The Journal of Practice Theory is a peer-reviewed and interdisciplinary academic journal dedicated to advancing the field of practice theory. Its aim is to explore, develop, and disseminate cutting-edge research on social practices and their significance in contemporary society. Although there is no single theory of practice, practice theories imagine and analyse social life and social phenomena as constituted by practices that are connected and extended across time and space. The idea of taking practices as a central unit of social analysis and conceptualisation sets this tradition apart, on the one hand from systems theories and structural accounts and on the other, from those who focus on some version of individualism. The Journal of Practice Theory is a place for practice theorists working with a wide range of interpretations of practice, in all kinds of disciplines, to advance concepts, understandings, and debates about the practical nature of social life. The reason for starting The Journal of Practice Theory is to provide the multi-disciplinary practice theory community with a common and dedicated platform for the exploration, exchange, and dissemination of research that advances the field whether by way of theoretical and conceptual development; philosophical integration; disciplinary connection, or empirical insight. The journal is open access, autonomous, and depends on the contributions of the practice theory community (authors, editors, and reviewers). This setup affords us the opportunity to publish articles that harness insights from multiple disciplines to develop the field of practice theoretical work. It also enables us to cultivate the free spread of ideas and knowledge and contribute to an emerging transformation in scholarship and research.
Practising the ‘Not Yet’: On the Climatization of Ordinary Life
Climate security is shaped by an absent presence: a threat that unfolds materially while simultaneously existing as an anticipated future of a ‘not yet’. This column argues that practice theory offers a productive approach for understanding how this dual character emerges through the practices of everyday life. Moving beyond macropolitical accounts of climate securitisation, we highlight how climate (in)security is increasingly enacted through ordinary preparedness, resilience, and adaptation practices, revealing both a diffusion of security responsibility to civilians and a horizontal blurring of civilian and military domains.
Copyright (c) 2026 Svenja McGrath, Fladvad Benno (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
An Interview with Duncan Garrow: Talking about Practice Theory and Social Change
Archaeologists describe changes in the distant past, basing their analyses on fragmentary remains of practices, people and material worlds. In this interview, Duncan Garrow talks about different methods of interpreting change in the archaeological record, beginning with questions of chronology, periodisation, and the tension between linear accounts of time and more complex understandings of the past. Duncan reflects on what radiocarbon dating and other scientific methods make visible, and on the uncertainties and absences which are integral to archaeological work. In discussing these issues, we range across questions of scale, regularity, innovation and the relation between objects and practices. We talk about how archaeological periods illuminate and artificially constrain interpretations of change, how material remains relate to practices at different temporal resolutions, and why change is more readily identified than explained.
Copyright (c) 2026 Elizabeth Shove, Manuel Baeriswyl, Duncan Garrow (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
An Interview with Robert Chia: Talking about Practice Theory and Social Change
Studies of organisational change often treat stability as the norm and change as something that happens to otherwise settled entities. Robert Chia challenges this view, starting with the claim that change is continuous, pervasive, and prior to the temporary stabilisations we call organisations or structures. Drawing on Bergson, Whitehead, James, Bourdieu, and Dreyfus, Robert develops a processual account in which practices emerge through situated coping and responsiveness rather than through moments of deliberate intervention in otherwise stable systems. In discussing this approach, our interview with Robert ranges across questions of agency, purpose, environment, materiality, and the distinction between ‘owned’ and ‘unowned’ change. We consider what it means to understand structures as ossified practices, how practitioners respond to unfolding situations, and how an emphasis on process reframes familiar debates about intentionality, stability, and transformation.
Copyright (c) 2026 Elizabeth Shove, Manuel Baeriswyl, Robert Chia (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
An Interview with Megan Warin: Talking about Practice Theory and Social Change
Long-standing divisions between the biological and the social matter for how bodies, health and processes of change are understood. In this interview, Megan Warin talks about the need to move beyond these traditions. By bringing Bourdieu’s concept of habitus into conversation with research on the developmental origins of health and disease and epigenetics Megan shows how social and biological processes come together in bodies, environments, and practices across generations. In discussing this approach, and its connections with Anthropology, Public Health, Feminist Theory, and Science and Technology Studies, we range across questions of embodiment, inheritance, materiality, temporality, and scale. We consider the value of metaphors of folding and bodies-within-bodies, the significance of ethnography and importance of interdisciplinary collaboration for overcoming the limits of individualised approaches to public health and for understanding processes of biosocial change.
