificrepresentations of a practice domain are, thebetter chances practitioners have to improvetheir action in it (cf. Pfeffer & Sutton, 2006;Rorty, 1979: 3).

DEBUNKING SCIENTIFIC RATIONALITY AS AFRAMEWORK FOR THEORIZING PRACTICE

The fundamental assumptions underlyingmodern scientific rationality have been sub-jected to heavy criticism over the years, from thephenomenological and hermeneutical critiqueof treating subject and world as two separateentities (Gadamer, 1994/1960; Heidegger, 1996/1927; Husserl, 1970/1900 –1901, 1970/1936; Mer-leau-Ponty, 1962/1945), Wittgenstein’s (1958) cri-tique of the picture theory of knowledge, and thepragmatists’ emphasis on experience and theconstructed nature of knowledge (Bernstein,1983; Dewey, 1938; James, 1996/1909; Rorty, 1979,1989) to Habermas’s (1974) critical theory of com-munication and Derrida’s (1981) critique of logo-centrism, to mention only a few of the bestknown philosophical sources of criticism. Thepoint that has been repeatedly made by thesephilosophical approaches is that scientific ra-tionality, by exalting the scholastic attitude (i.e.,knowledge generation through detachment frompractice), disconnects knowledge from its socialcontext and reduces human existence into cog-nitive knowing.

In particular, there are three problems withscientific rationality: (1) it underestimates themeaningful totality into which practitioners areimmersed, (2) it ignores the situational unique-ness that is characteristic of the tasks practi-tioners do, and (3) it abstracts away from time asexperienced by practitioners. By doing so theo-ries developed within the framework of scien-tific rationality fail to do justice to the logicunderlying practice. Below we explain why.

First, practitioners’ accounts reveal, and eth-nographic studies of organizational life confirm,that practitioners are immersed in organization-al practices in a holistic manner (Harper, 1987;Orr, 1996; Weeks, 2004). As several practice-based studies have shown (e.g., Engestrom, Mi-ettinen, & Punamaki, 1999; Gherardi, 2006; Jar-zabkowski, 2005, 2008; Lave & Wenger, 1991;Nicolini et al., 2003), the circumstances sur-rounding practitioners constitute a meaningful,unfolding totality, not a set of abstract, contin-gently linked variables (Weick, 2003: 467). To beinvolved in a practice is to be immersed in acontext, in which things, people, actions, andoptions already matter in specific ways.

For example, Orr (1996) vividly showed thatphotocopier service technicians are simultane-ously concerned with a number of issues thatmatter to them: fixing the broken photocopier athand, handling the customer in a satisfactorymanner, maintaining their reputation in thecommunity of technicians, projecting a good im-age of the company to the customer, and sharingtheir experiences with colleagues. We can alsoobtain a sense of the meaningful totality of man-aging from Mintzberg’s (2009: 245–248) account ofthe life of the head nurse of the Jewish GeneralHospital of Montreal. Managerial life for thehead nurse is far from handling contingentlylinked variables; she is part of the flow of life inthe hospital (Mintzberg, 2009: 246), immersed ina meaningful nexus of activities that deeplymatter to her. In short, when investigating anorganizational practice, a researcher does notexplore stand-alone entities but, rather, mean-ingful relational totalities—namely, interre-lated humans and objects that show up interms of familiar practices for dealing withthem (Spinosa, Flores, & Dreyfus, 1997: 17–18).

Second, another problem arising from focus-ing on how the abstract features of ahistoricaldiscrete entities are contingently linked in ag-gregates (typically in cross-sectional samplessince, according to scientific rationality, it isat that level that valid explanations may bederived; see Starbuck, 2006) is that such a fo-cus is juxtaposed with the irreducibly situa-tional nature of reality practitioners experi-ence. As Starbuck remarked, in aggregating,“researchers construct homogeneity in hetero-geneous phenomena” (2006: 143). By doing sothey inevitably simplify the phenomena athand (Weick, 2007), thus generating proposi-


tional statements, which, even if true at theaggregate level, as seen from a manager’ssituated action perspective, appear to be sim-plistic. Take, for example, the well-estab-lished proposition that “participation in theimplementation of new ideas makes the ideasmore acceptable” (Starbuck, 2006: 128). Even ifvalid in the aggregate, it is not necessarilyvalid for my organization, in this particularcontext at this particular point in time (seeBuchanan, 1999).

Third, by conceptualizing practice as an atem-poral space, scientific rationality abstractsaway from the temporal flow of practice, such asthe practical necessities, uncertainties, and ur-gencies in which practitioners are typically en-tangled, as is evident in Orr’s (1996), Buchanan’s(1999), and Mintzberg’s (2009) accounts. The flowof practice, such as its tempo, “and above all itsdirectionality, [which] is constitutive of itsmeaning” (Bourdieu, 1990: 81), disappears. Play-ing a game, chairing a meeting, teaching aclass, and nursing a patient all involve, to vary-ing degrees, anticipation, uncertainty, and ur-gency (Nicolini, 2009a: 123). Yet this sense oftemporal flow—time as experienced by practi-tioners—is excluded from formal social scien-tific accounts (Bourdieu, 1990: 82; Zaheer, Albert,& Zaheer, 1999).

The exclusion of experienced time is clearlyseen in the propositional statements included incontingency models of explanation, so popularin management research. As Bateson remarked,“The if . . . then of causality contains time, butthe if . . . then of logic is timeless” (1979: 63). Thecausality that concerns practitioners—what todo, in this particular situation, to achieve theresults they wish—is not included in the propo-sitional statements offered by contingency mod-els. Buchanan’s (1999) change manager, whomust handle an awkward colleague, Weick’s(2001) Mann Gulch smoke jumpers, who confronta huge fire mistaken initially for an ordinaryone, and Badaracco’s (2002) loan officer, whomust make up her mind as to how to proceedwith a serious accounting irregularity she hasdiscovered, are all faced with issues of timingand tempo, about which they get very little helpfrom timeless propositional statements of thetype, “The chance of success improves whenintervention and participation are used to in-stall a decision and declines when edicts andpersuasion are applied, no matter what decision

context or situation is being confronted” (Nutt,2001: 46). Practitioners, partly because of theasymmetrical time of action (i.e., the future al-ways involves some degree of open-endedness),and partly because of the infinite contextualrichness calling for judgments (Taylor, 1993b:54–56), always face some degree of suspenseand uncertainty as to how to go on (Shotter,1996); hence, the timing of action becomes im-portant (as evident in Orr’s, Buchanan’s, andBadaracco’s accounts). Suspense and uncer-tainty, however, are typically absent in the con-tingency models of explanation, still dominat-ing theory development in the leading journalsof the field.

In conclusion, when adopting the frameworkof scientific rationality, researchers withdrawfrom practice, becoming spectators of practice(Bourdieu, 1998: 133). Insofar as this is the case,scientific rationality leads researchers to im-pose a representational logic on practice thatconceals the logic underlying practice: themeaningful relational totality in which practi-tioners are involved is neglected in favor of fo-cusing on discrete entities with pregiven prop-erties, the situational nature of the dilemmaspractitioners face is underestimated in prefer-ence of generic propositional statements, andtime as experienced by practitioners is excludedfrom contingency models.

