Abstract
Until recently, the concept of “practice” has been regarded as to be in opposition to the concept of “theory”. However, practice itself is now being recognized as the theoretical subject, and is often discussed in methodological contexts. In this paper, I consider the reason why the boundary between theory and practice is becoming ambiguous, and investigate the theoretical meanings and political implications of the notion of practice, in referring mainly to the works of Anthony Giddens.
My argument is as follows. First, the notion of practice is concerned with the routine nature of social life, and such routinisation is based on “understanding” in the existentialist phenomenological sense. According to this point of view, understanding is not merely methods of social study, but very ontological condition of human life. Giddens develops such a perspective sociologically and explicates that epistemological separation between theory and practice cannot be legitimated methodologically. Second, political implications. In the modern society, there are no longer any guaranteed normative connections between personal selfunderstanding and conditions of institutional reproduction. Consequently, routine grounds of understanding tend to become relatively vulnerable. Political implications of Giddens' theory are concerned with problems of psychological tension and moral dilemma in such problematic situations, and from this perspective, time-space conditions of understanding are examined as basic grounds of democratization.