Copyright (c) 2026 Elizabeth Shove, Manuel Baeriswyl, Warin Megan (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
How Practices Become Knowable: Towards a Practice Hermeneutics
Abstract This paper asks how practices become knowable in empirical research. Practice theories conceive of social life as organised through nexuses of doings and sayings, but studying those nexuses requires representing them. The resulting tension – how to make practices visible without reducing them to representations – defines the epistemic challenge of practice-based enquiry. Drawing on Dimitri Ginev’s hermeneutic theory of social practices, I develop ‘practice hermeneutics’: an interpretative framework that clarifies how researchers might disclose practices by interpreting their traces. This approach explicates the hermeneutic movement between familiarity and articulation – the circle through which practices become intelligible – and proposes standards of disclosive adequacy for empirical work. By showing how enquiry itself unfolds within the same world of practices it seeks to understand, the paper advances a hermeneutic foundation for practice research and invites further exploration of its methodological implications.
Copyright (c) 2026 Inti José Lammi (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Mapping Scales of Change: Attending to Scale Across and Through Practices
Across the social sciences, scale is often understood as the level, size, or scope at which social phenomena are studied, measured, or governed. Practice theory has long been uneasy with such scalar distinctions, seeking to move beyond dominant micro–macro divides. Rather than abandoning scale, this paper asks what it might mean to think in terms of scales of change. Scales of change are conceptualised as the reach, rhythm, and organisation through which practices extend across timespaces and persist, adapt, or falter. The argument is developed through a cartographic sensibility that decouples mapping from representation and approaches it instead as a situated, processual practice of tracing relations between practices, materials, and temporal-spatial arrangements. Mapping operates as an of-the-moment practice that provisionally orders relations, making some trajectories of change visible while leaving others obscure. A cartographic exercise on multi-local dwelling is used as an illustrative case to explore how different ways of tracing practices render different scales of change perceptible. The paper develops a conceptualisation of scale as emergent from practice and shows how shifts in scale reconfigure what becomes visible as change, who can recognise it, and how it can be acted upon.
Copyright (c) 2026 Jenny Rinkinen (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Power and Theories of Social Practice: Bringing Capacity into Question with a Focus on Plastic Packaging Recycling
In this essay, we conceptualise ‘capacity’ as a means of attending to power and addressing corollary issues of disparity and social change in a manner commensurate with the ontological commitments of second-wave theories of practice. While second-wave theories of practice justifiably see power as immanent to the enactment and ordering of practices, the challenge remains to develop convincing analytical tools capable of empirically parsing the relations that give rise to social disparities. Our conceptualisation of capacity, which comprises three interwoven dimensions (potential, limit, and position), responds to this challenge and, in doing so, illuminates how practices are imbued with and produce social disparities in capacities to act. To illustrate the novel empirical tractability that our conceptualisation of capacity contributes to the debate on power and second-wave theories of practice, we focus on and critique the assumed ‘power’ of packaging design practitioners to tackle waste by enhancing the recyclability of plastic packaging. As this case demonstrates, the conceptualisation of capacity articulated in this paper contributes a powerful means for practice-theoretical research to unpick and address the details and dynamics of disparities in capacities to act, sharpening insight into the constraints and possibilities for social change.
Copyright (c) 2026 Torik Holmes, Matt Watson (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Good Neighbouring: A Travelling Practice
In this opinion piece for the journal's Current Affairs column, Stephen Kemmis and Emily Cole examine contemporary US immigration enforcement practices and the emergence of responses to them. Responding to widespread narratives of political polarisation and division, they conceptualise the issue in terms of a contested field of evolving practices. While recent policy shifts toward detention and deportation have generated forms of policing that are widely challenged and resisted, they have also prompted the emergence and expansion of practices of care, protection, and solidarity among US citizens. Focusing in particular on developments in Minnesota, Kemmis and Cole show how traditions of ‘good neighbouring’ are being reworked into new forms of collective action and resistance. The piece highlights how distributed learning across social ensembles sustains these transformations, revealing the tensions and consequences of changing government policy, and pointing to the enduring potential and capacity for humane and solidaristic forms of practice.
