Social Practices in Sociology

Social Practices and Social Systems

• Social practices refer to everyday practices and habits performed in a society, serving as a central starting point for understanding social systems.
• Practices consist of routinized behavior, bodily and mental activities, and background knowledge.

Social Practice

• Social practice involves the study of individuals and their activities, behaviors, emotions, and etc. in a social environment.
• Social practice is not based on free choice or usefulness, but on personal background and history.

Components of Social Practice

• MATERIAL: physical aspects and human body
• MEANING: issues that are important for the material component, understanding emotions and beliefs
• COMPETENCE: skills and knowledge

Professional Socialization and Identity

• Professional socialization: acquisition of specialized knowledge, skills, and norms needed to perform professional roles.
• Professional identity: a professional is identified by the community they belong to and their discourse.
• Professional identity ≠ language used: doubts about the real identity = social unacceptability/dismissal

Attributes and Frames

• Attributes and frames inherent in a profession are part of the identity a professional is claiming to have.
• Language used by professionals: has an indispensable role to play in creating and indexing those professional attributes and frames.
• A professional speaks and writes in certain ways to project a legitimate identity.

Written Professional Discourse

• Written professional discourse: reader engages in social interaction (text-reader conversation), text as a collaborative effort.
• Social constructionism: written text is a social construct because it involves mental representations of social contexts during writing.

Text-Reader Conversation

• Reader engages in a social interaction in which they negotiate the meanings like in a face-to-face interaction.
• Well-written texts: play an essential role in coordinating people's actions and ensuring the integration of social actions into the social context.

Reflexivity and Performativity

• Reflexivity: refers to the social practices that are reflected in language use.
• Performativity: stands for "the production of our social and cultural identities through creative use of contextual and interactional resources.
• We perform and construct our social and cultural identities by using language resourcefully in interaction.

Organizational Culture

• Organizational culture: can be defined by its aspects, dimensions, traits, elements.
• Culture: derived from the idea of cultivation, which means the patterns of development.
• Corporate culture: denotes the more commercialized meaning of organizational culture.
• Organizational culture: a set of values, symbols, and rituals shared by the members of a specific firm, which describes the way things are done in an organization.