‘They Wouldn’t Mind Pushing People Off the Bus’: Exploring Power in Practice Theory through the Work of Simultaneous Interpreters

Introduction

Drawing upon qualitative data, this article discusses the causes and effects of power by examining simultaneous interpreting in the UK as a social and professional practice. Scholars investigating social phenomena as practices, often explain power through the performativity of everyday life (Bourdieu, 1977; Butler, 1993; de Certeau, 1984; Foucault, 1979). Based on this, contemporary practice theorists frame power as an effect manifested in human action (Ghaffari et al., 2019; Janssens and Steyaert, 2019; Watson, 2017). Full consideration, however, is not given to the wider configurations which form practices (meanings, competencies, and materialities governing social order and performance) and which affect relations of power (Mahon et al., 2017; Müller-Mahn et al., 2018; Pantzar and Shove, 2010; Schatzki, 2015). Defining power as a situated accomplishment flowing from the configuration of practices, ‘suffusing’ individuals’ relations and actions, this article argues that we should be sensitive to the conditions of collectively steered practice, which predates individuals’ performances, for a more articulated practice-based understanding of power. By asking, ‘how does the organisation of a practice impact how power emerges and moves?’, this study analyses the harshly competitive interpreting profession to inform its theorising.

In the UK, interpreting involves offering clienteles paid communication service provision in high-stakes settings. This is an unregulated self-employed profession, constrained by weak signals of status and market disorder that presents interpreters with difficulties sustaining stable commissions and income (Pym et al., 2013). Between 2009 and 2020, the value of interpreting services grew by just 7% amid tensions of precariousness (Office for National Statistics, 2021). As a distinct form of ‘invisible labour’ (Hatton, 2017), the socio-economic devaluation that typifies much freelance, knowledge work (Holtgrewe, 2014), there are contentious deontological issues around interpreters as ‘invisible’ professionals who ought to operate unobtrusively and offer successful communication service by closely collaborating with colleagues. Instead, failure is visible and dangerous because it disrupts communication and clientele’s enterprises. This has implications for how power develops because interpreters’ complex, apparently ‘natural’, work may be unacknowledged by their clientele. Caught between orderly, collegial success and public breakdowns, interpreters compete to showcase individual professionalism, in turn, securing material rewards, work allocation, and clientele’s trust. Thus, it is an original example of how a practice’s situated organisation can generate particular power relations.

The article first reviews power as concerning the performativity and configuration of practices. The second and third sections discuss the empirical and methodological context of the study. The fourth presents the findings, while the final section discusses their significance along with practice-based considerations into power. The empirical contribution lies in its insights into interpreting organisation as a work practice underpinning interpreters’ competitive struggles for recognition and the ‘logic of invisibility’ associated with its competent conduct. More broadly, this study shows that the situated context of practice is integral to understand the particular type of power relations practitioners engage in (Foucault, 1979; Schatkzi, 2002; Shove and Pantzar, 2007). Theoretically, in tandem with considering the findings through a composite practice lens (e.g. de Certeau, 1984; Nicolini, 2012; Schatzki, 2002; Shove et al., 2012), this article shows that power moves as acts of gamesmanship inflected by the norms, skills, purposeful states, and material arrangements of the practice, which in turn suffuses practitioners’ conduct. Throughout, it highlights sociological reflections by offering an understanding of power shaped by the practical order of everyday action.

Finding power in practice theory

Practice theory is an ontological paradigm focused on practices – routinised accomplishments rooted in competence, materiality, and meanings (Shove et al., 2012). It is a meso-perspective that overcomes the agency/structure binary by elevating practices as the unit for investigating social phenomena – from work to policy and consumption. Social orders exist through practices whereby individuals ‘perform’ under collectively shared understandings (Røpke, 2009).

The first articulations of power contingent to practice theory emerge from the epistemological legacies of social theorists attentive to practice and performativity in everyday life. Through the discussion of ‘practice regimes’, social theorists present definitions of power as either a strategic relationship involving a set of actions performed upon another action (Foucault, 1979); as the interplay of socialised attitudes that guides individual behaviours (Bourdieu, 1977); or formulating power as performativity reiterated though relational grounds of action that regulates and constrains individuals (Butler, 1993). Among contemporary practice theorists, Watson (2017) provides an influential discussion of power linked to performativity, partially following a Foucauldian perspective. He argues that ‘power relations and their consequences only exist through connections between moments of the performance of practices’ so its reality is ‘effected, and made manifest, in moments of human action and doing’ (Watson, 2017: 171–173). Through studying conflict in creative advertising, Ghaffari et al. (2019) similarly theorise power as the result of dynamic interaction in practice, while Janssens and Steyaert (2019), following Watson, use the case of career mentoring to show that power is tied to reproductive work.

