How crisis reveals the structures of practices

ABSTRACT

The speed, scope and scale of changes wreaked by the Covid-19 crisis of 2020 onwards raise challenging questions for practice theorists. After all, practice theory has generally emphasized continuity. According to Reckwitz, practices are 'routinized types of behaviour'. For Nicolini practices are 'very resilient and often difficult to change because, qua practices, they are taken for granted and often considered as part of the natural order of things'. Where practice theorists have explored change, they have often focused on slow-cooked transformations, for instance the spread of showering from the 1870s onwards, the emergence of the Kentucky bourbon industry in the mid-19th Century, or the decades-long shifts in the practices of strategy in modern Western businesses. The Covid-19 changes have an intensity that is quite other to these leisurely evolutions. Our argument here is that the Covid-19 crisis, challenging as it is, in fact provides an opportunity for practice theorists. As a set of extreme events, it exposes for further investigation structural features of practices along two dimensions, external and internal. These structural features help us address two particularly tough questions raised by initial observations of the crisis. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)