Explanation
Social practices are recurring patterns of behavior, interaction, and everyday activity through which individuals navigate and reproduce social life. Practices include not only actions themselves but also the meanings, norms, skills, routines, and material conditions associated with them.
Examples of social practices include:
- consumption habits,
- communication styles,
- family routines,
- work practices,
- media use,
- or everyday forms of surveillance and self-presentation.
Practice-oriented sociology argues that society is not shaped only by institutions or individual decisions but also by habitual and socially shared practices embedded in everyday life.
Social practices are influenced by culture, social norms, technologies, material environments, and power relations. They can both reproduce and transform social structures over time.
In criminology, practice-oriented perspectives are used to examine routine activities, policing practices, surveillance practices, online interaction, and everyday forms of social control.
Theoretical Reference
Social practices are associated with practice theory, Pierre Bourdieu, Anthony Giddens, Andreas Reckwitz, ethnomethodology, and cultural sociology.