Since practices endure through performances carried out by individuals, power can be captured in performativity. Nevertheless, there remain questions about the associations of power with the broader social configurations of practices. Explanations of how power relates to the elements that underpin and legitimise performance are absent. In fact, practices ‘foreground the centrality of interest in all human matters and therefore put emphasis on the importance of power, conflict . . . as constitutive elements of the social reality we experience’ (Nicolini, 2012: 6). Scholars suggest that it is how a practice hangs together to shape ‘particular set of relatings . . . particular kinds of power relationships, or relationships of inclusion or exclusion’ (Denegri-Knott et al., 2018; Kemmis et al., 2014: 8) because all social relations are (re)produced through practices, so power emerges as the ‘basic dimension of social interdependence’ (Schatzki, 2012: 6). Furthermore, each practice is always situated, meaning that each establishes its own social order (e.g. cooking is certainly not the same as teaching). Hence, situatedness affects how power manifests in a practice linked to those settings and arrangements reflecting the interwoven meanings used to act (Schatzki, 1996). This article attends to power ‘by recognizing that seemingly neutral ‘circuits’ of reproduction are skewed and slanted by patterns of inequality . . . perpetuated through the dominance and marginalisation of specific practices and practice complexes’ (Pantzar and Shove, 2010: 14). Suppose practice theory bears importance to sociological understandings of power, we must pay attention to how practices’ milieu, or ‘the interrelated teleologies, rules, understandings and situations that govern how people act’ (Schatzki, 2015: 28), orients people in affecting outcomes and individuals.

Configuring power in practices

This section draws upon a practice theoretics, to explore power as a feature of human coexistence embedded in practices (Contu, 2014). Practice theorists diversely label elements constituting a practice, but they all agree that it includes competence, materials, and meanings. For clarity, this article refers to Schatzki’s (2002, 2010) influential definition of practices as a situated set of activities (doings and sayings), recognisable across space and time and organised through ‘practical understanding’, ‘normativity’, and ‘teleo-affectivity’, with materiality as a later addition. A practice cannot exist unless these elements are available. Each performance brings them together, implying that their recurrent unavailability may dissolve the practice (Shove et al., 2012).

Practical understanding indicates the shared knowledge that coordinates competent action (Schatzki, 2002). Power should be thought of through practical understanding because different ways of ‘knowing in practice have specific empowerment and disempowerment effects’ (Nicolini, 2011: 603). Competence is associated with pursuing specific interests, thus, taking place within identifiable power relations as individuals use skills to act and influence sociality (Heizmann, 2011; Hekkala et al., 2021). Specifically, this is the case when a misalignment of skills between individuals is present because competent action bears differential access for people to have possibilities within practices, most notably, as they try to gain something for themselves or opposing someone else (Arcari, 2018).

Second, power further results in rules (or normativity) that orient activities and typically are enforced by authorities, regulations, and codes of conduct (Schatzki, 2002). Individuals’ compliance and resistance to rules are tied to the outcomes of practice, so people use them as a form of power to strengthen or weaken their chances for achieving objectives (Hardy and Thomas, 2014; Weenink and Spaargaren, 2016), but also as self-protection in conflict situations (Goffman, 1974). If rules are part of the apparatus that orients practitioners’ range of powerful actions, teleo-affectivity, as collectively ordered aims and emotions, also can grant or deny the power to act in certain ways, since practices ‘serve certain interests at the expense of others’ (Nicolini, 2012: 6). Teleo-affectivity makes a fertile ground for disputes because individuals consider their own goals and needs against those of other practitioners, exhibiting behaviours as trust and information-sharing but also opposition (Jones and Lichtenstein, 2008). Therefore, people can exercise power around shared goals and commitments, which may involve some asserting control over resources and decision-making (Contu, 2014). Hence, power involves game-like behaviours whereby people’s differential abilities – knowledge, skills, reputation – can affect others (Goffman, 1974). For example, individuals can act through strategies, creating ‘a place that can be delimited as [their] own and serve as a base from which relations with an exteriority . . . can be managed’ to achieve one’s purposes (de Certeau, 1984: 35–36). Individuals also act through tactics, re-signifying the ordering of social reality by escaping standards and rules through creative, deviant resistance within a practice’s space of activity (de Certeau, 1984). Therefore, power is linked to teleo-affectivity as it wells up from the dynamics that confirm or contest existing loci of control for the pursuit of rewards, derivative from the logic of the practice (Iedema et al., 2006).

