Ebook: Toward a Theory of Social Practices: A Development in Culturalist Theorizing

// European Journal of Social Theory. – 2002. – Vol. 5 (2). – P. 243–263.This article works out the main characteristics of ‘practice theory’, a type of social theory which has been sketched by such authors as Bourdieu, Giddens, Taylor, late Foucault and others. Practice theory is presented as a conceptual alternative to other forms of social and cultural theory, above all to culturalist mentalism, textualism and intersubjectivism. The article shows how practice theory and the three other cultural-theoretical vocabularies differ in their localization of the social and in their conceptualization of the body, mind, things, knowledge, discourse, structure/process and the agent.