The argument developed here builds upon an understanding of practice as a ‘type of behaving and understanding that appears at different locales and at different points of time and is carried out by different body/minds’ (Reckwitz 2002: 250). As Schatzki puts it, a practice is ‘a temporally unfolding and spatially dispersed nexus of doings and sayings’ (1996: 89). In this sense, practices exist as provisional but recognizable entities composed of also recognizable conventions, images and meanings; materials and forms of competence. At the same time, if they are to exist at all, practices require active reproduction and performance. In other words, people have to do them. More than that, it is through these doings that the contours of individual practices are defined, reproduced and constituted. Since people engage in many practices (during a day, a year or a lifetime), any discussion of the temporal texture of daily life has to take account of how practices intersect in time and in space. There are various ways in which one might approach this topic.
First, and as indicated above, many would agree that uses of time (as well as of energy, water, money, material goods and environmental resources) represent the detectable remains or traces of practice. By following these variously visible trails one can learn, in aggregate and occasionally in detail, about who does what, and about when and how this varies. Although good for retrospectively revealing trends and patterns, exercises of this kind are of limited value in understanding exactly how some practices emerge and others disappear. Since people have to make or find time in which to do – i.e. to perform – practices, it is reasonable to suppose that if new practices are to take hold, time has to be made for them at the expense of others which are no longer performed, or not performed as frequently as before. This reasoning points to a zero-sum model of daily life in which practices compete with each other for necessary temporal, as well as material and cognitive, resources. From this point of view, time-use data also tell us something about the relative successes of rival practices.
Ironically, those who follow the temporal traces of practice are obliged to gloss over the fragile nature of the always provisional entities they track and play down the endless processes of recruitment and learning that are inevitably involved. By contrast, those who concentrate on the details of doing make much of the point that experiences accumulate and identities evolve in ways that are collectively important not only for the careers and trajectories of the individuals involved, but also for the practices they carry and of which they are a part (Becker 1963; Jalas 2006). For example, Sudnow’s (1978) study of becoming a jazz pianist demonstrates that as the novice’s career develops, new possibilities and performances come within his or her reach. At the same time, the enterprise of jazz piano playing – the detail of what it involves and what there is to learn – depends upon and is defined and collectively reproduced by the variously experienced cohorts of those who do it. This work suggests that time-critical concepts like those of an unfolding career are made by dynamic, mutually constitutive relations between practice and practitioner.
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Elizabeth Shove