Practices endure by using things in specific ways, and a practice-based view of power necessarily includes materiality (Feldman and Orlikowski, 2011). Materiality provides points of resistance by contributing to ‘articulate a world where not everything and everyone is the same, where inequalities and power are continuously produced and reproduced as the pattern of what is doable and sayable, of what is possible, of who can or cannot do or say’ (Gherardi et al., 2003: 22–23). Sometimes contradictory, various layouts, positions, and properties of objects incorporate power into the sites of practice (Dale, 2005) and help to coordinate the ‘horizon of possible actions’ (Engeström et al., 2003: 152; also Belmondo and Sargis Roussel, 2015; Swan et al., 2007). Consequently, materiality is intertwined with social relations. According to how practitioners engage with it, it can create conflict, destabilising the regular order of performance by subtracting materiality itself or causing breakdowns in its use (Svabo, 2009). Whether the focus is on tools, boundary and enabling objects, or technology, the common denominator is that materiality is a constantly available form of power, allowing legitimisation/delegitimisation processes in practice (Newell and Marabelli, 2015).

Questioning how the organisation of a practice impacts how power emerges and moves, this article sees power in the relations between humans, social orders, and materialities in practice (Hardy and Thomas, 2014). It defines power as a situated practical accomplishment flowing from the configuration of practices, ‘suffusing’ the relations and actions of individuals in the practice. Power is imbued with particular values, norms, and meanings which legitimise certain actions and decisions, intertwining with the purposes and affectivities inherent in participating in a practice, which for practitioners become a complex web of interests and strategic behaviours.

Situating power: the context and configuration of interpreting

The social structuring of power is characterised by the configuration of a practice, which is always open to contestation according to particular interests (Shove and Pantzar, 2007). In the UK, interpreters are mostly part of a 4.4 million independent workforce (Association of Independent Professionals and the Self-Employed (IPSE), 2021). The UK interpreting market is the second-largest in the world, comprising 1600 language service companies driven primarily by the public sector’s large consolidated contracts (Nimdzi and Association of Translation Companies (ATC) UK, 2019). An important part of this market is represented by ‘conference’ interpreting, which entails rendering spoken information from a source to a target language, conveying the meaning and register of the source language content in technical, political, scientific, diplomatic, and business settings predominantly through a technical modality, ‘simultaneous interpretation’ (ISO 18841:2018, 2018), which is also the methodological focus of this article. Working in simultaneous mode, the interpreter renders in real-time, while the speaker speaks, the incoming information from one language into another, leveraging specific materiality: sitting in a sound-proof booth equipped with headphones, microphone, and a console broadcasting to the users. Interpreting requires a high degree of training and is upheld by practical understandings of how to manage interpretation techniques and technologies, process and translate from one language into another, research topics and terminology according to the areas interpreted, and functioning in fast-paced, confidential environments.

In the last few years, on-site interpreting has been accompanied by a surge in remote interpreting, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. Remote interpreting indicates that the participants, including the interpreters, are distributed across different sites. In this modality, interpreters provide services virtually through a live audio feed, using solutions as videoconferencing equipment and online platforms. Future research might consider the increasing shift to remote solutions for a further theorisation of the link between power and the changing configuration of the practice.

