Cips Podcasts

This book contends that practices are perhaps the most fundamental building-block of social reality. What then would social scientists’ research look like if they took this insight seriously? The book argues that to be effective, social-scientific inquiry requires the detailed empirical study of human practices. At the same time, it makes a case for the central place in social theory and the philosophy of the social sciences of a well-developed practice theory. To be sure, conventional research in the social sciences has always investigated regularities of human behaviour; yet its core assumptions, the author argues, leave it ill-equipped to cope with essential features of the phenomena it investigates. This book is thus devoted to examining what these generic features of human practices are. In the process, it also explores how practices are constituted; how they can be identified, characterised and explained; how they function in concrete contexts; and how they might change across time and space. Not