THE FRAMEWORK OF PRACTICALRATIONALITY

Although several philosophers and social the-orists have critiqued the framework of scientificrationality (Bourdieu, 1977, 1990; Dunne, 1993;Flyvbjerg, 2001; Giddens, 1979; Schatzki, 2002;Shotter, 1993), the philosopher who, perhapsmore than any other, has sought to overcome itsassumption that the epistemological subject-object relation constitutes the most basic form ofknowing has been Martin Heidegger (see Drey-fus, 1995, and Guignon, 1983). His existential on-tology provides valuable resources for develop-ing practical rationality as an alternativeframework for scientific rationality.

In this section we describe the key features ofHeidegger’s existential ontology and outline theframework of practical rationality. We first de-scribe the Heideggerian notion of being-in-the-world—that is, our inevitable “entwinement”(Sandberg & Dall’Alba, 2009: 1351) with the world


as revealing the logic of practice. We then dis-cuss different modes of engagement with theworld. We focus specifically on how “temporarybreakdowns” in our engagement with the worldilluminate the logic underlying organizationalpractice.

Entwinement As the Logic of Practice

In his analysis of the ontological structure ofhuman existence, Heidegger showed that theepistemological subject-object relation is notour most basic way of relating to the world but,rather, is derived from a more fundamental wayof existence—that of being-in-the-world(Heidegger, 1996/1927: 49–58). Contrary to the on-tology underlying scientific rationality, whichassumes disconnection—namely, that we, assentient beings, are initially separated from theworld to which we subsequently become contin-gently connected—the notion of being-in-the-world stipulates that our most basic form of be-ing is entwinement: we are never separated butalways already entwined with others and thingsin specific sociomaterial practice worlds (here-after “sociomaterial practices”), such as teach-ing, nursing, managing, and so on (Dreyfus,1995; Orlikowski, in press; Sandberg &Dall’Alba, 2009; Schatzki, 2005; Taylor, 1993a).

Taking entwinement as the primary mode ofexistence means that for something to be, itneeds to show up as something—namely, aspart of a meaningful relational totality withother beings. For example, a hammer used byWillie, who is an independent Saab repairer innorthern New York (Harper, 1987: 31–73), existsas a hammer—as a tool with which to bendmetal—by virtue of being part of the sociomate-rial practice of repairing Saab cars, which con-sists of several other tools and activities, suchas doing bodywork (straightening bent metal oncars), forging metal, tempering metal (adjustingits hardness with heat and cold), welding, fittingrepaired parts into the car, dealing with custom-ers, and so forth. As Bartky remarked, “All thesethings form a structure both of being and ofmeaning and apart from such a structure a thingcan neither be nor be understood” (1979: 213).What applies to a hammer also applies to thehand tools used by flute makers (Cook & Yanow,1996: 441), the BlackBerrys used by investmentand senior support staff at a private equity firm(Orlikowski, 2007: 1441), and the PowerPoint

used by a lecturer (Gabriel, 2008): they receivetheir meaning as specific tools from their en-twinement in flute manufacturing, investmentbanking, and teaching as specific sociomaterialpractices.

In other words, being entwined with the worldmakes it possible for something to be at all, tobe intelligible as something (Dreyfus, 2003: 2),and, insofar as this is the case, entwinementconstitutes the logic of practice. Consider teach-ing, for example (Schatzki, 2005: 472). As a par-ticular sociomaterial practice, teaching forms arelational totality of significance, consisting of(1) a particular teleological structure, which ori-ents its practitioners toward attaining certainends (Schatzki, 2005: 471) and stipulating possi-ble ways to practice teaching; (2) certain al-ready-defined distinctions about what mattersin teaching, which provide its practitioners witha particular orientation and identity (i.e., what isworthy and what is trivial, what is proper be-havior and what is not, how and when certaintools are to be used; Nicolini, 2009a: 126; Or-likowski, 2002: 257–258; Polt 1999: 46; Taylor,1985a: 71, 1985b: 23); (3) specific “standards ofexcellence” (MacIntyre, 1985: 187), which furnishits practitioners with certain concerns andpoints of reference (Schatzki, 2005: 472); (4) par-ticular activities, such as lecturing, interactingwith students, and mentoring (Schatzki, 2005:468); and (5) the use of certain tools, such astextbooks, whiteboards, and PowerPoint, whichare defined by their utility in specific activitiesand in reference to other tools (Orlikowski, 2007;Orlikowski & Scott, 2008). Tools and activitiesare sensible—that is to say, practically intelli-gible—by virtue of the teleological structure ofthe practice (Schatzki, 2000: 33).

To be more specific, taking entwinement asthe logic of practice highlights that the identityof a particular sociomaterial practice is noncon-tingent in the sense that it incorporates distinc-tions that provide its practitioners with a certainorientation, without which the particular prac-tice would not be what it is (Taylor, 1985a: 23,1985b: 36). Saying that practitioners are noncon-tingently related to their practices does not tellus anything about how they are related; existen-tial noncontingency does not preclude historicalcontingency—far from it. For example, there aremany ways in which the sociomaterial practiceof teaching may exist across time and space(hence, historical contingency), but, at the same


time, teachers are, at any point in time, neces-sarily (i.e., noncontingently) oriented towardsome identity that defines their practices (cf.Smith, 1997: 40). The ends to be achieved, thestandards of excellence, and the distinctionsconstituting a sociomaterial practice, of course,change over time. But for change to be intelligi-ble, these defining features of a practice must beaccorded ontological priority—they are a pointof reference, albeit a contestable one, to guidebehavior (Dreyfus, 1995: 161; MacIntyre, 1985:190).

The entwinement logic of practice also bringsto the fore the necessarily embodied nature ofpractice. Membership in a sociomaterial prac-tice is embodied in the sense that the personwho enacts a practice (e.g., teaching, managing,nursing, etc.) at the same time embodies it (Mer-leau-Ponty (1962/1945: 82). For example, asHarper (1987: 31) made clear, being a member ofa particular sociomaterial practice, Willie (thecar repairer) develops a deep understanding ofmaterials, tools, and techniques that becomesincorporated in his body as a specific car repairknow-how. And as Bourdieu remarked, the em-bodiment of practice “tends to guarantee the‘correctness’ of practices and their constancyover time, more reliably than all formal rulesand explicit norms” (1990: 54).

Moreover, the notion of entwinement makesus sensitive to the temporality of practice (Shot-ter, 2006: 591). The relational totality of socioma-terial practice is irreducibly temporal, not onlyin the sense of taking place in time but, morecrucially, as immediate anticipations in the ac-tual carrying out of action. For example, thenurse that does telemonitoring typically antici-pates whether a call is routine or a possibleemergency (Nicolini, 2009a: 123), and the hospi-tal resident typically anticipates the supervis-ing physician’s reaction to her voicing herconcern about a medical mishap (Blatt, Chris-tianson, Sutcliffe, & Rosenthal, 2006: 910). Inother words, to practice is to anticipate(Bourdieu, 1990: 81; Shotter, 2006: 591). We arealways ahead of ourselves in the sense of ourimmediate anticipation of how our specific prac-tice unfolds in time, be it teaching, repairingcars, treating a patient, or managing, becausewe bodily incorporate specific ways of beinginvolved in the respective sociomaterial prac-tice.

Revealing the Logic of Practice ThroughTemporary Breakdowns

For Heidegger, there are several modes of en-gagement with the world, ranging from immer-sion to detachment. Revealing the entwinementlogic of practice requires something in between:a state of “involved thematic deliberation”—namely, a mode of engagement that involvesboth immersion in practice and deliberation onhow it is carried out. Here we explore how themode of involved thematic deliberation comesabout and how it enables us to illuminate cen-tral aspects of the logic of practice.

