Theodore Schatzki

Among the theses promulgated by the Frankfort School theorists during the forties and fifties was the decline of the individual under contemporary capitalism. The chief agent of this decline was identified as the culture industry, which served the reigning system by integrating people into its particular regime of production, reproduction, and consumption. By dominating minds, homogenizing behaviors, and normalizing tastes, this industry prepared people for capitalist toil. In so doing, it also obstructed the flowering of individuality. Individuality, if it were possible any longer, could henceforth be found only among the “captains” of capitalism in charge of the system. In fact, however, these captains were equally captive. The future of the individual thus seemed sealed.

This essay provides a framework for characterizing changes to social phenomena that accompany the digitalization of society. It begins by discharging two preliminary tasks: presenting the social ontology used in the analysis—a version of practice theory—and surveying extant general accounts of sociodigital phenomena to give readers a sense of the accounts on offer and to indicate through contrast how broad my account is. The starting point for the essay’s own account is the great number and variety of sociodigital phenomena and changes today. The essay proposes to base a general account of this profusion on the notion of form, where the form of something is the features it exhibits in key dimensions of variation that characterize a population to which the something belongs. It is claimed that the four central dimensions of variation for social, and thus sociodigital, phenomena are (1) constitution, (2) interactions and associations, (3) spaces and times, and (4) meaning and significance. Following discussion of this claim, sketches are offered of the forms of four pre-digital social phenomena and four sociodigital ones. A final section offers general observations about how sociodigital phenomena are different in these four dimensions from their pre-digital counterparts.

This essay explores consonant aspects of the relationship between phenomenology and practice theory. It makes three basic claims. The first is really just an observation, namely, that phenomenology makes incisive contributions to the account of action found in practice theory. The second claim is that practice theory updates an important conception of sociality developed in post Heideggerian phenomenology. And the third claim is that phenomenologies and practice theories can combine to form wider accounts of human life that encompass such phenomena as experience, consciousness, emotions, and the body that phenomenology has well analyzed and practice theory has somewhat ignored.

Social Change in a Material Worldoffers a new, practice theoretical account of social change and its explanation. Extending the author's earlier account of social life, and drawing on general ideas about events, processes, and change, the book conceptualizes social changes as configurations of significant differences in bundles of practices and material arrangements. Illustrated with examples from the history of bourbon distillation and the formation and evolution of digitally-mediated associations in contemporary life, the book argues that chains of activity combine with material events and processes to cause social changes. The book thereby stresses the significance of the material dimension of society for the constitution, determination, and explanation of social phenomena, as well as the types of space needed to understand them. The book also challenges the explanatory significance of such key phenomena as power, dependence, relations, mechanisms, and individual behavior. As such, it will appeal to sociologists, geographers, organization studies scholars, and others interested in social life and social change. As such, it will appeal to sociologists, geographers, organization studies scholars, and others interested in social life and social change.

Humanistic theory for more than the past 100 years is marked by extensive attention to practice and practices. Two prominent streams of thought sharing this focus are pragmatism and theories of practice. This volume brings together internationally prominent theorists to explore key dimensions of practice and practices on the background of parallels and points of contact between these two traditions. The contributors all are steeped in one or both of these streams and well-known for their work on practice. The collected essays explore three important themes: what practice and practices are, normativity, and transformation. The volume deepens understanding of these three practice themes while strengthening appreciation of the parallels between and complementariness of pragmatism and practice theory.

This essay pursues two goals: to argue that two fundamental types of time—the time of objective reality and “the time of the soul”—meet in human activity and history and to defend the legitimacy of calling a particular version of the second type a kind of time. The essay begins by criticizing Paul Ricoeur’s version of the claim that times of these two sorts meet in history. It then presents an account of human activity based on Heidegger’s Being and Time, according to which certain times of the two types—existential temporality and succession—meet in human activity. The legitimacy of calling existential temporality a kind of time is then defended via an expanded analysis of activity that examines where the two times meet there. The concluding section briefly considers a conception of historical time due to David Carr before showing why history is a broader domain encompassing human activity where the two times meet.

My dissertation traces the consequences following for social science from an analysis of the nature of its object domain, which I call "socio-historical reality." In particular, I hope thereby to dissolve many misconceptions about the character of social science. ;Influenced by Dilthey, I propose an "individualist" account that analyzes socio-historical reality as nothing but interrelated everyday lives, which themselves consist in series of actions that are governed by practical intelligibility and performed in interconnected settings. This analysis differs from traditional versions of individualist social ontology because in elaborating Heidegger's idea that action is governed by practical intelligibility, and in emphasizing the role of setting in ongoing action, it offers a novel account of the ingredients out of which socio-historical reality consists. These ingredients are: actions, the entities found in settings, a broad range of factors such as rules, paradigms, ideas, goals, and normal practices, which are articulated by entities in settings and determine what it makes sense to people to do, and concrete relations between these phenomena, for example, chains of actions and commonalities in the factors mentioned under . An important consequence of my account is that socio-historical reality does not contain unexperienceable types of entities. ;This analysis of the object domain of social science has implications for the constitution of overarching social formations , the nature of social causality, and the character of social science. I maintain, for example, that all social science should be verstehende, though not necessarily interpretive; that it is unlikely that social science will discover laws governing what happens in socio-historical reality; that much of contemporary social science unknowingly and illegitimately uses fictions in its accounts; and that explanation in social science refers ultimately to individual actions and does not rest on laws or generalizations

