Book review

Abstract

Book reviewSilvia Gherardi's influence on practice-based studies and organizational research Organizational and management qualitative research gained new possibilities with the advent of practice-based studies (PBS), which is strongly oriented towards what I call "Trento's School of Thought" (TST). This comprised a group of researchers gathered in Research Unit on Communication, Organizational Learning and Aesthetics (RUCOLA) forming a movement that introduced aspects such as aesthetics, embodiment and sociomaterialityusually neglected by organization and management scholarspaying special attention to PBS, offering new perspectives in organizational phenomena and influencing research methodologies.Silvia Gherardi, who developed a post-humanist practice theory, is a former scholar of the PBS movement. Her recent book, How to Conduct a Practice-Based Study: Problems and Methods, in its second and renewed edition summarizes her theoretical and methodological thoughts in the empirical study of social practices.She developed her own practice theory and proposed a research design, methodology and methods based on an onto-epistemology of practice that displaces the human subject as the central seat of agency, the one in control of the world, the one from whom intentional actions emanate, thus differentiating it from human-centred practice theories (that study humans and their practices). De-centring the subject does not mean removing it, but placing subjects, objects and instruments in an agential and material-discursive environment (see Moura and Bispo, 2019).When the "Practice Turn" (Schatzki, 2001) paved the way to create the "practice scholars" group, at the same time, a special issue of the journal Organization (Gherardi, 2000) opened the debate on practice theories under the heading, "Practice-Based Studies", in the context of organization and management studies. It is obvious that the way in which practice scholars adopt the notion of "practice" in their work varies. My focus in this paper is to introduce Silvia Gherardi's practice theory and its influences on qualitative research.The term "Practice-Based Studies" is the outcome of the initial effort of some scholars (many of them from Rucola at the University of Trento) trying to set in dialogue their diverse theoretical approaches commonly sharing an interest in understanding organizational phenomena as processual and performative, that is, "as practice". They gathered to discuss organizational phenomena through different theoretical possibilities focussing on collective forms of knowing, doing and organizing (Gherardi, 2006;Bispo, 2013). The first formal meeting was in 1998 at the Academy of Management Annual Meeting in a symposium organized by Davide Nicolini and Dvora Yanow. Further, some of the papers presented in the symposium were published in a special issue of the journal Organization in 2000. In 2003, Davide Nicolini, Silvia Gherardi and Dvora Yanow edited a book, Knowing in Organizations: A Practice-Based Approach, consolidating the meaning of the te...

Educational Impact of Research

“…The impact of research can be perceived as affect because it generates emotions that are directly linked to the practice of research. We thus understand that a social practice is the result of collective accomplishments enacted from the connections of bodies, materialities, discourses and knowledge (Bispo, 2020b;Gherardi, 2019). Affect is related to the capacity (agency) that human and non-human actors have to affect and be affected by each other (Massumi, 2002).…”