Copyright (c) 2026 Stephen Kemmis, Emily Cole (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Re-viewed: Alan Warde’s (2005) ‘Consumption and Theories of Practice’ in the Journal of Consumer Culture
This first set of re-views revisits a foundational text in the sociology of consumption, Alan Warde’s ‘Consumption and Theories of Practice’, published in the Journal of Consumer Culture in 2005. Rather than offering a single reading, the section brings together three commentaries written by people whose work has been influenced by the article. Dale Southerton positions Warde’s article within a series of intellectual ‘moments’ that have shaped his own research trajectory. Tamzin Rollason revisits the text from the perspective of sustainable consumption and fashion research. Finally, Torik Holmes invites a re-reading of Warde’s work as an intervention in the politics of consumption. Together, these re-views provide a glimpse into the past twenty years of debate at the intersection of practice theory and consumption and show how contributions like Warde’s article are interpreted and mobilised in current research.
Copyright (c) 2026 Dale Southerton, Tamzin Rollason, Torik Holmes, Jenny Rinkinen, Elizabeth Shove (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
In this contribution to the Theory Corner of the Columns section, Elizabeth Shove interrogates the pervasive metaphor of the ‘practice lens’. Elizabeth takes aim at the seemingly innocuous concepts of 'perspectives', 'lenses’, and ‘filters’ on the grounds that they reproduce a dangerously limited view of the status of theory in social research. The ensuing debate is as important for those who believe that theories selectively reveal aspects of an independent reality as it is for those who claim that theories constitute the very terms of enquiry.
Copyright (c) 2026 Elizabeth Shove (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Editor’s Introduction to Volume 1: Practice Theory: Past, Present, Future
On behalf of the Editorial Team, I would like to welcome readers to the inaugural issue of The Journal of Practice Theory. This introduction explains the rationale and promise of establishing this new journal and outlines its aims and scope. It also introduces the first issue, Vol. 1: Practice Theory: Past, Present, Future, providing an overview and commentary on each of the three sections and on what they reveal about the current state and potential of practice-theoretical research. The editorial concludes with an invitation to contribute to future issues of the journal and to submit articles that connect, extend, and expand the field of practice theory across disciplines and topics.
Copyright (c) 2025 Stanley Blue (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
The Subjects of Practices: An Invited Response to the Question: ‘What is the Significance of the Human Being in Practice Theories?’
This paper considers the significance of people within practice theory, arguing that they do not merely participate in practices as unspecified individuals but assume specific subject forms through which they develop a practice-related subjectivity. In contrast to both the Cartesian notion of an autonomous subject and its dissolution in holistic accounts of practice, the article proposes a relational understanding of subjectivity as a constitutively conditioned capacity to act. Drawing on Bourdieu, Giddens, Schatzki, Leont’ev, and the concept of subjectivation, it shows how subjects and practices co-constitute one another as transformative processes. Practices are not only structured patterns of action but, following Leont’ev, motivated and meaningful activities oriented toward an ‘objectivity’ (‘Gegenständlichkeit’) in the world. They thus include the embodied, reflexive capacities of participants. Material artefacts and infrastructures are seen as enabling or constraining such agency. The article illustrates this dynamic through the historical emergence of the ‘Fosbury Flop’ in high jumping, showing how innovation arises from socio-material constellations rather than autonomous creativity. People appear as active, reflective moments within practice, whose constitutively conditioned subjectivity enables critique, transformation, and the creation of something new.
co-constitution of practices and subjects
objectivity (“Gegenständlichkeit“) of practice
Copyright (c) 2025 Thomas Alkemeyer (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Proposing a Gradient of Humanism/Non-Humanism and Understanding The Contributions of Body-Minds To Social Practices
The world is constantly changing, as are the social practices that comprise it. In view of the growing numbers and types of dynamic non-humans recruited into social practices, and what the significance of humans might be in this crowd, this article presents three interrelated lines of thinking in two main sections. The first section discusses whether there are any potential differences between humanist and post-humanist varieties of social practice theories, and instead of favouring one or the other, advocates for some middle ground by proposing a gradient of humanism. The second section explores how human body-minds (bodies) can be conceptualised more distinctively in theories of social practice, and in doing so, invokes the persistent question of whether distinctions between humans and non-humans in social practices can be usefully made and, if so, what roles they might play. The conclusion reflects on the previous discussion and revisits the recursive relationship between practices and bodies, highlighting important nuances and complexities while advocating for an expanded conceptualisation of bodies as more than simple carriers of practices and moving beyond dichotomies of humanist/post-humanist accounts of practice.
