Sayings and Doings in Practices: Enhancing practice-driven institutionalism with insights from the philosophy of embodiment

Abstract

The practice-driven perspective in organizational institutionalism has proposed that what actors say and do is decisive for the enactment of practices in everyday situations. However, this perspective has predominantly considered the role of doings and has disregarded the distinct role of sayings used in everyday situations. Our theoretical argument proposes the co-constitutive coexistence of sayings and doings in the enactment of practices that explains why and when doings inform specific sayings and why and when sayings prefigure specific doings. Theorizing this coexistence reveals when it is that sayings bolster the reproduction and stabilization of doings, when they contribute to change, and when sayings cannot coordinate doings because actors literally cannot understand one another. We argue that the consideration of the coexistence of sayings and doings is relevant for practice-driven institutionalism, as it enables the differentiation of the situated impact of doings and sayings on the development of practices. To develop this argument, we build on insights from the embodiment perspective within the philosophy of mind (i.e., philosophy of embodiment), which suggests that the body and its sensorimotor states in practices play an instrumental role in cognition and language use.