The concept of practice

Who is "we"? Is "taking for granted," in W.'s work, a property of persons and the "individual subconscious"? Is "common sense" "held in common" by all involved individuals? [there is another alternative: that it is that which does not get talked about at that moment and for that purpose]

The tacit is what we take for granted and so tends to fade into the background. If it is not forgotten, it tends to be relegated to the individual subconscious, to what we all know instinctively, to what comes naturally. But the tacit is no more individual and natural than we make explicit to each other. Common sense is only common sensical because it is sense held in common. (p. 47)

Not only are claims processors different to start with, but working together creates differences as well as similarities. They specialize, gain a reputation, make trouble, and distinguish themselves, as much as they develop shared ways of doing things. (p. 75)

Their enterprise, then, is not just to process claims ... They daily practice, with its mixture of submission and assertion, is a complex, collectively negotiated response to what they understand to be their situation. (p 78)

The negotiation of meaning is .... (p. 86)

If practices are histories of mutual engagement, negotiation of an enterprise, and development of a shared repertoire, then learning in practice includes the following processes for the communities involved:

• evolving forms of mutual engagement
• understanding and tuning their enterprise
• developing their repertoire, styles , and discourses (p. 95)

Practice is the source of its own boundary

1. participants ... develop idiosyncratic ways of engaging ...
2. They have a detailed and complex understanding ...
3. they have developed a repertoire for which outsiders miss shared references (p. 113)

Flowers, computers, and us

For learning in practice to be possible, and experience of meaning must be ininteraction with a regime of competence. (p. 138)

Building an identity consists of negotiating the meaning of our experience of membership in social communities. (p. 145)

Identity

Weber, Geertz?

I will use the concept of identity to focus on the person without asssuming the individual self as a point of dparture. Building an identity consists of negotiating the meanings of our experience of membership on social communities. (p. 145)

The mix of participation and non-participation that shapes our identities has to do with communities in which we become invested, but it also has to do with our ability to shape the meanings that define these communities.

Identity formation is thus a dual process:

1. Identification ... providing experiences and material for building identities through an investment of the self in relationsof association and differentiation.
2. negotiability ... the degree to which we have control over the meanings in which we are invested. (p. 188)

Tuesday, June 13, 2006