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Educational planning has become an essential ingredient in providing welfare in welfare societies. This article examines and criticizes the prevailing logic of educational planning by teasing out an underlying conception of ‘action’. By mobilizing an ethnomethodological critique of this notion of planning the article suggest that a situated perspective on action provides an alternative. Building on this alternative the article draws on contemporary practice theory to unfold how a situated perspective on action can understand educational planning as an activity that takes place in ecologies of practices. Drawing on examples from educational planning practices in engineering the article illustrate how activities unfold in ecologies of practices. The article concludes that this reconstruction is of significance because it helps to make the normativity of educational planning explicit.

Whether one gazes to high-level international politics, the general public opinion, or how we as individuals identify ourselves as contributors to society, the industrialized West has increasingly come to see innovation as its core obligation around which everyone is drawn together in universal appreciation. The widely held imagination of innovation is that of a process by which new developments in science and technology are transformed into new business applications. Higher education and professions are eager to impose their expertises onto and claim authority within the domain of innovation. In the recent two decades, universities and other engineering institutions that are typically identified with technology development have expanded their research and teaching activities towards the business end of innovation. PurposeThis paper investigates the new emergent trend in academic institution building where business and management competencies are incorporated to engineering curricula. By comparing experiences from early career alumni from educations that are results of moving engineering institutions into business, we analyze the consequences imposed by changing disciplinary demarcations within academic and professional engineering knowledges. Theoretical and methodological frameworkThe paper draws upon theoretical frameworks from Practice Theory (e.g. as developed by Theodore Schatzki, Stephen Kemmis et al.), and co-production and sociotechnical imaginaries from Science and Technology Studies (e.g. as developed by Sheila Jasanoff). The paper analyzes how knowledge institutions develop under influence from widely held ‘sociotechnical imaginaries’ and how particular forms of (technological) expertise and new governance principles, like New Public Management, place universities under pressure to reinvent themselves in order to accommodate expectations of higher effectiveness, competition, and economic yield.Results Our results indicate that the efforts to reorganize academic engineering knowledge-productions towards business operate after an accountability principle that at one and the same time improve on the academic institution’s ranking while it presents a challenge to new kinds of graduates who face a professional job market that is ill prepared to adopt their novel forms of expertise. LimitationsThe paper’s point of departure is one Danish setting where it investigates how a group of social scientists at The Technical University of Denmark invented the ‘Design and Innovation’ engineering program in response to the new demands for business-orientation within Danish universities. The upshot of this endeavor is discussed in relation to ethnographic research about the competence profiles of the program’s engineering candidates and how they fare in subsequent employment in industry. Originality/value The paper contributes to contemporary discussions of transformations within the university system by supplying empirical case material as well as conceptual resources for fathoming recent developments in the institutional reconfiguration of the university.

It is a fundamental challenge for organizational theory to understand and explain how organizations work: what drives processes of organizational learning and change, and how is coordinated action brought about in organizations? It is well recognized that organizational theory rests on – or implicitly presumes – fundamental philosophical assumptions. Organizational theories are based on ontological and epistemological assumptions about what an organization is, how actors act and learn in organizational settings, and how researchers can come to know about organizational phenomena. But it is less recognized that organizational theory also presumes and express ethical and normative perspectives on organizations. This is also the case in the new branch of organizational theory that has been developed with an inspiration from theories of practice (e.g. Schatzki 2005, 2006; Nicolini 2013; Gherardi 2015). Although practice theoretical approaches have made an effort to critically reflect on the ontological and epistemological assumptions of organizational theory the literature only contains very few attempts to understand the role played by normativity and ethics in organizations (Erden et al. 2014). In this paper I will attempt to discuss how the practice theoretical approach to organizational theory can become more explicit about the role of normativity and ethics in order to better understand organizational practices. I will do this by discussing two prominent early practice theoretical theories of ethics, namely Alasdair MacIntyre’s virtue ethics and Charles Taylor’s ethics of authenticity. I will argue that these two ethical approaches fail to substantiate an adequate practice theoretical approach to the study of organizational practices. I will further argue that practice theoretical approaches might find inspiration in John Dewey’s thoughts on ethics, and that these thoughts resonate well with ontological assumptions made by contemporary practice theoretical approaches to organizational theory. This paper thus discusses the role of normativity and ethics in practice theoretical approaches to organizational theory. My discussion will proceed in three steps. I will start by characterizing the practice theoretical perspective on organizational activity, thereby outlining the ontological and epistemological assumptions of this approach. I will then proceed to discuss the role played by normativity in the practice theoretical perspective. Thirdly, I will discuss how a practice theoretical conception of normativity can reflect on ethical problems in organizational practice. This discussion examines MacIntyre’s and Taylor’s ethical theories. The discussion is concluded by suggesting that contemporary practice theory might look to Dewey in order to develop an ethical perspective that is compatible with its view on normativity.