However skilled, interpreters often face precariousness because of the predominant freelance organisation of their work and the competitiveness of the language industry. UK-based interpreters mainly work on the private market, sometimes alongside work for international organisations. Interpreters can negotiate labour conditions directly with clients, but more frequently they are outsourced work by commercial intermediaries (e.g. agencies, typically for fixed fees). Generally, it is not known when and how much work may be available: securing long-term planning and pension plans is seen as difficult, with many interpreters relying on state retirement provision. Mismatched supply and demand, downward pricing trends, alongside fluctuating trade markets, cause approximately 41% of interpreters across the EU to search for additional income streams (European Union Association of Translation Companies, 2020). In this context, interpreting presents two intertwining teleo-affective aims: one is the practice intrinsic aim of maximal effectiveness of communication, or quality service, to clienteles, and the other is the rewards that come with securing such service in positive evaluations, professional recognition, work allocation, and substantial earnings for which interpreters compete with one another. Non-standard employment often entails power relations based on self-interest and struggles for achieving competitive advantage (Aroles et al., 2019; Banks and Hesmondhalgh, 2009; Hartshorn and Sear, 2005). This is common among knowledge workers, including interpreters, who are subject to labour market vagaries as independent economic units at the behest of multiple organisations (Mould et al., 2014), competing over opportunities in an environment where disposability of project-based workers is high (D’Cruz, 2017). Since practices of work are profoundly relational phenomena based on interdependence (Feldman and Orlikowski, 2011), they can connect workers with power through competition and collaboration (Jarzabkowski and Bednarek, 2018), which is similar for interpreters caught up in distinctive forms of collaboration and competition. Interpreters can receive jobs not only from agencies, but also from colleagues who have their direct clients with the tacit understanding that they will be next recruited in return. Clients and all-flowing work are owned by the recruiters, so interpreters should not be in direct contact with clients that ‘do not belong’ to them, channelling all issues through the recruiter. Failure to comply can cause a significant conflict of interests and precarious trust (Setton and Dawrant, 2016). Furthermore, due to cognitive fatigue when performing, simultaneous interpreters operate through ‘teamwork’ by working in pairs, usually taking turns every 30 minutes. The interpreter who is ‘resting’, helps others (e.g. by locating terminology, checking the rendition, writing down acronyms, numbers).

In addition, there are normative requirements found in deontology, marketing, and consumption of the practice, which encourage interpreters to act as invisible mediators of spoken language. This ‘invisibility’ means that interpreters shape their labour to be unobtrusive in their communication services. This norm, by which interpreters partake in their own self-effacement, impinges on power relations: it is difficult for individual interpreters to emerge to the clientele as ‘better’ than colleagues because of such invisible, group-based work, which often combines with clients’ lack of understanding of how complex processes of interpretation work. This causes ambivalent relations in an industry involving dense social networks (Pym et al., 2013). Interpreters must collaborate for joint success and to obtaining recommendations, but also compete for work allocation. These shared activities that maintain the practice are crucial for problem-solving and for shielding the performance from precarious outcomes. However, they combine with power struggles over securing rewards made available by the practice, as jobs and compensation, in the wider context of labour precariousness (Resch and Steyaert, 2020; Schwartz, 2018). The empirical case of interpreting in the UK shows that situatedness is integral to understand specific, relational dispositifs of power (Foucault, 1979). Therefore, the article provides a ‘situated’ definition of power distinctive to interpreting, as the gamesmanship for the assertion of individual visibility resulting from the tension between affirming professional advancement, practical collaboration, and the practice’s goals of communication.

Methods

Epistemologically, this study is rooted in praxeography: the knowledge and methodological orientation of practice theory. As an interpretative approach, praxeography attends to the configuration of practice and processuality of performance through a sense-making process, implying proximity to practitioners and ‘thick’ empirical reconstruction work (Bueger and Gadinger, 2018). Praxeography invites data collection methods, like interviews and observations, permitting direct access to the actions and meanings of practice. Through praxeography, the study captured the modus operandi of interpreting, and interpreters’ ‘practical, symbolic and performative accomplishments’ (Jonas et al., 2017: xvii). The wider study behind this article was a multi-method investigation of interpreting as a social and professional practice and included participant observation to proximally record interpreters’ ‘doings’, and semi-structured interviews for reconstructing interpreters’ discursive accounts (‘sayings’) (Schatzki, 1996). For space limitations, this article discusses only 46 semi-structured interviews with British conference interpreters (35 women, aged 35–56, and 11 men, aged 29–64) conducted between April 2016 and May 2017. The respondents freelanced for clienteles as corporations and supranational institutions across a variety of settings. The sample was gathered through purposeful stratification criteria to ensure relative homogeneity, including specialised training and memberships of associations. The interviews lasted 80–120 minutes and were audio-recorded. The sample was accessed partially through snowball sampling using the researcher’s network and referral. As the researcher is also an interpreter, privileged access was allowed into confidential settings where interpreters are reluctant to be observed for fear of jeopardising the performance (Monacelli, 2009). In addition, the sampling relied on relations with institutions and contacting interpreters through associations’ databases. Social science ethical guidelines were followed at every stage (e.g. gaining participants’ written informed consent).