Copyright (c) 2025 Cecily Maller (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Practice Theory Perspectives on Learning and Social Change
This essay briefly outlines an individualist, cognitive, epistemic view of learning and supplements it with a sociomaterial, ontological view of learning as coming to practice differently. It draws on anthropological views of learning in communities of practice to outline a sociomaterial view of learning distributed among participants in social ensembles in which different participants come to practice differently from one another. It argues that learning is an ontological transformation, not only of learners, but also of the worlds they inhabit – in particular, practices, sites and arrangements, histories, and lives. Understanding learning as transforming learners’ worlds locates learning in processes of social change, allowing researchers to show how distributed learning in social ensembles contributes to social movements for cultural, economic, ecological, social, and political transformation.
Copyright (c) 2025 Stephen Kemmis (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
On War and Practice Theory: Difficulties, Dangers, and Unease
In this short piece for the Columns section of the journal, Torik Holmes considers war as under-explored terrain and asks what the potential might be for a practice theoretical analysis of armed conflict. In doing so, he discusses how a conceptual focus on practices rather than individuals unsettles conventional narratives of blame and responsibility and raises difficult ethical questions about the uses and consequences of social theories.
Copyright (c) 2025 Torik Holmes (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Bordering and Insurgency: Towards a Decolonial Practice-Based Approach
This essay advances a decolonial agenda for practice-based research through the concepts of bordering and insurgency, introduced as generative tools for rethinking how practices are theorised and studied. While practice theories have contributed significantly to overcoming dualisms and foregrounding relationality, many empirical applications continue to overlook colonial histories, power asymmetries, and intersectional dynamics that shape social practices. Drawing on decolonial ideas, I propose an affirmative orientation that expands the analytical and ethical scope of practice theories. Bordering invites attention to the epistemic boundaries that legitimise certain practices while marginalising others, while insurgency foregrounds the knowledges and actions that emerge from sites of resistance. Together, these concepts support a more plural, situated, and reflexive engagement with practice - one that is attuned to historical legacies, ongoing exclusions, and the political stakes of knowing and doing. The essay concludes by encouraging future research that embraces epistemic diversity and cultivates methodologies capable of engaging with contested and emergent forms of practice.
Copyright (c) 2025 Marcelo de Souza Bispo (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Gendering Practices: Feminist Perspectives Transforming Practice Theory
In this essay I intend to explore the intertwining of feminist and gender perspectives and practice theory, highlighting their mutual contributions and potential synergies. On the one hand, a practice-based approach offers a relevant framework for studying gender, shifting the focus of analysis to actual activities, situated actions, and material arrangements. On the other, feminist research, which has long proposed a conceptualisation of gender as social practice, can enrich the debate on practices, bringing to light the ways in which power and inequality are woven into the fabric of practices. Finally, I will attempt to outline some directions for future research that bridge practice theory and feminist research, foregrounding embodiment and the intertwining of power and materiality.
Copyright (c) 2025 Barbara Poggio (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
What’s ‘Natural’ About Disasters? Practice Theory as an Emancipatory Lens for Reconceptualising the Social Construction of Disasters
Practice theory constitutes an emancipatory lens for reconceptualising the social construction of disaster. Framing extreme weather disasters, such as floods, fires and tropical storms as natural, places them beyond human action. By contrast, a practice lens places their consequences firmly within the realm of human action. Drawing on practice theory, we explain why framing disasters as natural exacerbates their prevalence. We note that the practices of everyday life and striving to resume those practices after disaster often take precedence over alleviating the sources of disaster. Furthermore, these practices are distributed across time and space in patterns of social order that perpetuate the tendency for disaster to disproportionately affect the most vulnerable. We conclude by issuing a call to arms to embrace the emancipatory potential of practice scholarship by exposing the disastrous consequences of mundane practice, critiquing the dominant ways of knowing that contribute to existing constructions of disaster and using social science to advocate for fundamental change.
