12 Objectual practice Karin Knorr

In this paper, I want to develop some concepts designed to capture the affective and relational undergirding ofpractice in areas where practice is creativc and constructive. Current conceptions of practice emphasize the habitual and mle-governed features of practice. Though much debate surrounds the exact specification of the relevant mies and habits (see most authors seem to agree that practices should be seen as recurrent processes govemed by specifiable schemata ofpreferences and prescriptions. Such processes are doubtlessly prominent in rnany areas of social life; their existence sustains our sense ofpractices as custornary or routinized ways of behaving. However, it is also a characteristic of current times that many occupations and organizations have a sigruficant knowledge base. In these areas, one would expect practitioners to have to keep learning, and the specialist'i who develop the knowledge base to continually reinvent their own practices ofacquiring knowledge. Practice, in this case, would seem to take on a wholly different set of meanings and raise a different set of questions from the ones raised by habitual activities. For example, how can we theorize practice in a way that allows for the engrossment and excitement-the emotional basis .~ of research work? What characterization ofpractice might make the notion more dynamic and include within it the potential tor change? Research work seems to be particular in that the definition of things, the consciousness ofproblems, etc., is deliberately looped through objects and the reaction gran ted by them. This creates a dissociation between self and work object and inserts moments of interruption and retlection into the performance of research, during which efforts at reading the reactions of objects and taking theirperspective playa dccisive role. How can we conceive ofpractice in a way that accommodates this dissociation? In this paper, I want to address these questions by taking as my starting point a particular characterization of knowledge-centered practiee-one that can be traced back to Heidegger but that also finds support in scientists' se1f-understandings of their work. At the core of this characterization lies the assumption that creative and constructive practice-the kind ofpractice that obtains when we. confront nonroutine problems-is internally more