“How on earth did this happen?” The relationship of practical consciousness and institutional evolution

Abstract

Institutional theory assumes that actors’ reflexivity—their discursive consciousness—is the precondition that enables institutional change. We argue that such focus on discursive consciousness disregards one elementary source of institutional change: practical consciousness—the domain of nonreflective cognitive processes. Our article offers a major contribution to the literature: By elaborating the important difference between discursive consciousness and practical consciousness, we contribute to the theorization of the cognitive apparatus of actors in institutional theory. We apply this theorization to highlight institutional evolution as a previously unnoticed mode of institutional change that explains why, and how, institutions change in a nonreflective way. We also provide implications for the ways in which our work might stimulate future empirical research.

Introduction to the Research Handbook on Entrepreneurship as Practice

“…Additionally, practice theorists also argue that to carry out the actions that constitute a practice, practitioners simultaneously draw upon and are guided by pre-existing organizing dimensions of the practice, namely practical understandings, explicit rules, and teleo-affective structures. Practical understandings (aka habitus (Bourdieu, 1990), practical knowledge (Strati, 2007) or practical consciousness (Goldenstein & Walgenbach, 2021)) are tacit ways of knowing how to participate in a practice -an embodied understanding of what to do learned by engaging in the practice. It is knowing how to do something and having the skill or capacity to do what is understood by the practice.…”