The entwinement logic of practice stipulatesthat “absorbed coping” (Dreyfus, 1995: 69) is ourprimary mode of engagement with the world.Absorbed coping is a mode of engagementwhereby actors are immersed in practice with-out being aware of their involvement in it: theyspontaneously respond to the developing situa-tion at hand. Absorbed coping is primary in thesense that practice forms a familiar relationalwhole that people are absorbed in and, at thesame time, embody. As Heidegger showed, it isonly when we encounter some form of signifi-cant breakdown (interruption, disturbance) inour absorbed coping that we start to focus on—thematize—the sociomaterial practice (i.e., our-selves, others, and tools) as something separateand discrete, singling people and tools out fromtheir relational whole, and, thus, ”change over”to the epistemological subject-object relation(Heidegger, 1996/1927: §74; Dreyfus, 1995: 60–89).

According to Heidegger (1996/1927: §74), twomajor forms of breakdown can occur in our ab-sorbed coping: temporary breakdowns and com-plete breakdowns. When we are faced with atemporary breakdown, we shift from absorbedcoping to the mode of involved thematic delib-eration (Dreyfus, 1995: 72–73): although we arestill involved in a practical activity, we havenow started paying deliberate attention to whatwe do in order to continue. It is primarilythrough temporary breakdowns that the rela-tional whole of sociomaterial practice is mo-mentarily brought into view. This is because ourdeliberate attention to what has become un-available remains dependent on the practicalactivity in which the temporary breakdown hasoccurred.

When the breakdown is so significant that ourabsorbed coping is completely interrupted (com-


plete breakdown), we become disconnectedfrom our absorbed coping and move from in-volved thematic deliberation to “theoretical de-tachment” (Dreyfus, 1995: 79–81). We bracket ourimmediate practical concerns, either being tooparalyzed to act (e.g., panicking) or aiming tofind out the abstract properties of the situationat hand.

Once our work is permanently interrupted, wecan either stare helplessly at the remaining ob-jects or take a new detached theoretical stancetoward things and try to explain their underlyingcausal properties. Only when absorbed, ongoingactivity is interrupted is there room for such the-oretical reflections (Dreyfus, 1995: 79).

When we become detached from our practicalactivity at hand, the relational whole in whichwe are involved withdraws and becomes inac-cessible. Instead, what remains and becomespresent in our theoretical detachment is our par-ticular activity as an array of discrete entities.

Let us illustrate the above concepts with theactivity of lecturing. When a teacher is im-mersed in lecturing a class of students, his orher engagement with the world is that of ab-sorbed coping—the teacher responds spontane-ously to the solicitations of the task at hand,without paying explicit attention to what he orshe is doing (Yanow & Tsoukas, 2009: 1355–1356).The PowerPoint slides, the whiteboard, the lay-out of the room, and the behavior of the class areall transparent and nonthematized. It is onlywhen something goes wrong—when, for exam-ple, the PowerPoint temporarily breaks down—that the teacher needs to shift from absorbedcoping into a mode of involved thematic delib-eration as to what is problematic with the Pow-erPoint and how to fix it. In that instance theteacher’s PowerPoint presentation is singled outand thematized, and its apparent utility in lec-turing becomes momentarily manifest—that is,its specific features, such as the particular dia-grams, cartoons, and photographs included in it,the projector, and the laptop connection with theprojector come to the fore. The specific relationalwhole (the entwinement of people and objects)involved in lecturing comes into view. Note,however, that although the faulty PowerPointpresentation forces the lecturer to pay deliber-ate attention to it momentarily, he or she is stillinvolved in teaching—the teacher is in the modeof involved thematic deliberation.

However, if the PowerPoint breakdown per-sists—namely, if the teacher is faced with acomplete breakdown while lecturing—he or shewill become disconnected from his or her ab-sorbed coping. Such a complete breakdownpushes the lecturer into theoretical detachment.The teacher now starts forming hypothesesabout the likely causes of the PowerPoint com-plete breakdown and how they may be dealtwith. When entering the mode of theoretical de-tachment, lecturing turns into an array of dis-crete entities (e.g., the laptop, the projector, theirconnection, the switches, the content of the pre-sentation, etc.), with specific abstract properties.In other words, when the teacher becomes the-oretically detached from his or her lecturing, therelational whole of lecturing as absorbed cop-ing withdraws.

Notice that in both instances of breakdown(temporary and complete), the thematizationand singling out of the PowerPoint presentationpresupposes lecturing as an activity situatedwithin the sociomaterial practice of teaching(Schatzki, 2005: 474), because it is this contextthat makes the epistemological subject-objectseparation possible in the first instance. In otherwords, this changeover in our modes of engage-ment—from absorbed coping to involvedthematic deliberation and then to theoretical de-tachment—demonstrates how the epistemolog-ical subject-object relation is a derivative modeof being-in-the-world. We are first absorbed inpractice before we start reflecting on it. (Dreyfus,1995: 120).

To sum up, in Heidegger’s existential ontol-ogy, being-in-the-world comes before the sub-ject-object separation. Or, to put it differently,the subject-object relation becomes possibleonly insofar as we acknowledge the ontologicalpriority of being-in-the-world. This is because itis our engagement in— entwinement with—particular sociomaterial practices that enablesus to understand ourselves as particular sub-jects and objects as particular things in the firstplace. Therefore, what constitutes the logic ofpractice is not the epistemological subject-object relation but the entwinement of our-selves, others, and things in a relational whole,in the sense that we are always already en-gaged in specific sociomaterial practices.

Practitioners’ primary mode of engagement ina sociomaterial practice is absorbed coping—dealing with the world nondeliberately. When


their absorbed coping is significantly disrupted,practitioners shift to one of two modes, both ofwhich are characterized, in varying degrees, bythe subject-object relation. When the distur-bance is a temporary breakdown, practitionersshift to the involved thematic deliberation mode:their relational whole comes into view and theypay deliberate attention to what they do, whilestill remaining practically involved in the taskat hand. In other words, it is in the mode ofinvolved thematic deliberation where the logicof practice momentarily becomes manifest andilluminated. When the disturbance is more seri-ous and takes the form of a complete break-down, practitioners become disengaged fromthe sociomaterial practice and switch to theoret-ical detachment. Through such change in themode of engagement, the entwined logic ofpractice becomes concealed and, instead, prac-tice presents itself as an array of discrete enti-ties with specific abstract properties.

In the section below, following the frameworkof practical rationality and its Heideggerian ex-istential ontology, we explore how theory devel-opment in organization and management sci-ence may take place.

STRATEGIES FOR THEORIZING THROUGHPRACTICAL RATIONALITY

How can we grasp the logic of practice, the-matize it without distancing ourselves from it,and so avoid turning it into a set of discreteentities? The framework of practical rationalitydeveloped above suggests two interrelated ma-jor breaks with scientific rationality: (1) a shiftfrom entities as the point of departure to en-twinement (namely, focusing on investigatingthe relational whole of specific sociomaterialpractices) and (2) a shift from the scholastic at-titude of theoretical detachment to involved the-matic deliberation (namely, focusing our re-search attention on temporary breakdowns).Each one of these shifts represents a distinctstrategy for accessing the logic of practice andis examined below separately.