A sustainable transition of our cities is more urgent than ever. For that reason, many urban development projects worldwide are assigned ambitious visions about contributing to the sustainable transition. However, it seems that the projects often lack ability to realize these visions and to actually contribute to a sustainable transition. On the contrary, the projects seem to strengthen the already unsustainable configuration of our cities. In this paper we will argue that there is no causal relationship between vision and reality in urban planning. With reference to a Schatzkian practice theoretical understand of human activity we claim that people act in indeterminate ways and that we must understand planning and strategy as it happens in constellations of social practices and material arrangements. Based on a study of an urban development project in Copenhagen this article shows that the realization of visions is contingent on the involved practices and the prefiguration of the dominant practice architectures by material arrangements. It is the main argument of the paper, that by focusing on practices and material arrangements we can understand better what happens in urban development projects between vision and reality, and that it is in this process and not the vision that urban development and transition has to happen.

Based on a concrete practice-based study we discuss how such studies can be an important integrated part of critical participatory action research that spur change from inside a professional practice. We also discuss our roles as researchers (and union activists). We see and explore the potential in initiating changes within a practice tradition. To make local changes in the practices is to change the world. The majority of practice-based studies are analyzing different kinds of practices, but only few studies have engaged in doing action research in a practice tradition. Our paper explores how practice-based studies of professions can become of significance means to promote positive changes starting within the practices. In the paper, we will discuss this research strategy and our roles as researchers inspired by Kemmis et al (2014, 2014) and Eikeland & Nicolini (2011). We will draw upon a practice-based case study about the practices of a study administration unit in a university college in Denmark. The study includes ten weeks of participation observation study and five qualitative interviews, both in the central part and in three local study administrations. Managerial initiated organizational change processes and the digitalization strategy for the work in a study administration failed to recognize the invisible work within the practices. Critical participatory action research can help participants not only articulate work processes, but also to have a better understanding of how practice traditions makes work intelligible. This provides possibilities for action and change. We claim that the practice-based studies can become an integrated part of doing critical action research, and we investigate and reflect upon our stewardship of the practices we engaged in.

