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Governance, Innovation & Change
Social practice
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Why this matters
[To be drafted]
Shared definitions
Practices can be understood as situated patterns of action organised around shared, yet malleable, practical understandings in time and space. They transcend individual action by definition but are conceptually rooted in assumptions about agency.1)
A more developed account from practice theory treats practices as routinised types of behaviour consisting of several interconnected elements: forms of bodily activity, forms of mental activity, things and their use, background knowledge, know-how, states of emotion, and motivational knowledge.2) On this reading, practices are the primary unit of social analysis — neither individual behaviour nor social structure, but the shared, repeated performances that connect them.
The distinction between behaviour and practice matters for energy policy. Behaviour-change approaches target individual attitudes and choices, assuming that information provision or price signals will shift what people do. Practice-oriented approaches focus instead on the social, material, and infrastructural arrangements that make certain ways of doing things normal, easy, and expected — and others difficult or inconceivable. Shove (2010) argues that energy demand is better understood as the product of ordinary social practices than as the aggregated outcome of individual decisions, and that effective policy must engage with how practices change rather than simply trying to shift individual behaviour.3)
Perspectives
Actors and stakeholders
Technologies and infrastructure
Institutional structures
Distinctions and overlaps
Behaviour vs. social practice
Behaviour refers to individual actions or responses. Social practice refers to the collective, repeated, and culturally embedded patterns through which people engage in everyday life. The distinction matters for how change is understood: behaviour-change frameworks focus on individual choices, while practice theory asks how the social and material conditions enabling particular ways of doing things come to be established or disrupted.4)
Related topics
Topic notes
Content notes from source material:
- Source material included a ChatGPT-generated comparison of behaviour and social practice — used as a structural prompt only; content replaced with Reckwitz (2002) and Shove (2010).
- The Möllering & Müller-Seitz (2018) definition draws on Giddens (1984) — consider adding the Giddens primary source directly.
- Related pages flagged in source: users/citizens/consumers, actors and roles, innovation; institutional change noted — belongs in Institutions rather than a separate page.