Searching for Entwinement

This strategy implies that researchers focuson how practitioners are ordinarily involved inthe relational whole within which they carry outtheir tasks. The entwinement strategy consists

of the following five components. First is takingsociomaterial practice as the point of depar-ture—that is, focusing on the entwinement ofpractitioners and tools in sociomaterial prac-tices. Second, as a result, the focus is not onpeople alone but on what people actually do—that is to say, the activities they are involvedin—to achieve particular purposes. Focusing onactivities reveals patterns of sociality, tool use,and empowerment (Nicolini, 2009a: 125). Third,zooming in on how the activity is accomplishedthrough the body and the use of various toolsreveals the sense in which the practice is en-acted. Fourth, through exploring the standardsof excellence that underlie a practice by focus-ing on what is regarded as success and failure,normatively binding or not, one can come closeto understanding what matters to those involvedin a practice and, therefore, what is the distinc-tive way for the practice to be that provides itwith its identity. And fifth, zooming out on therelationships between various practices showswhat makes a practice under study possible.Exploring the resources required for a practiceto be what it is and how those resources areacquired from other practices enables one tounderstand connections and possibilities (Nico-lini, 2009a).

What does the strategy of searching for en-twinement look like? Illuminating examples areprovided by Orlikowski (2002), Suchman (2007),Nicolini (2009a), and Sandberg and Pinnington(2009), to mention a few. It should be stressed,however, that it is not so common to see all thepreceding five components in a single study,since pragmatic constraints come into effect. Forexample, the more a researcher zooms in on howa practice is accomplished, the more difficult itwill be to zoom out to explore connections be-tween practices (Nicolini, 2009b: 134). Below wediscuss the study of professional competence bySandberg and Pinnington (2009) to illustrate sev-eral of the above points.

Sandberg and Pinnington (2009) proposed andexamined the utility of an existential ontologi-cal framework in the context of corporate law,within a large international law firm. As theypoint out, traditional theories of competence,such as the prevalent KSA (knowledge, skills,attitudes) theories, informed by scientific ratio-nality, are entity based in that they conceptual-ize professional competence as consisting oftwo independent entities: a set of specific attri-


butes possessed, such as KSAs, and a separateset of work activities to be accomplished. Takingan entity-based view in studying managementcompetence means that researchers try to iden-tify what attributes (knowledge, skills, etc.) arecentral in management. The identified attri-butes are then organized into predefined cate-gories such as KSAs (Boyatzis, 1982; Le Deist &Winterton, 2005; Mulder, Weigel, & Collins, 2007;Rothwell & Lindholm, 1999; Sandberg, 2000). Theattributes are thereafter often “rated to allowquantitative measurement of the correlation be-tween success in accomplishing the work andpossession of the designated attributes” (Sand-berg, 2000: 10).

A particular problem arising from entity-based approaches is that while they identifynecessary prerequisites (list of attributes) forcarrying out a job, such a list of attributes doesnot “demonstrate whether the workers use theprerequisite attributes, or in what way they usethem in accomplishing their work” (Sandberg &Targama, 2007: 57). In other words, researchersfollowing entity-based approaches are unableto describe what constitutes competence in workperformance (where Gherardi calls competence“practical accomplishment” [2006: 20]).

In contrast to prevalent theories, Sandbergand Pinnington’s study, explicitly informed byan existential ontological framework, takes theentwinement of aspects of corporate law socio-material practice (i.e., people, tools, activities),rather than entities, as the point of departure.Their in-depth interviews, supplemented by sit-uated observations of the corporate lawyers invarious contexts, generated important verbaland nonverbal data on what constitutes compe-tence in corporate law practice, such as the en-twinement of specific tools (like clothing, mobilephones, legal resources, and the prestigious of-fice building) in distinctive ways of practicingcorporate law.

In their analysis the authors’ focus was not ontools themselves but on their entwinement—namely, on their uses in particular activities inthe context of distinctive ways of practicing cor-porate law. Their findings suggest that the pro-posed existential ontological perspective en-ables closer descriptions of what constitutescompetence in work performance, and theyshow that professional competence is not pri-marily defined by scientific or tacit knowledge,or by other attributes such as skills and atti-

tudes in themselves. Instead, competence isconstituted by specific ways of being in theworld—in this case, of four different ways ofpracticing corporate law, each one forming adistinct competence in corporate law.

In particular, Sandberg and Pinnington’s find-ings show how the existential meaning of eachspecific way of practicing law distinguishes andintegrates central aspects of corporate law prac-tice into distinct forms of professional compe-tence in work performance. For example, theexistential meaning of “minimizing legal risks”as way of practicing corporate law

distinguishes and integrates a specific self-understanding (legal service provider), a specificunderstanding of work (applying legal rigor,forming a team of lawyers, informing the client oflegal issues), particular people (clients, col-leagues, support staff) and specific tools (legalknowledge, precedents, communication skill,clothes, and buildings) into a distinct competencein corporate law (Sandberg & Pinnington, 2009:1157).

Furthermore, their findings also show how as-pects of practice, such as knowledge, are de-fined not by some objective properties but bytheir entwinement in particular ways of practic-ing corporate law. So, for example, in minimiz-ing legal risks as a way of practicing corporatelaw, knowledge about the Corporation Acts isnot defined by the specific laws within the Actsbut by its usefulness or availability for minimiz-ing legal risks. In other words, for somethingsuch as “knowledge about . . . ” to be, it needs toshow up as something—namely, as part of ameaningful totality with other beings: in thiscase, a distinctive way of practicing corporatelaw.

Searching for Temporary Breakdowns

This strategy aims at exploring the temporarybreakdowns that may be found or created in asociomaterial practice, which are treated asopenings for accessing the significance of theinternal workings of a practice. The purpose isto let the practice reveal itself through themoments it temporarily breaks down—namely, the moments when things do not workas anticipated. We identify two kinds of tem-porary breakdowns: first-order breakdownsand second-order breakdowns. The formeremerge in organizational practices them-


selves, whereas the latter are created by theresearcher after entering a practice. Each oneis discussed below.

First-order temporary breakdowns. When tem-porary breakdowns occur, absorbed coping isinterrupted and practitioners enter into the in-volved thematic deliberation mode of engagingwith the world, through which they pay deliber-ate attention to their practice while at the sametime still being involved in it. Such breakdownsare called “first order” insofar as they naturallyoccur in the organizational practices understudy. The strategy of searching for first-ordertemporary breakdowns consists of exploringpractitioners’ responses to (1) thwarted expecta-tions, (2) the emergence of deviations andboundary crossings, and (3) awareness of differ-ences. Such explorations contribute to graspingthe significance of the way a sociomaterialpractice is accomplished in the mode of ab-sorbed coping.

Thwarted expectations. Expectations arethwarted when a practice is disrupted becauseunintended consequences emerge, new realiza-tions come about, or standards of excellence arenot met. This is nicely illustrated in Feldman’s(2000) study of organizational routines in the stu-dent housing department of a large U.S. stateuniversity. In that study Feldman sought to cap-ture the internal dynamic of routines by follow-ing practitioners closely and scrutinizing theiractions, the outcomes they yielded, and the re-sponses to those outcomes. Such an approachenabled Feldman to note temporary break-downs in the enactment of routines and howthose breakdowns made manifest central as-pects of the logic underlying the sociomaterialpractice in question.

For example, in carrying out the “damageassessment routine,” building directors wouldgo through room inventories, after studentshad gone, to assess any damages and thenwould send the bill to those responsible. In thecourse of time, however, the building directorsbecame increasingly unhappy with this rou-tine since, in their experience, it worked in away that fell short of the standards of excel-lence of their practice—namely, that they werenot mere administrators but educators too.What had happened was that the hitherto ap-plication of the routine let students ”get offeasy” since, typically, their parents (or eventheir parents’ secretaries) would pay for any

damages incurred, without the students’ beingconfronted with the damages they had done totheir rooms.

