Theodore R. Schatzki

Peripheral Vision The Sites of Organizations

This essay introduces a new form of social ontology and sketches its bearings on the analysis of organizations. The essay begins by contrasting the two social ontological camps — individualism and societism — into which social theory has been divided since its inception. It then describes the new approach, called site ontology, according to which social life is tied to a context (site) of which it is inherently a part. Examples of such ontologies are presented, as is my own thesis that the site of social life is composed of a nexus of human practices and material arrangements. The bearing of the latter ontology on the character, origin, and perpetuation of organizations is then considered, using an academic department as an example. Contrasts are also drawn with various approaches in organizations theory, including rational organizations, neoinstitutionalism, systems theories, and selection theories. A final section considers the complex psychological structure of organizations, working off Karl Weick and Karlene Robert’s notion of collective mind in organizations.

On Organizations as they Happen

The essay examines what organizations are as they happen. It first argues that the happening of an organization has two basic components: the performance of its constituent actions and practices and the occurrence of events whereby its material arrangements causally support these activities. Equating the idea of something as it happens with that of something in real time, the essay then examines two kinds of real time in which organizations occur. The first is the unfoldings of the performances and events that are the happening of the organization. The second is the co-occurrences of the teleological past, present, and future in organizational actions. As it happens, however, an organization is more than what there is to it in real time. It also embraces the persisting structures of its practices and its enduring material arrangements, both of which, among other things, institute possible real times for the organization. The essay argues that the perpetuation of practice structure should be understood as organizational memory.

A Primer on Practices

As the title indicates, this chapter is a primer on practices. It begins by discussing practice theory generally but mostly presents my own ideas. The topics addressed are practices, activities, and social phenomena, with special attention to temporality and the unfolding of practices. The chapter concludes with comments about conducting research on practices. My goal is to provide practice theoretical stimulation to readers interested in practice-based education and research.

A New Societist Social Ontology

This article delineates a new type of social ontology—site ontology—and defends a particular version of that type. The first section establishes the distinctiveness of site ontologies over both individualist ontologies and previous societist ones. The second section then shows how site ontologies elude two pervasive criticisms, that of incompleteness directed at individualism and that of reification leveled at societism. The third section defends a particular site ontology, one that depicts the social as a mesh of human practices and material arrangements. The article concludes by outlining what is involved in giving site-ontological analyses of social things.

Overdue analysis of Bourdieu's theory of practice

Pierre Bourdieus 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 adeq...

Wittgenstein and the social context of an individual life

This article argues that two significant implications of Wittgenstein’s writings for social thought are (1) that people are constitutively social beings and (2) that the social context of an individual life is nexuses of practice. Part one concretizes these ideas by examining the constitution of action within practices. It begins by criticizing three arguments of Winch’s that suggest that action is inherently social. It then spells out two arguments for the practice constitution of action that are extractable from Wittgenstein’s remarks. Part two contrasts the conception of the social context of individual life as practices with three historically significant conceptions of such a context: totality; sui generis reality; and abstract structure. It also circumscribes that contemporary movement - practice theory - that develops the Wittgensteinian position and represents, perhaps, his most significant legacy for social thought.

The Social Bearing of Nature

This essay examines how nature pertains to social life. Part I describes the social ontology the essay employs to address this issue. This ontology is of the site variety and is opposed to ontologies of both the individualist and socialist sorts. Part II describes where nature appears in this ontology. Artifacts are differentiated from nature, and much of ?nature? is shown to be second nature, a type of artifact that looks and feels like nature. Part II concludes by disputing the idea that nature forms a backdrop against which society develops semi-autonomously. Part III examines the idea of human history as a natural history. Opposing construals of natural history that treat human-social existence as a piece of nature, it defends the necessity of maintaining distinctions between social life and nature and between social history and natural change. None the less, it continues, human history is a natural history. These claims are held together via a neo-Marxian conception of human natural history as the development of humankind through its entanglement with nature. Elements of the ?metabolism? of humankind with nature are described.

Living Out of the Past: Dilthey and Heidegger on Life and History

This essay examines continuities and transformations in Heideggers appropriation of Diltheys 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 Daseins being both underlies objective history and makes the scholarly narration of history possible. Part one describes Diltheys account of life, Heideggers criticism that this account objectifies life, and Heideggers appropriation of those aspects of Diltheys 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 Diltheys 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 historians life makes the writing of history possible.

Wittgenstein + Heidegger on the stream of life

This paper combines views of Wittgenstein and Heidegger into an account of mind/ action. It does this by suggesting that these two philosophers be viewed in part as descendants of Life‐philosophy (Lebensphilosophie). Part I describes the conception of life that informs and emerges from these thinkers. Parts Two and Three detail particular aspects of this conception: Wittgenstein on the constitution of states of life and Heidegger on the flow‐structure of the stream of life. The Conclusion offers reasons for believing their combined viewpoint.

On Sociocultural Evolution by Social Selection

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 (as opposed to cultural) 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.