Fire and water combined: Understanding the Relevance of Working Life Studies through a Concept of Practical Activity

Abstract

When I presented the basic ideas of this paper at a conference, a Swedish colleague commented: ‘you manage to combine water and fire.’ I understood his kind comment to mean that he used water and fire as metaphors for practice and theory. The comment puzzled me for a while. Water and fire obviously destroy each other, or at least radically transform each other. Then I realized that humans have actually managed to combine water and fire in several ways. One solution is the kettle. It makes possible to use fire in a controlled way for the human purpose of boiling water. Thus, this paper can be taken as an attempt at offering a kettle-like vehicle for bringing together practicetheoretical concepts and vocational practice. My kettle is a concept of practical activity. I am trying to boil up an answer to the following question: in what senses a study of work can be practically relevant to those who are doing the work being studied?

Academic Knowledge Production: Framework of Practical Activity in the Context of Transformative Food Studies

“…For instance, despite its emancipatory objectives, citizen science can contribute to separating "science professionals" from "practitioners" and "amateurs" (see e.g., Conde, 2014) and end up granting more value to scientific measurement than to embodied and non-articulable ways of knowing (see e.g., Barad, 2003;de la Bellacasa, 2016). By putting more weight on "expert knowledge, " scholars may fail to understand that "amateur-practitioners" can also be "experts" of their own practice (Gherardi, 2012;Räsänen, 2015). Consequently, there is a danger that research produces food studies based on Western knowledge (Jehlička et al, 2020), and thus reproduces neoliberal agency and individualistic understandings of human behavior (Alkon and Mares, 2012), among other things.…”

“…The practice theoretical approach that we adopt emphasizes the relevance of the context and materiality of practices and suggests that practitioners (c.f. carriers of the practice, Reckwitz, 2002) are the experts of their own practice (Räsänen, 2015). In this view, practices, as the objects of study, form what Nicolini (2011) calls "the sites" of knowing within which "we engage with the world and the material and linguistic practices into which we are socialized [and which] provide a background for understanding what counts as an object of knowledge, what counts as knowing subjects, and in the event what counts as possible (and "real")" (Nicolini, 2011, 604).…”

“…Developed by a research group within our (former) local academic community, the framework of practical activity (FPA) (Räsänen and Mäntylä, 2001;Räsänen, 2008Räsänen, , 2009Räsänen, , 2015Räsänen and Trux, 2012) is the result of an effort to develop "an alternative, constructive, and participatory approach to higher education research" (Räsänen, 2008, p. 2). Acknowledging the diverse disciplinary traditions behind practice theories and drawing on the work of several known scholars (e.g., Pierre Bourdieu, Michel de Certeau, Alasdair MacIntyre and Dorothy Holland), FPA aims to direct people-be they researchers, citizens, businesspeople, artists, food activists, or other practitioners-to their own and/or others' practices.…”

Talous käytäntöteoreettisesti : kotitalouksien omaehtoinen ruuanhankinta taloutta koskevan tiedon lähteenä

“…Käytäntöteorioiden näkökulmasta on hedelmällistä keskittyä tutkimaan jotakin tiettyä käytännöllistä toimintaa (Räsänen 2009;2015a). Tässä kirjoituksessa keskitymme pohtimaan kotitalouksien omaehtoista ruuanhankintaa, mikä tekee näkyväksi talouteen liitettyjä vaikeasti sanallistettavia, kehollisia ja ei-inhimillisiä ulottuvuuksia.…”

“…Infrastruktuuri määrittää pitkälti niitä olosuhteita ja mahdollisuuksia, joiden puitteissa ruokatalouden toiminnan odotetaan tapahtuvan. Räsäsen ja kumppaneiden käytännöllisen toiminnan viitekehys (Räsänen 2009;2015a;Räsänen & Trux 2012) korostaakin, että poliittinen ohjautuvuus tai vastaavasti yksilöiden oman edun tavoittelu ( Jackson 2009; Raworth 2017) ovat vain yhdenlaisia toimintatapoja muiden joukossa. Yhtä tärkeää on ymmärtää ihmisten taktikointia eli sitä, miten ihmiset luovivat toisten määrittämässä tilassa ja sen materiaalisissa ulottuvuuksissa (De Certeau 1984;Lefebvre 2004).…”