Praxeolocical Approaches to Agency

More on Agency (from Susanne Eichner, Agency and Media Reception: Experiencing Video Games, Film, and Television)

At the core of these approaches lies the concept of social practices – routinized body perform- ances – in interplay with meaningful comprehension. In contrast to former action theories, praxeologic approaches define action not as selectively separated units, but as a process occurring in time and space. Temporality and repetition are thus im- portant aspects of praxeological social interpretation. Each social practice then consists of a body performance – on a very basic level a practice is a skilful move- ment of the body: Bourdieu’s “connaissance par corps”, Taylor’s “embodied agency” and Joas’ “constitution of body schemas” all inherit this focus on corpore- ality. Perhaps most important, the structuredness of the social lies in the routinization of social practices: 

Their [social practices’] seemingly self-evident – as a matter of fact heavily presuppositional, since fostered by know-how – repetitive and uniform action was marginalized in Weber’s typology of ac- tion as ‘traditional action’ and thus linked to non-meaningful behaviour. Admittedly, this seems to be the real fundament of structuredness of the social world (Reckwitz 2004: 324).6