Copyright (c) 2025 Paula Jarzabkowski, Katie Meissner, Tyler Riordan, Rosie Gallagher (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Sociodigital Practices: Mobilising and Challenging Social Practice Theory
In this article, we ask what the emergence of digital technologies means for social practices. We argue that digital forms (devices, data, infrastructures, platforms, etc.) and (many) social practices are entangled such that they should be conceptualised as sociodigital practices. Conceptualised as such, key analytical questions are: How are sociodigital practices configured and reconfigured? And how and what kinds of connections form between sociodigital practices? We demonstrate how five concepts from Social Practice Theory (SPT) – infusing, circulating, merging and emerging, cross-referencing, and interweaving – are instructive for addressing these questions. Four challenges to SPT (and practice theories more broadly) are identified. (1) Analysis needs to extend beyond the everyday to include professional practices and sites of practice performance. (2) Technical expertise and interdisciplinary collaboration are essential to fully grasp the material threads that weave through sociodigital practices. (3) Specific concepts (infusing, cross-referencing, and interweaving) represent important analytical starting points for explaining the extensiveness and density of sociodigital practices. (4) Attention to futures claims as empirical objects of enquiry is necessary to engage with sociodigital future-making practices.
Copyright (c) 2025 Dale Southerton, Susan Halford (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
The Travels and Adoptions of Practice Theories
Although the practice-theoretical approach originated primarily as a theoretical endeavour and framework for empirical sociological research, it has also long sought to inform, inspire, and guide practical policies, strategies, and interventions. This article outlines future research directions aimed at exploring the travels and adoptions of practice theories across various fields of usage.
Copyright (c) 2025 Seweryn Rudnicki (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
What is the Place of the Human Being in Practice Theories?
This paper sets out a response to the journal’s question - what is the place of the human being in practice theories? - from a posthumanist position. The article is positioned within the so-called re-turn to practice theories after the 2000s, inside work and organization studies. It explores the conception of 'the human being' once practice is assumed as the unit of analysis. The discussion is organised around three arguments. The first focuses on the decentring of the human subject, no longer universal, pre-given and the only seat of agency. The second articulates a processual vision of the human as becoming-with nonhuman, more-than-human, and earth. The third proposes a conception of the human multiple, emerging from ethic-onto-epistemic practices of knowledge production grounded in the concepts of sociomateriality and naturecultural. In conclusion, the article argues that the decentralisation of the human subject in posthumanist theories of practice opens up methodological possibilities that do not depend ontologically, epistemologically, or ethically on the figure of the human subject.
Copyright (c) 2025 Silvia Gherardi (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
An Interview with Joseph Rouse: Careers and Ideas in Practice
In mapping out some of the key features of his interpretation of practice theory, Joseph Rouse begins by talking about the influence of science studies, and about the social organization of scientific practice. In all of this, Kuhn is an important figure, as are controversies about the socially constructed nature of knowledge. For Joe, practice theory provides a distinctive take on these debates and on the place of language, materiality, normativity, and power. All these issues prove to be important for big questions about the natural and the social world and for Joe’s conclusion that practices underpin the basic structure of human biological environments.
Copyright (c) 2025 Elizabeth Shove, Manuel Baeriswyl, Joseph Rouse (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
An Interview with Stephen Turner: Careers and Ideas in Practice
Over the course of his long career, Stephen Turner has challenged a host of established positions in social theory. In this interview we discuss some of these interventions, starting with his critique of concepts that purport to explain social life but that are detached from it. Instead of treating practices as reified entities that ‘exist’ and about which we can have a theory, Stephen works from the ground up, asking about the place of habit and tacit knowledge and their significance for how practices are shared. In discussing Stephen’s approach, and how it relates to – and departs from - the work of Thomas Kuhn, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, Antony Giddens, and Bruno Latour, we range across topics to do with constructivism, realism, and materiality. We look back at the reception of his landmark book, The Social Theory of Practices (1994), and we look forwards: thinking about where his ideas are leading now.
Copyright (c) 2025 Elizabeth Shove, Manuel Baeriswyl, Stephen Turner (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
An Interview with Wanda Orlikowski: Careers and Ideas in Practice
Starting from an early interest in Information Systems research and digital technology, Wanda Orlikowski came across social science by accident. From that moment on, she has sought to change the ways in which work, technology, and organizing are thought about, especially in the field of management studies. Her research focuses on the dynamic interplay between technology and organizations, and on how organizing structures, cultural norms, communication patterns, and work practices are reconfigured over time. Her notable contribution lies in applying Anthony Giddens' structuration theory to analyze the adoption and utilization of technologies within organizational settings. In this interview, she takes us through the stages of these metamorphoses and describes her approach, from questioning structures and their effects to detailed ethnographic studies of technologies in action.
Copyright (c) 2025 Elizabeth Shove, Manuel Baeriswyl , Wanda Orlikowski (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0