Seen as part of a sociomaterial practice, thedamage assessment routine was teleologicallystructured—it was set up to attain a certain end(i.e., assess damages to student rooms), againstwhich the actions of its practitioners madesense. Initially, the routine had a mere”opera-tions management” identity: its distinctionsprincipally revolved around the logistics ofdamage assessment and bill paying. Experi-ence from enacting the routine, however,showed building directors that the way they hadapplied those distinctions fell short of the stan-dards of excellence they found they held: thebuilding directors realized that they did notwant to be mere managers but educators too;students should be held responsible for theirdamages as part of their broader education ex-perience at the university. Considering them-selves as educators was a way to be in theirsociomaterial practice.

Having the experience they did made thebuilding directors wonder about their role andhow best to enact it; there was a temporarybreakdown in their practice. The breakdownrevealed (to them and to the researcher) whattruly mattered to them—namely, the signifi-cance of some of the distinctions they hadbeen enacting in their work. The source of thebreakdown was the tension generated be-tween the particular outcomes of the hithertoapplication of the routine and the particularstandards of excellence held. That tensionmade practitioners step back from their prac-tice—from the absorbed coping mode of en-gagement—and reflect on its now temporarilymanifested entwined components, particu-larly the entwinement of the room inventorylist, the time and mode of its use, and thestandards of excellence they should pursue.Notice that the logic of practice here is re-vealed, and further theorized (Feldman, 2000:620 – 626), through the researcher’s focus on thetemporary breakdown. The latter created anopening that enabled Feldman to look into theinternal working of the routine—the way itwas initially designed and used, the experi-ences its application generated, and the sig-nificance of those experiences for the practi-tioners involved. Feldman shows what mattersto practitioners, what they care about, and


how they deal with the experiences the enact-ment of the routine generates.

Deviations and boundary crossings. Devia-tions emerge when new discourse items are in-troduced or new actions appear. Exploring howpractitioners respond to deviations enables re-searchers to see what is significant to practi-tioners (what matters to them) and, therefore,comes close to grasping the logic underpinningtheir sociomaterial practice. For example, Katzand Shotter (1996) discuss a medical interview ofa female patient from Haiti, in the context of aroutine medical examination at the primarycare clinic of a large, urban U.S. hospital. As theauthors note, in medical interviews the medicalvoice is typically dominant, centering on symp-toms mentioned by the patient, prompted by thephysician. In the process of this diagnostic in-terview, however, the patient uttered, on twooccasions, “It’s not like it is back home” (1996:921–22). Katz and Shotter (1996: 922) note thatthe patient’s utterance constituted a “break”with—a temporary breakdown in—the medicaldiscourse that was hitherto driving the conver-sation; the patient was pointing to her broaderpersonal world, implicitly inviting the physicianto relate her medical problems to it. Which iswhat the physician perceptively did, by follow-ing up on questions having to do with the pa-tient’s cultural background (Katz & Shotter, 1996:923).

In this instance the physician crossed theboundaries of the strictly medical discourse toengage with the patient as a person. Suchboundary crossing, in response to a deviationfrom “the official or routine regime of signifi-cance” (Katz & Shotter, 1996: 930), if registered byresearchers through appropriate research de-signs (here by zooming into the relevant conver-sations and writing in a first person narrative),enables researchers to “articulate the practicefrom within the practice itself” (Shotter & Katz,1996: 213).

Awareness of differences. Absorbed copingmay be temporarily disrupted when practi-tioners become aware of different practices (orthe possibility of different practices). The lattermay be practices from the history (or from dif-ferent parts) of the organization itself, practicespresent in other organizations, or new practicesintroduced in change projects. Thus, exploringhow practitioners respond to awareness of dif-ferent practices (e.g., the resistance, ambiva-

lence, or acceptance different practices mayevoke) reveals what is significant in their ownparticular practice (Stensaker & Falkneberg,2007). As Dunbar and Starbuck (2006: 173) note,some of the adaptive and reactive capabilitiesof organizations are revealed when researchersfocus on efforts to displace organizations fromequilibrium.

For example, in her research on a privatizedBritish utility undergoing strategic change,Balogun (2006) explored middle managers’ dif-ferent reactions to the restructuring of the oldgroup into three new divisions (core, engineer-ing, and services). Being aware of the new, nowperceived as elevated, status of the core divi-sion, engineering division middle managers re-sented what they saw as having been deprivedof ”ownership” of the assets of the company.Focusing on how different groups of middlemanagers coped with the perceived differencesbetween the new schemata (centered on the val-ues of customer focus and a flexible culture) andthe old schemata (associated with the valuesof a traditional, provider-driven bureaucracy)enabled Balogun to show what mattered to themembers of the different divisions (see alsoBalogun & Johnson, 2004).

Second-order temporary breakdowns. Anotherpossible strategy for enabling the logic of prac-tice to reveal itself is for researchers to activelycreate a temporary breakdown in the practicethey investigate. There are already various tech-niques available that may be utilized for creat-ing temporary breakdowns, such as Garfinkel’s(1963) breaching taken-for-granted ways of do-ing things, scenario planning (van der Heijden,Bradfield, Burt, Cairns, & Wright, 2002), counter-factual thinking (Sayer, 2000), instructive lan-guage (“think of . . . ,” “imagine . . . ,” “sup-pose . . . ,” etc.; see Shotter & Katz, 1996: 231), andthought experiments (Folger & Turillo, 1999), allof which prompt people to reflect on possibili-ties and potentialities (see Weick, 2003, forfurther examples). Below we illustrate second-order breakdowns by revisiting Argyris’s well-known technique for action research.

By his own admission (Argyris, 2003, 2004), Ar-gyris is a cognitivist who, most likely, would nothave much time for the existential ontology wehave outlined here. Yet his research on howmanagers tend to reason and how they mightreason more productively can be recast in someof the terms of an existential ontology insofar as,


through the temporary breakdowns he createsin the organization at hand, he gets to reveal, tosome extent, the logic of practice. We explainhow this is done below.

In his sessions with managers, Argyris typi-cally invites them to describe an organizationalproblem as they see it, describe the strategythey would follow if they had the chance to talkto someone about how to resolve the problem,and write down on the right-hand side of a pagewhat they would say to that person and, on theleft-hand side, what thoughts or feelings theywould not communicate to their imaginary in-terlocutor (Argyris, 1993, 2003, 2004). In this waythe researcher is no mere observer of other peo-ple’s activities but a temporary participant inthem, causing his subjects to think about them-selves and their practices. The researcher delib-erately interrupts the flow of managerial prac-tice— creating a temporary breakdown—inorder to get practitioners to step back from whatthey routinely do for the sake of improving theway they reason and communicate with othersand, thus, solving problems more effectively.When managers have had the chance, as a re-sult of the temporary breakdown caused by theresearcher, to see how they actually think andcommunicate, their logic of practice will be re-vealed to them and to the researcher. The lattercan then further theorize that particular logic,and this is what Argyris has done in his influ-ential work.

A similar type of research has been adoptedby those postmodern scholars who, throughhigh-involvement research designs, seek to helppractitioners unearth their unquestioned as-sumptions and reflect on them critically (Cun-liffe, 2002, 2003; Shotter & Katz, 1996). Practicethen becomes reflexive insofar as practitionersobtain a clearer view of their actions and, look-ing back at them, can see aspects they could notsee before.