Pierre Bourdieu's theory of practice is an unsung classic of contemporary social philosophy. It combines the first analysis by a social theorist of the practical intelligibility governing action with an exciting perspective on how the structure of social phenomena determines and is itself perpetuated by action. Bourdieu, however, misinterprets his own theory of intelligibility as a theory of the causal generation of action. Moreover, he attempts to analyze the underlying structure of intelligibility with a set of fundamental oppositions that at the same time structure the social phenomena found in the worlds through which people live. It is argued that practical intelligibility has no underlying structure, that the fundamental oppositions apply at best to traditional societies alone, and that these oppositions do not even structure intelligibility in such societies but, instead, are only a descriptive scheme with which a social scientist can reconstruct social phenomena in them. The outline of a more adequate account of practical intelligibility is also presented

This essay sketches an expanded theoretical conception of the roles of nature and technology in history, one that is based on a social ontology that does not separate nature and society. History has long been viewed as the realm of past human action. On this conception, nature is treated largely as an Other of history, and technology is construed chiefly as a means for human fulfillment. There is no history of nature, and the history of technology becomes the history of useful products. The essay discusses the changes wrought in these understandings by a social ontology that depicts social existence as inherently transpiring in nexuses of practices and material arrangements. The first implication is that the domain of history should be expanded from the realm and course of past human activity to the realm and course of past practice–arrangement nexuses. In turn, this wider conception transforms the significance of nature and technology in history. Until recently, most accounts of the relationship between society/history and nature have presumed that society and history are separate from nature. On my account, by contrast, nature is part of society: a component of the practice–arrangement nexuses through which social life progresses. Human history, consequently, is a social–natural history that encompasses the varying presence and roles of nature in human coexistence. Technology, meanwhile, is not just useful products, and not just a mediator of society/history and nature. It also is something through which humans manage social life and the nature that is part of it, largely by drawing nature into this site and thereby conjointly transforming society, technology, and nature in history; and something that, over time, plays an increasingly central role in the nexuses where social life transpires. Through technology, in short, social–natural history takes form and advances

This essay pursues two goals: to argue that two fundamental types of time—the time of objective reality and “the time of the soul”—meet in human activity and history and to defend the legitimacy of calling a particular version of the second type a kind of time. The essay begins by criticizing Paul Ricoeur’s version of the claim that times of these two sorts meet in history. It then presents an account of human activity based on Heidegger’s Being and Time, according to which certain times of the two types—existential temporality and succession—meet in human activity. The legitimacy of calling existential temporality a kind of time is then defended via an expanded analysis of activity that examines where the two times meet there. The concluding section briefly considers a conception of historical time due to David Carr before showing why history is a broader domain encompassing human activity where the two times meet

Inspired by Heidegger’s concept of the clearing of being, and by Wittgenstein’s ideas on human practice, Theodore Schatzki offers a novel approach to understanding the constitution and transformation of social life. Key to the account he develops here is the context in which social life unfolds—the "site of the social"—as a contingent and constantly metamorphosing mesh of practices and material orders. Schatzki’s analysis reveals the advantages of this site ontology over the traditional individualist, holistic, and structuralist accounts that have dominated social theory since the mid-nineteenth century. A special feature of the book is its development of the theoretical argument by sustained reference to two historical examples: the medicinal herb business of a Shaker village in the 1850s and contemporary day trading on the Nasdaq market. First focusing on the relative simplicity of Shaker life to illuminate basic ontological characteristics of the social site, Schatzki then uses the sharp contrast with the complex and dynamic practice of day trading to reveal what makes this approach useful as a general account of social existence. Along the way he provides new insights into many major issues in social theory, including the nature of social order, the significance of agency, the distinction between society and nature, the forms of social change, and how the social present affects its future

This essay is a commentary on and critique of the conception of human activity that Robert Pippin attributes to Hegel in his recent book, Hegel's Practical Philosophy. Two principal features of this conception are that it treats human activity as indeterminate and that it construes what someone does and why on a given occasion as depending on social contexts. Pippin suggests that these two features will sound strange to contemporary philosophers. The essay claims, by contrast, that these features will not sound strange to philosophers who advocate one of a small family of other accounts that espouse these two ideas. The essay argues, further, that certain such accounts, namely, ones inspired by Heidegger and Wittgenstein, are more promising accounts of human activity than is Hegel's. The bulk of the essay explores the indeterminacy of activity and the dependency of activity on social context as these are analyzed in Pippin's book and in Heidegger and Wittgenstein

This essay addresses various issues about interpretive social investigation that arise in recent books by Berel Lerner and by Mark Risjord. The general topics considered are the relation between interpretation and explanation, the explanation of action, and alternative rationalities. Part 1 centers on Risjord’s attempt to draw interpretation into the explanatory enterprise, among other things pointing out the limiting assumptions of his account and asking whether social investigation has epistemologically significant practical ends. Part 2 addresses the roles of normativity and rationality in explanations of action, taking up (1) a disagreement between Risjord and David Henderson on normativity, and (2) Lerner’s account of Winch’s appropriation of Wittgenstein’s idea of expressive action. Part 3, finally, endorses Lerner’s and Risjord’s version of the claim that rationality has multiple criteria while also suggesting that intelligibility, not rationality, lies at the heart of many debates on interpretive social science