Practice Theory and Working Life Studies

Abstract

The article introduces the practice the-oretical perspective as a conceptual framework for understanding working life. Practical theory is a long and wide spread tradition within the human and social sciences. It sets out to understand people, work and society based on the activity and actions performed in sites. This article explains the basic assumptions and concepts of the practice theoretical perspective. The article focus on how recent practice theory – in the version of Theodore Schatzki’s theory of social life - develops concepts to understand how social life is organized through practices and how normativity in practice helps to determine actions. It is argued that the practice-theoretical approach can offer working life research concepts that enable a systematic and reflected study of working life as bundles of practices.