When Practices Control Practitioners: Integrating self-reinforcing dynamics into practice-based accounts of managing and organizing

Abstract

Practice theories inform much of current organization and management research by focusing on social practices “in vivo and in situ,” helping us understand how they are produced, reproduced, connected, and eventually transformed by practitioners. Despite the explicit focus of these theories on process, some important dynamics within and across organizations remain undertheorized. This is particularly true for self-reinforcing processes like escalating commitment or path dependence. While such dynamics have been studied quite extensively with the help of other theories, this work often lacks a clear relation or relevance to lived life in organizations. This paper offers an integration of self-reinforcing dynamics into practice-based theorizing, and thereby outlines a new way of understanding self-reinforcement “in vivo and in situ.” By discussing the role and relevance of specific performative linkages as being “weak signals” for self-reinforcement, we provide a new way of analysing this important process phenomenon that is closer to life lived forward, where outcomes are necessarily uncertain, and practitioners can always choose to act differently.