Category: social ontology
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Social structures built on other social structures
My book Profit and Gift in the Digital Economy argues that we should explain the economy in terms of complexes of appropriative practices, while my earlier work stresses that causal influence is exerted by entities – people, objects, and social entities like organisations (which are in turn composed of people and often objects too). In this…
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Realism and practice theory
As a realist who uses the concept of practices (not least in my book, Profit and Gift in the Digital Economy), I’ve occasionally been surprised by hostility to the concept from some other critical realists.Here I’d like to defend the concept, while putting some caveats around how realists should use it.