It is the aim of this paper to investigate teamwork amongst professionals in engineering consultancy companies in order to discern how teamwork affects the collaboration and work practices of the professionals and eventually their quality of work. The paper investigates how professional engineering practices are enacted in two engineering consultancy companies in Denmark where ‘teamwork’ has been or is an ideal for organizing work.Through multi-sited ethnographic and practice-based studies (Marcus 1995, Schatzki 2002, Kemmis et al. 2014, Gherardi 2012) this paper sets out to investigate how teamwork is being ‘done’ and practiced in two engineering consultancy companies. We bring together our own ethnographic studies of engineering work practices in two Danish engineering consultancy companies. In these different sites we show how team- and project work mediate relations within organizations and how team members experience the impact of teamwork in relation to their professional backgrounds and outlooks. By paying attention to how teamwork is enacted in these different sites we are addressing two research questions:• How does team- and project work challenge relations between employees and managers, and how does this affect work quality?• How is team-based self-management and technology-mediated management reconciled in teamwork and how does it affect the professionals?In our study collaboration in engineering work practices has been studied as ‘field-sites’ in George Marcus’ multi-sited ethnographic perspective (Marcus 1995) and we have been inspired by Kemmis et al.’s (2014) notion of Practice Architectures in order for us to discern the doings, sayings and relating that constitute the practices within the field-sites. In line with Marcus’ perspective we do not intend to use the different sites to make comparisons, but instead we explore how ‘teamwork’ is taken up, reenacted and practiced in different ways in the sites according and in relation to the specificities of the practice architectures and practice traditions that encapsulates the happenings and history of the practices. This allows us to investigate how cross affiliations and overlaps of cultural-discursive, material-economic and social-political arrangements are weaved together and intertwined, but the approach also helps us make visible differences and contrasts in lending ‘meaning’ to the dominant discourse about teamwork. Furthermore we adopt Schatzki’s notion of a ‘site’. Here a site is not only delimited by its physical localization. More generally, a ‘site’ is a locality where something – a social phenomenon like team- and project work – is or takes place (Schatzki 2002, 64). The physical location is of importance in the sense that social phenomena always transpires in objective space-time, but in an important sense the site transgresses objective space-time. The teleological location (or ‘timespace’ in Schatzki’s (2010) terms, or ‘project’ in Kemmis et al.’s (2014) terms), i.e. how actors are attuned to and comports with a phenomenon, in significant ways specify how actors relate to the phenomenon and signify a ‘Verweisungsganzheit’ (Heidegger 1927/2010). This helps contextualize social activity. The production of our empirical material has benefitted from theoretical and methodological framework of Kemmis et al.’s and we use their ‘tabels of invention’ to structure and present our findings. Engineering practices and engineering culture is being (re)produced within sites and through practices that can only be understood properly by reflecting on the doings, sayings and relating of the practitioners. Thus attention must be given to the discursive and historical preconditions of the sites as well as the material arrangements that prefigure the practices. Furthermore it is necessary to reflect on how power-relations and social-political arrangements shapes the way practitioners relate to one another. It is thus the ambition to analyze the sites by using a practice-based lens. This methodology honors the complexity and heterogeneity of the engineering practices under study and lends us practical methods to track and propel our investigations and discern how practices are reproduced to sustain or delimit quality of work. It is the aim of this paper to investigate teamwork amongst professionals in engineering consultancy companies in order to discern how teamwork affects the collaboration and work practices of the professionals and eventually their quality of work. The paper investigates how professional engineering ractices are enacted in two engineering consultancy companies in Denmark where ‘teamwork’ has been or is an ideal for organizing work.

In this paper we investigate teamwork amongst professionals in engineeringconsultancy companies in order to discern how teamwork affects the collaboration andwork practices of the professionals. The paper investigates how professionalengineering practices are enacted in two engineering consultancy companies inDenmark where teamwork has been or is an ideal for organizing work. Through apractice-based lens the article sets out to investigate, firstly, how discourses about teamandproject work affect engineering work practices, secondly, how technology-mediatedmanagement is reconciled in teamwork practices, and, thirdly, how team- and projectwork affect engineering professionalism and collaborative work practices. A practicetheoretical framework informs the analysis. Teamwork is investigated as aphenomenon enacted through the sayings, doings and relatings of practitioners inlandscapes of practices and the interconnectedness of the practices are traced throughthe setup of specific ecologies in the sites.

Proponents of the ‘practice turn’ in the social sciences rarely mention American pragmatism as a source of inspiration or refer to pragmatist philosophy. This strikes us as not only odd, but also a disadvantage since the pragmatist legacy has much to offer practice theory in the study of organizations. In this paper we want to spell out the theoretical similarities and divergences between practice theory and pragmatism to consider whether the two traditions can find common ground when gazing upon organization studies. We suggest that pragmatism should be included in the ‘tool-kit’ of practice-based studies of organizations.

Den amerikanske ledelses- og organisationsguru Peter F. Druckers begreb om videnarbejde og ledelse af videnarbejdet har på mange måder været definerende for moderne ledelsestænkning. I denne artikel argumenterer vi via en empirisk case for, at ledelse i videnarbejdet omfatter meget mere og andet end Drucker har blik for. med udgangspunkt i et praksisteoretisk perspektiv beskriver vi arbejdet i et lille team af ingeniører i en videnintensiv virksomhed. Gennem det empiriske materiale viser vi, at videnarbejdet i vid udstrækning er ordnet og styret af ingeniørernes (professionelle) praksisser og de materielle arrangementer, som arbejdet udspilles iblandt. Det praksisteoretiske perspektiv på videnarbejdet fremdrager således andre afgørende forhold i og ved videnarbejdet end Drucker. Artiklen bidrager til at forstå, hvad ledelse af videnarbejde må forholde sig til.

