A practice is a repeatable, organized activity that people perform within institutions and social settings. Diagnosing a patient, administering an exam, filing a police report, conducting a job interview, classifying a specimen — these are practices. They have rules (written or implicit), roles (who does what), settings (where they happen), and products (what they generate).
Practices matter for social analysis because they are where ideas meet the world. An idea about how criminals should be treated remains an idea until it becomes a practice — until someone builds a prison, trains guards, writes schedules, and processes inmates. This distinction — between ideas and the practices through which ideas take material form — is central to Michel Foucault’s genealogy. Foucault traced how practices changed rather than how ideas changed: the prison’s timetable came from the monastery, its drill from the military, its examination from the school [@foucault1977].
Practices produce knowledge. A clinical practice produces case files, diagnoses, and statistical distributions. This knowledge isn’t a neutral byproduct — it is the medium through which knowledge operates. Practices are contingent: the job interview, the clinical examination, the standardized test — none are inevitable. Each emerged from specific historical conditions and could have been otherwise.
Related terms
- Institution — the stable structures that organize and sustain practices
- knowledge — the mechanism by which practices produce knowledge as they exercise power
- Discourse — the rules that govern what practices can produce as sayable and knowable
- Genealogy — the method for tracing how practices emerged through contingency and conflict