What is important to note is that through cer-tain types of action research or high-involve-ment research, practitioners are made to stepback from their absorbed coping mode. The tem-porary breakdowns are not located in the flow ofthe organizational practice itself but are delib-erately created by the researcher. Merely askingdetailed and concrete questions about whatpractitioners do and how they accomplish theirwork temporarily disrupts practitioners� ab-sorbed coping and throws them into a mode of

deliberation. Practitioners enter into involvedthematic deliberation, insofar as the researcherprompts them to reflect on their sociomaterialpractice, and they temporarily step back fromtheir practice to reflect on how they practice. Inthose moments the logic of practice comes to thefore in that the relational whole into which theyare absorbed and its significance become mo-mentarily manifest.

DISCUSSION

In this article we have addressed the follow-ing question: How can organizational and man-agement theories be developed so they betterreflect the way actors enact their practice and,thus, are more relevant to practice? In answer-ing this question we have made two contribu-tions.

First, we have shown why the framework ofscientific rationality underlying mainstream or-ganizational and management theories fails tograsp the logic of practice and, thus, is unable togenerate theories relevant to practice. Our re-evaluation of the onto-epistemological assump-tions underlying scientific rationality showedthat the latter, by foregrounding the subject-object relation, invites researchers to look atorganizations as collections of discrete entitieswhose patterns of contingently linked abstractproperties are to be identified and representedin a theory. However, by doing so, how therelational whole of the organizational practiceis made available to involved practitioners isconcealed, thus making researchers unable tograsp the logic of practice (Dreyfus, 1995: 120).In other words, in following scientific ratio-nality, the enactment of organizational prac-tice is obscured and the logic of practice isclosed off.

Second, and most important, as an alternativeto scientific rationality, we have proposed andoutlined practical rationality as a coherent onto-epistemological framework and demonstratedhow it enables management researchers to bothstay close to the logic of practice and generatepractical rationality theories—theories that cap-ture essential aspects of the logic of practice. Tobe more specific, drawing on Heidegger’s exis-tential ontology, we showed that our entwine-ment with the world is ontologically prior to theepistemological relation between a subject andan object. Things do not appear to researchers


as they are in themselves. Instead, their appear-ance is dependent on the mode in which re-searchers engage with them. Intelligibility isnot a property of things but is relative to theirways of being-in-the-world (Dreyfus, 1995: 31;Winograd & Flores, 1987: 33). Absorbed coping isthe mode of being practically involved in a so-ciomaterial practice—namely, in a relationalwhole in which human beings and tools areentwined. Hence, if management researchersare interested in grasping the logic of practice,they need to get a handle on how a sociomate-rial practice shows up to practitioners absorbedin it. This is what the framework of practicalrationality and the related strategies we havesuggested here—searching for entwinementand searching for temporary breakdowns—enable researchers to do.

Below we discuss the main implications fortheorizing through the framework of practicalrationality. In particular, we address issues re-lated to process (i.e., how we may go about de-veloping practical rationality theories) and con-tent (i.e., what practical rationality theories looklike). Moreover, we outline the benefits practicalrationality yields to management researchersand practitioners.

Implications for Theory Development

Developing theory through the strategy of en-twinement implies doing the following: (1) tak-ing sociomaterial practice as the point of depar-ture—what practitioners routinely do, withothers and tools, for what purposes; (2) lookingfor how practitioners competently perform do-ings and sayings, with what results; (3) search-ing for the distinct ways in which performancesare enacted; and (4) exploring what matters topractitioners by searching for how actions arerecognizable and reportable to others and, thus,how accountability is accomplished. Thus, the-oretical accounts that seek to grasp the logic ofpractice through the entwinement strategy focuson relational totalities and performances or,more precisely, on how relational totalities areaccomplished: the discursive and material re-sources practitioners routinely draw on (i.e.,practically employ in the mode of absorbed cop-ing), in distinct ways, for certain purposes, andin the context of particular activities, in realiz-ing certain identities.

To that end, research methods such as thephenomenological “life-world interview” (i.e.,seeking to capture interviewees’ meaning struc-ture of lived experience; Kvale, 1996: 5; Sand-berg, 2000: 12, 2005: 54–56), “shadowing” (Czar-niawska, 2008; McDonald, 2005), “qualitativeresearch diaries” (Symon, 2004), and “instruc-tions to the double” (i.e., asking an intervieweeto imagine giving work-related instructions to adouble who will replace him/her in that job thefollowing day; Nicolini, 2009a: 126, 2009b) aim atgrasping the logic of practice—namely, captur-ing the distinct and unreflexive ways (i.e., in theabsorbed coping mode) in which people rou-tinely act while entwined with others and tools.

Developing theory through the strategy oftemporary breakdowns entails doing the follow-ing: (1) taking instances in which expectationsare thwarted, boundaries are crossed, and/ordifferences in awareness are noticed as thepoint of departure; (2) situating the temporarybreakdowns under study within the broader so-ciomaterial practice in which they occur; and(3) identifying the significance of the way inwhich practitioners are absorbed in their prac-tical activities. It should be noted that, as Wino-grad and Flores remark, “a breakdown is not anegative situation to be avoided, but a situationof non-obviousness” (1987: 165)—the recognitionthat something is missing or is not quite right,with the result that some aspects of the rela-tional whole come to the fore. Suitable researchmethods for the breakdown strategy includethose mentioned earlier, as well as “critical in-cident analysis.” The latter, when employedfrom a phenomenological perspective (Chell,2004), attempts to “capture the thought pro-cesses, the frame of reference and the feelingsabout an incident or set of incidents, which havemeaning for the respondent” (Chell, 2004: 47).

Taken together, the strategy of searching fortemporary breakdowns reveals something thatthe strategy of searching for entwinement doesnot: the significance of the taken-for-granteddistinctions practitioners cannot articulatewhile absorbed in practice (e.g., assumptionsabout role structure effectiveness, such as in thecase of the Mann Gulch fire [Weick, 2001]); as-sumptions about rocket reliability, such as inthe case of NASA’s launch of the Challenger[Starbuck & Milliken, 1988; Vaughan, 1996]).Searching for entwinement reveals somethingthat searching for temporary breakdowns does


not: the scope of the sociomaterial whole thatshapes human action, which practitioners areunaware of while immersed in action (e.g., Or-likowski’s [2007] investment managers who em-bedded their BlackBerrys in their work and per-sonal lives and how this changed work andcommunication practices). Both the scope of thesociomaterial whole and the significance of howits sociomaterial components interact are im-portant. Ideally, therefore, the strategies of en-twinement and temporary breakdowns shouldboth constitute the foci of research that aims totheorize the logic of practice, although prag-matic constraints often make it difficult to incor-porate both.

A second major implication for theory devel-opment concerns the outcome—namely, whatpractical rationality theories are like and, con-sequently, how they differ from scientific ratio-nality theories. Admittedly, theorizing, in all itsforms, necessarily involves abstraction. Theo-ries consist of statements of relations amongconcepts aiming to make sense of a generic phe-nomenon (e.g., professional competence in cor-porate law practice), the empirical manifesta-tions of which vary across time and space(Bacharach, 1989: 496, 498; Stinchcombe, 1968: 15;Weick, 1989: 517). However, since practical ra-tionality theories aim to provide an account oforganizational practice as enacted—that is, asan unfolding relational whole—they deviatesignificantly from scientific rationality theories,which aim to provide a detached account of or-ganizational practice as a set of discrete entitiesthat become contingently related to each other.

