Theodore Schatzki

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 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

Explaining Heidegger's ideas on spatial phenomena simply and succinctly, this book will be provocative and invaluable to anyone interested in space and spatial theory. The author gives incisive, informative, and compelling analyses of Heidegger's overall philosophy and of his changing ideas about space, spatiality, the clearing, places, sites, and dwelling. This study also charts the legacy of these ideas in philosophy, geography, architecture, and anthropology and includes a bibliography of select works that examine or are influenced by Heidegger's ideas on space.

This book develops an original Heideggerian account of the timespace and indeterminacy of human activity while describing insights that this account provides into the nature of activity, society and history. Drawing on empirical examples, the book argues that activity timespace is a key component of social space and time, shows that interwoven timespaces form an essential infrastructure of social phenomena, offers a novel account of the existence of the past in the present, and defends the teleological character of emotional and ceremonial actions.

This paper combines a phenomenological account of the types of causal transaction found in social reality with a critique of two theories, one structuralist and one Marxist, that contravene it. Part I argues that there are three types of causal transaction in social life in addition to physical causal transactions: people bringing about states of affairs by acting, states of affairs bringing about actions by inducing responses, and entities and states of affairs bringing about what makes sense to people to do by making certain factors determine this. It is also contended that social formations and structures cause actions and other social formations/structures only by way of participating in these types of transaction. The conditions under which this occurs are discussed. Part II criticizes Peter Blau's account of structural effects and Jean?Paul Sartre's version of a materialist theory of history, two theories that either advocate or require causal transactions between social structures/ formations which do not reduce to transactions of the types described in Part I. The paper concludes by suggesting that social entities that make actions possible do not thereby cause them

The essay criticizes an alleged new paradigm for explaining sociocultural change: selectionism. Part one describes the general selectionist explanatory schema, which selectionists claim applies to realms beyond the biological, in particular, the sociocultural. Part two focuses on the way most selectionists, in focusing on cultural change alone, wrongly separate culture from society. Particular atten-tion is paid to the accounts these selectionists offer of human action. Part three fills out a conception of the sociocultural, the need for which is indicated by the arguments of the previous section. Part four then criticizes existing social selectionist accounts of sociocultural change, again focusing on the role of human action. The conclusion is that selectionism does not offer a new explanatory paradigm, but is only a label for a class of accounts that highlight the role of contextualized agency in explaining social change

This essay examines continuities and transformations in Heidegger's appropriation of Dilthey's account of life and the accompanying picture of history between the end of World War One and Being and Time . The essay also judges the cogency of two conclusions that Heidegger draws in that book about history, viz, that historicity qua feature of Dasein's being both underlies objective history and makes the scholarly narration of history possible. Part one describes Dilthey's account of life, Heidegger's criticism that this account objectifies life, and Heidegger's appropriation of those aspects of Dilthey's account - temporality, movement, and wholes - that do not result from objectification. Part two focuses on how Heidegger reworks the idea that life is movement by reconceptualizing movement as a happening (and not a stream) and by replacing Dilthey's lived experiences with actions. Part three examines how Heidegger takes over from Dilthey the idea that something is historical if and only if the past is part of its present, also attending to the type(s) of past that these thinkers consider to be part of life. A final section judges the cogency of the two aforementioned theses, defending the claim that the historicity of life is the condition of the objective nexus of actions and events called history and criticizing the thesis that the historicity of a historian's life makes the writing of history possible.

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