How Crisis Reveals the Structures of Practices

• Published date: 01 January 2021
• Date: 01 January 2021
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12650
• Author: David Seidl,Richard Whittington

© 2020 Society for the Advancement of Management Studies and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

How Crisis Reveals the Structures of Practices

David Seidla and Richard Whittingtonb

aUniversity of Zurich; bUniversity of Oxford

Keywords: crisis, Covid-19, practice change, practice theory

The speed, scope and scale of changes wreaked by the Covid-19 crisis of 2020 onwards

raise challenging questions for practice theorists. After all, practice theory has generally

emphasized continuity. According to Reckwitz (2002, p. 249), practices are ‘routinized

types of behaviour’. For Nicolini (2012, p. 3) practices are ‘very resilient and often diffi-

cult to change because, qua practices, they are taken for granted and often considered as

part of the natural order of things’. Where practice theorists have explored change, they

have often focused on slow-cooked transformations, for instance the spread of showering

from the 1870s onwards (Shove et al., 2012), the emergence of the Kentucky bour-

bon industry in the mid-19th Century (Schatzki, 2019), or the decades-long shifts in the

practices of strategy in modern Western businesses (Whittington, 2019). The Covid-19

changes have an intensity that is quite other to these leisurely evolutions.

Our argument here is that the Covid-19 crisis, challenging as it is, in fact provides

an opportunity for practice theorists. As a set of extreme events, it exposes for further

investigation structural features of practices along two dimensions, external and inter-

nal. These structural features help us address two particularly tough questions raised by

initial observations of the crisis. The first concerns difference: how can we explain why

some practices have changed quickly and radically, while other related practices have

been relatively stable? People have stopped coming to the office, but they still carry out

old meeting routines, only with different means – on Zoom, raising hands is virtual. We

shall argue that part of the explanation for such differences lies in external structural re-

lationships between practices. The second question involves trajectories in time: to what

extent is it possible to go back to earlier practices after the crisis? When people do resume

office work, the meaning of ostensibly similar behaviours may shift – the ‘same old’ is in

Journal of Man agement Studi es 58:1 January 2021

doi:10. 1111/jo ms.1 265 0

Address for reprints: David Seidl, University of Zurich, Chair of Organization and Management, Plattenstrasse

14, CH-8032 Zurich (david.seidl@business.uzh.ch).