Performative practices and practicing performativity: Why some ideas stick and others fail

Nolan, Ryan; Siedlok, Frank

Abstract

The practice turn has shown how organisational realities are accomplished in situated activity, yet a puzzle remains, concerning how promoted ideas take hold in fields dominated by established practices. We address this gap by foregrounding the entanglement of practice and performativity. Building on debates across practice theory and performativity, we examine performation as the practical work of advancing concepts, frameworks, and theories into existing practice arrangements. We develop a typology of performation trajectories that distinguishes cases where promoted ideas stabilise as new ways of working from those where they diffuse as generic labels, meet resistance, or become frustrated. The typology specifies two conditions that shape these outcomes. The first concerns the promoted idea, particularly its specificity as something that can be enacted rather than affirmed or aspirational. The second concerns the infrastructures of practice, including material supports, evaluationregimes and institutional arrangements that can support enactment or reproduce resistance. We show how these conditions can combine to generate different outcomes and to explain persistence under frustration. In doing so, the paper augments the practice turn by clarifying how novelty is attempted, resisted, and occasionally stabilised through reconfiguring practice arrangements. We offer the typology as an analytic tool for comparative diagnosis.

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Performative practices and practicing performativity: Why some ideas stick and others fail

Abstract

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Primary Track