The main divergence is that concepts play asignificantly different role in the two types oftheories. Scientific rationality theories assumethat (1) concepts fully capture a priori what isreally going on in the world (cf. Chia & Holt,2008: 474); (2) concepts and their relationships intheoretical statements enable practitioners to“win the privilege of totalization” (Bourdieu,1977: 106), thus offering them a synoptic view ofthe phenomenon at hand; and (3) concepts pro-vide practitioners with “manipulable variables”(Hrebiniak & Joyce, 2001: 612) to enable inten-tional action.

In contrast, within practical rationality theo-ries, concepts are seen as partly emergent cre-ations (rather than as fixed representations of apregiven world), which help us orient ourselvesin the world. To put it differently, concepts are

not fully defined a priori, nor are they connectedto the empirical world in a definite manner(Weick, 1989: 519); rather, concepts are seen asopen ended—that is, partly determined throughthe particular practices in which they are en-acted. Practice has an irreducible epistemicvalue, insofar as it gives concepts their particu-lar shape, drawn from local contexts. The open-ended and context-specific character of practi-cal rationality theories is diagrammaticallymanifested through bidirectional arrows (seeOrlikowski, 2000: 410), recursive patterns (seeJarzabkowski, 2008: 624; Orlikowski, 2000: 410;Sandberg & Pinnington, 2009: 1162), circular in-teractions (see Feldman, 2000: 623, 625, andWhittington, 2006: 621), or narrative means thatpreserve the complexity of human interaction(see Weick, 1995, and Orr, 1996) by incorporatinghuman purposes and motives, contextual rich-ness, multiple temporalities, and connectionsamong events across time (cf. Tsoukas & Hatch,2001). Practical rationality theories provide theconceptual means to capture the recursive pat-terns of interactions across practices, while atthe same time remaining open to further concep-tual specification through exploration of partic-ular practices.

For example, in the work of Feldman and hercoauthors, routines are not viewed as entities(i.e., “programs,” “habits,” or “genes”; see Feld-man & Pentland, 2003: 97) but as “emergent ac-complishments” (Feldman, 2000: 613). Routinesare not completely defined a priori as havingcertain inherent characteristics (such as stabil-ity and repetitiveness), manifested any time rou-tines are applied, but as having an irreducibleperformative component, situationally defined,which invests routines with flexibility andchange. Thus, what a routine is is not fully de-fined a priori but partly emerges from the way aroutine is enacted within a particular socioma-terial practice (Feldman & Orlikowski, in press).Hence, Feldman (2000) uses the term routines-in-action. Similarly, for Orlikowski (2000), technol-ogy does not have, nor can it be developed tohave, certain inherent features that determinehow it will be used or appropriated in organiza-tions. Technology, rather, constitutes, alongwith human agency, a “technology structure”that emerges from the repeated, recursive, andsituated interaction between people and partic-ular technologies. Hence, Orlikowski (2000) usesthe term technology-in-practice (similarly, see


Jarzabkowski et al.’s [2007)] concept of strategy-as-practice).

Theories about routines-in-action, technology-in-practice, and strategy-as-practice orient us tograsp the general pattern through which respec-tive phenomena are enacted and to look for thesituational specificity through which processesof enactment take place in particular contexts,thus potentially refining our theories. Combin-ing a general template with situational specific-ity is what enables Orlikowski (2000) to explorethe enactment of technology-in-practice in dif-ferent firms ranging from consulting to software,Weick (2001) to investigate sensemaking in con-texts as diverse as the Mann Gulch fire and thePolish Workers� Defense Committee, and Chris-tianson, Farkas, Sutcliffe, and Weick (2009) toexplore a rare event, such as the collapse of theBaltimore & Ohio Railroad Museum, as a signif-icant interruption calling for sensemaking, lead-ing them to further elaborate on the latter byconnecting features of sensemaking to organiz-ing routines.

The epistemic open-endedness of concepts inpractical rationality theories makes those con-cepts empirically underdetermined and leads toan alternative view of generalization. In con-trast to scientific rationality theories, which aremostly aiming for statistical generalizations,practical rationality theories offer what Tsoukascalls “heuristic generalizations.” (2009: 295). Thelatter are generalizations insofar as they arebuilt with concepts abstracted from concretedata. However, they are heuristic generaliza-tions in the sense that they are open to furtherspecification in particular cases; the latter offeropportunities for further refining concepts andmaking fresh distinctions.

While in scientific rationality theories con-cepts are taken to fully reflect the features of apregiven world, in practical rationality theoriesconcepts are seen as indicators that guide thesearch for better understanding, encouragingresearchers to look for family resemblances—namely, for the similarities and differencesamong the empirical phenomena indicated by aconcept (such as, for example, routine-in-action,strategy-as-practice, sensemaking). Thus, re-searchers are invited to think analogically andsee the extent to which current conceptual for-mulations help them understand a particularcase at hand. Insofar as all analogies are inex-act to some extent, researchers are impelled to

reformulate, in various degrees, the currentlyavailable conceptualizations and, thus, poten-tially make new conceptual distinctions. Fromsuch a perspective, the question “To what extentdoes this hold in other cases?” (a statisticalquestion) does not arise, since particular casesshare family resemblances with one another(Tsoukas, 2009: 286–287). The question, rather, is“How far can you go with these concepts athand?” thus offering researchers the opportu-nity to refine their analytical understanding ofcertain phenomena.

That practical rationality theories are able to”merely” indicate the logic of practice does notmean they are less precise than scientific ratio-nality theories that more ”fully” explicate orga-nizational practice as specific entities’ proper-ties and their patterns of relationships. Rather,the reverse is true. As we have shown, any at-tempt to spell out something in a definite andcontext-free way requires such a significantbreak with organizational practice that the ac-tual logic of practice withdraws. What is left tospell out is practice as a set of discrete entitieswith abstract properties, but not the entwine-ment logic of practice. Practical rationality the-oretical accounts qua indicators, on the otherhand, bring us closer to the logic of practiceinsofar as they let practice manifest itselfthrough the moments it temporarily breaksdown or through outlining the relational wholein which practice is routinely taking place,which practitioners are normally unaware of.Paradoxically, attempts to spell out explicitlythe logic of practice fail since they turn it into aset of discrete entities, whereas attempts to in-directly access the logic of practice succeedsince they approach practice in ways that allowits logic to manifest itself.

The Benefits Practical Rationality Offers toOrganizational Practice and Theory

A central benefit deriving from the proposedframework of practical rationality is that it of-fers a way of significantly bridging the theory-practice gap in organization and managementby making possible the development of practi-cal rationality theories. Such theories enableboth researchers and practitioners to obtain aclearer view of what is involved in the enact-ment of a sociomaterial practice. This is a viewof theory-as-elucidation. Practical rationality


theory helps practitioners to better articulateand make manifest what was previouslyopaque in their routine practices and, thus, ob-tain insights into their practice. In particular, byilluminating the logic of practice, practical ra-tionality theories enable practitioners to betterunderstand, engage, and, above all, improvetheir own practice. In other words, practical ra-tionality theories connect to practice becausethey elucidate and bring us closer to the logic ofpractice as experienced by practitioners, ratherthan the logic of the researcher, which is typi-cally reflected in scientific rationality theories.

