The Practice of Eating by Alan Warde

Author:Alan Warde
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2016-01-10T16:00:00+00:00

Coordination and Regulation

One appeal of considering Practices as entities is that processes involved in their social coordination can be brought to light. Practices are subject to differing degrees of both social coordination and authoritative regulation. The sharing of practices is not simply, nor even primarily, a function of the circulation of ideas, for it also depends upon authoritative direction and correction. Authority is sometimes backed up by the force of law; many common practices are partly circumscribed by legal regulation. Practices are often in addition regulated by organizations created to deal with the governance of the activity and the everyday performances of its practitioners. Think of occupational associations and trade unions, the governing bodies of sports, scientific and medical colleges, therapeutic communities, trade associations and the multitude of voluntary associations of enthusiasts for recreational activities like fishing, dancing and motoring. These pillars of civil society, which develop from being mutual associations to becoming bureaucratic organizations, typically evolve from facilitating desirable levels of cooperation among participants to the wielding of power through making and enforcing rules about procedure. Their effects are difficult to measure or to estimate, and their operations less transparent than the published texts discussed above. They nevertheless play an indispensable role in the formalization and codification of Practices, their propagation and their regulation.

Practices become institutionalized. Institutionalization is a central, if sometimes elusive, concept in sociological analysis (Berger and Luckmann 1966; Hodgson 2006; Martin 2004). It refers to both organizations (e.g. mental institutions) and to ways of doing things (e.g. the institutions of electoral democracy). For Berger and Luckmann, institutionalization was fundamental to society, the consequence of reciprocated habitualization and the basis of the objective features of social arrangements. Like other post-war sociologists, they understood the process of objectivation in the terms of role theory, which has been eclipsed in more recent micro-sociology, condemned for presenting performances and interaction in too rigid a manner. Nevertheless, their definition of institutionalization as a ‘reciprocal typification of habitualised actions’ which set up ‘predefined patterns of conduct’ and preclude many theoretically possible alternative courses of action is the basis of a serviceable working definition (Berger and Luckmann 1966: 72). Institutionalization potentially makes way for new positions devoted to the social coordination of performances. Organizations emerge devoted to the management and reproduction of practices. Integrative practices always have institutionalized forms and agents explicitly and overtly devoted to the regulation of the practice. The process of institutionalization thereby portends incipient regulation which may be more or less formal.

The existence of dedicated organizations indicates that a significant degree of institutionalization has been achieved. While theo­retically the perpetuation of a practice requires only continued performances, its consolidation and its trajectory are much influenced by organized promotion and regulation. Institutionalization engenders mechanisms which offer generalized reassurance and feedback to practitioners. In the process people are encouraged to conceive of what they do as that which they ought to do; normal behaviour comes to be judged effective and is accorded moral or aesthetic value. Normal procedures are seen as best, or at least respectable, conduct in light of the standards of the practice.

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