Science & Technology Studies (STS) and social science has made a turn, a ‘practice turn’, and the notion ‘practice theory’ has made its way into the field of STS. But it is notable that proponents of this turn and theory rarely mention American pragmatism as a source of inspiration or refer to pragmatist philosophy. Reading through the practice theoretical STS literature the vista seems to come very close to positions occupied by classical American pragmatists. In this paper, I invite you on a journey, which I have just begun, to find out not why contemporary scholars of practice theory as for example Rouse, Schatzki and Reckwitz refrain from including the pragmatist legacy in their writings. This question would probably either be entirely speculative or maybe even not very interesting? Rather, I want to explore what these two apparently similar ways of theorizing do to the study of science and technology, or to some of these studies. It is impossible to cover all STS studies inspired by practice theory, and I probably have not found all the studies drawing on pragmatism. It is in the spirit of both practice theory and pragmatism to reach out, to try to bridge ideas by talking to other traditions rather than shut themselves off in a closed closet (Bernstein, 1989; Nicolini, 2013), and as one of the contemporary pragmatist philosophers says with reference to Dewey’s “Experience and Nature” (1925 [1981]): “To be human is to be engaged in practices” (Boisvert, 2012: 109). To back up my argument, I begin by an introduction to some of the proponents of practice theory and of pragmatism. Regarding the latter, I primarily present work by Dewey because this is what I am most familiar with. Although I recognize that practice theory and pragmatism differ on fundamental philosophical issues in relation to the normative evaluation of action, I show that the two intellectual traditions have much in common when it comes to what they do to STS studies. After this introduction to practice theory, my paper will proceed in the following steps. Firstly, I will briefly survey practice theoretical and pragmatist contributions to STS studies in order to discern their respective accounts of practices and human activity. Secondly, I will trace these accounts back to Dewey’s and Schatzki’s philosophical reconstructions of the concept of ‘practice’ and ‘action’ in order to tease out differences and similarities between pragmatist and practice theoretical understandings. Thirdly, I will – mainly trough the work of Joseph Rouse – vindicate that the seeming collision points between practice theory and pragmatism (mainly in relation to conceptions of ‘normativity’ and ‘naturalism’) can in fact be overcome. I will argue that a pragmatist approach can add valuable resources to a practice theoretical ‘toolkit’ of studying and representing science and technology.

History reveals a number academically inclined engineers and others who have found engineering education lacking. The critics support their claim with diverse arguments and propose different reform initiatives (Buch 2012). Though the motivation varies the critics seems to agree on broadening engineering education.In this paper we will discuss issues of curriculum, pedagogics and - most importantly learning - in engineering education. We tend to agree with the critics that there is a need to broaden engineering education. We also suggest that this broadening of the curriculum should be backed up by reconsidering and eventually changing traditional teaching methods and pedagogics in engineering education.We will start our discussion by diagnosing the fundamental problem within engineering education as it is commonly practiced. We will argue that this problem is closely related to traditional and idealized conceptions of what it means to do - and learn - engineering. In engineering 'problems' are framed in ways that installs technical problems at the center of attention and non-technical factors at the periphery - thus a demarcation between the technical core and the social periphery is established. The ethos of engineering culture thus reduce real world problems to ideal and well-defined technical problems in order to make them 'solvable' and 'operational'. As noticed by many critics of traditional engineering education installing this reductionism in engineering practice, comes at a cost. It tends to relegate social and cultural processes from the problem analysis and problem solving activity and engineering studens are discouraged to investigate real world problems and question established practices of problem solving.Inspired by the work of philosopher John Dewey we see 'inquiry', the pursuit of open questions, as fundamental to science and engineering practice. We suggest that teaching and learning engineering should be more authentic to the actual practice of engineering and thus stimulate 'problem questioning' among the students. Inquiry is a fundamental human attitude towards complex problems and it is in fact counterproductive to let tight disciplinary framings- and strict 'object world' perspectives - be the only avenue to 'problem solving'.By introducing cases from engineering and scientific practice we will illustrate how the perspectives of the Humanities and Social Sciences can be brought to bear in teaching the fundamentals of engineering and science. The cases - taken from history and contemporary society - will illustrate that actual 'problems' are not amendable to single-answer problem solving, but thorough reflections.