The framework of practical rationality helpsresearchers generate theories that both graspimportant aspects of the logic of practice andarticulate what is going on in the organizationsunder study more clearly than the absorbed cop-ing of the actors involved would allow for (Tay-lor, 1985b: 27, 111). Greater clarity is possiblesince sociomaterial practices are always al-ready constituted by distinctions that provide anidentity to those practices. But the question in-evitably arises as to whether such distinctionsare adequate, complete, and useful—hence theneed for more refined distinctions. As Taylor(1985a: 64) commented, once this question isopened, it cannot be closed; the process of the-ory development as the search for greater eluci-dation is bound to go on and on (Taylor, 1985a:63–75).

Seen in that light, theorizing through practi-cal rationality generates knowledge that is onthe same continuum as the knowledge practi-tioners employ when they are engaged in in-volved thematic deliberation about their prac-tices. This is shown in Snook’s (2000)theorizing of the friendly fire incident that oc-curred, in 1994, in the U.S. forces in the no-flyzone in Iraq. Snook’s (2000: 225) concept of“practical drift” (i.e., the gradual uncouplingbetween formal procedures and local prac-tices) captured what had been going on buthad not been paid attention to. A temporarybreakdown, such as the incident of friendlyfire, provided both practitioners and research-ers the opportunity to see the significance ofsome ongoing features of a routine air defenseactivity (Weick, 2003: 472).

Another important benefit that practical ra-tionality offers is a coherent onto-epistemologi-cal framework, along with systematic ways oftheory development, to ground the emerging

practice-based approaches in organizationstudies and the associated efforts to generate“performative” theories (Czarniawska, 2008: 7–8;Law & Urry, 2004: 395; Orlikowski, in press). Asseveral scholars have noted (Chia & Holt, 2006;Chia & MacKay, 2007: 218 –219; Gherardi, 2006;Jarzabkowski, 2005; Reckwitz, 2002; Sandberg& Dall’Alba, 2009; Whittington, 2006), practice-based approaches lack a coherent and consis-tent metatheoretical basis, which obstructsfurther theoretical advancement. By empha-sizing the entwined character of practice, theframework of practical rationality corrects thisweakness.

Concluding Remarks

In this article we have shown that theoriesdeveloped through the framework of scientificrationality are not relevant to practice becausethey fail to capture its logic. As an alternative,we proposed and elaborated the framework ofpractical rationality and showed how it enablesresearchers to develop practical rationality the-ories that grasp important aspects of the logicunderlying practice.

Having argued for the virtues of practical ra-tionality and the associated practical rationalitytheories, is there still scope for scientific ratio-nality theories of the kind we are so much usedto in organization and management science?There is indeed. We have not argued here thatscientific rationality theories, grounded in theepistemological subject-object separation, arewrong. Rather, we have argued that it is wrongto identify all theorizing with that generated bythe framework of scientific rationality. Scientificrationality theories are one possible type of the-ory, and the subject-object separation is onepossible mode of human engagement with theworld. The advantage of practical rationality isthat it is spacious enough to allow for both: thatbeing-in-the-world is the primordial mode of hu-man engagement with a sociomaterial prac-tice— hence the concern with how the lattershows up to beings who are absorbed in it—andthat human beings can engage with a socioma-terial practice in a theoretically detached way,through which its components appear as dis-crete entities to them.

There is, thus, room for developing scientificrationality theories by treating the world oforganizational and management practice in a


theoretically detached way. When such amode of engagement is adopted, the world ofpractice shows up to researchers as a collec-tion of discrete entities, whose constitutionand patterns of associations they can system-atically investigate. Notice that such investi-gations constitute a particular type of practice(an academic practice, institutionally sepa-rate from the organizational practices understudy) in which researchers have techniquesfor focusing on aspects of organizational prac-tice, “de-worlding” them (Dreyfus, 2000: 317),turning them into discrete entities, and insert-ing them, in the form of abstract propertiesand their relationships, into their theories (La-tour, 1988; Pickering, 1995).

But scientific rationality theories come at acost: because they include abstractions createdthrough researchers’ theoretically detachedmanner of relating to the world of practice, theytend to reflect the logic of the researcher ratherthan the logic of practice (Bourdieu, 1998: 127–140; Weick, 1999: 136, 140). However, althoughscientific rationality theories do not capture thelogic of practice, they can still be useful to or-ganizational practice insofar as they highlightsome of the forces that shape practice. For ex-ample, scientific rationality theories can be use-ful for identifying patterns in aggregate phe-nomena (McKelvey & Aldrich, 1983; Starbuck,2006); for investigating “ideal types” and “ideal-ized models” (McKelvey, 1997: 364)—that is tosay, theoretically capturing important aspects ofa phenomenon through the “analytical accentu-ation of certain elements of reality” (McKelvey,1997: 364; see also Gane, 2009; Swedberg, 2005:119–121; Weber, 1949: 90) and the avoidance of“the complexities of idiosyncratic microstatephenomena” (McKelvey, 1997: 364); for theorizing“generative mechanisms” that give rise to con-tingently experienced phenomena (Pentland,1999; Tsang & Kwan, 1999; Tsoukas, 1989); and forinvestigating propositional “design rules”(Romme & Endenburg, 2006: 288) for shaping or-ganizational settings (Bruosoni & Prencipe,2006).

Hence, scientific rationality theories such asthe above have the potential to provide organi-zational practitioners with resources to look attheir organizational practices in a different lightand, based on that, to be able to create newways of performing and enacting their practice.

Weber perhaps best captured what scientific ra-tionality theories can offer by referring to idealtypes as serving “as a harbor until one haslearned to navigate safely in the vast sea ofempirical facts” (1949: 104). Notice that in thisformulation ideal types (and scientific ratio-nality theories more generally) are seen as help-ing sensitize practitioners to important featuresof their practice, without, however, pretendingthat they have articulated its logic (“the vast seaof empirical facts”). Such theories do not dealwith how the world shows up to actors embed-ded in relational wholes and situated in uniquecircumstances but, rather, with how the worldappears to observers looking for patterns acrossdifferent contexts and the underlying forces thatshape them.

However, insofar as practice retains “a cer-tain plasticity stemming from the fuzziness,irregularity, and even incoherencies of its dis-positional principles” (Polkinghorne, 2004: 63),a style of theorizing different from that pro-vided by scientific rationality is required forgrasping its logic and, thus, for bridging themanagement theory-practice gap. Practical ra-tionality and the associated strategies of the-ory development suggested here provide theappropriate resources for such theorizing.

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Jorgen Sandberg ([email protected]) is a reader in management in theSchool of Business at the University of Queensland, Australia, and leads its researchprogram, Knowledge in Organizations. He received his Ph.D. from the University ofGothenburg. His research interests include competence and learning in organiza-tions, leadership, practice-based theories, qualitative research methods, and thephilosophical underpinnings of organizational research.

Haridimos Tsoukas ([email protected]) holds the Columbia Ship ManagementChair in Strategic Management at the Department of Public and Business Adminis-tration, University of Cyprus, and is professor at the Warwick Business School, Uni-versity of Warwick. He received his Ph.D. from the Manchester Business School. Hisresearch interests include knowledge-based perspectives on organizations, organiza-tional becoming, practical reason in management, and epistemological issues inorganizational research.


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GRASPING THE LOGIC OF PRACTICE: THEORIZING ......basic form of developing knowledge about the world; and (3) the logic of practice is constituted by the epistemological subject-object