Notwithstanding the advantages of insider research, steps were taken to avoid an insufficiently critical approach as the researcher was ‘part of the phenomenon’ (Adler and Adler, 1987). Insider researchers’ subjectivity must be ‘open to intensive scrutiny’ and ‘challenged on an ongoing basis’ (Van Heugten, 2004: 208). Several measures were employed to distance from the research object and participants. In line with practice theory, which emphasises reflexivity to attune to knowledge construction (Bueger and Gadinger, 2018), internal dialogue and critical self-evaluation were embraced, recognising how insider position could affect the research process and outcome. Reflexivity strategies included follow-ups, prolonged engagement and feedback with interpreters, and keeping a research journal to check for the researcher’s reasoning and reactions. A methodological log of field notes supported extensive descriptions, the researcher’s involvement, and bias on both parts as members of the practice. Field notes were cross-checked to taste for objectivity against data sources on the interpreting industry (e.g. market data). Weekly debriefing with colleagues also apprised of challenging potential subjectivity through deconstructing the ‘familiar’ world of interpreting.

Interviews gathered verbal evidence of interpreters’ struggles that impact their work. This, in turn, helped to understand the stakes and arrangements orienting power in interpreting. Interviews were transcribed, and transcripts converted in text format, uploaded on NVIVO for systematic coding. For this article, Qualitative Content Analysis (QCA) (see Alonso et al., 2018) was carried out to identify empirically driven codes, categories, and unifying themes. Initial transcript readings determined codes as the smaller analytical units, bearing condensed meaning identifying doings (actions) and sayings (discourses) ascribable to interpreters’ labour. Examples of ‘doings’ codes included ‘being exposed’, ‘wanting help’, and ‘reformulating message’ in the performance. Examples of ‘sayings’ codes included ‘adhering to invisibility’ and ‘disrupting teamwork’. Subsequently, codes were counted and compared to locate similarities and differences, grouped into categories dealing with micro-aspects of conflict in interpreting. Examples of the category were ‘practical responses to failure’ and ‘normative/non-normative actions’. Categories were unified into themes, informed by an inductive approach rooted in practice theory reasoning. This reasoning was organised around the coordinated elements of interpreting revealing of power: practical understanding (e.g. skills and behaviours), teleo-affectivity (e.g. emotions, ends, goals), normativity (rules), and materiality (engagement with objects). Until saturation, the analytical process was non-linear, involving going back and forth from the codes to the major themes, addressing interweaving, contradiction, and augmentation.

QCA was preferred to other methods, such as thematic analysis, for several reasons. Due to its interpretive theorising and exploratory nature, practice theory often relies on QCA and structured coding reliability (Alonso et al., 2018), as a well-suited method to analyse practical elements (Bartiaux et al., 2014; Dowling and Kent, 2015; Meinherz and Binder, 2020). QCA was useful in determining how many specific ‘sayings’ (words, patterns) occurred in codes and how they were used in context by interpreters to address power relations. Finally, QCA allowed analytical reporting of the results structured around a conceptual system modelled through a practice-theory sensitivity, inductively connecting power dimensions to practice elements (the conceptual system). The following section is structured around this conceptual system. Respondents’ characteristics have been anonymised to ensure confidentiality.

Data analysis

This section analyses how power arises and moves in simultaneous interpreting. It shows that, lived within precarious standards, the situated configuration of the practice steers how interpreters are caught up with conflicts in their working life.

Power and practical understanding

Interpreters’ conflicting relations further depended on informants acting to their advantage by exploiting misalignments of competence (or practical understanding). In some cases, this revolved around interpreters who hid behind a colleague’s expertise to manage a difficult assignment when they felt they could not compete. For instance, on three occasions, Joe, an English-Spanish interpreter, was angry with his booth-mate Jess, who obliged him to interpret finance discussions during business events, which she was not very good at. In turn, she ‘stole’ him the easiest bits of the event (e.g. initial and concluding remarks and those more devoid of technical content). During our interview, Joe commented:

She was interpreting horribly the finance stuff . . . switched off the microphone and told me she has always hated it, she doesn’t do it, and that I interpret it so that I can have the floor for myself. I was really angry . . . all the times we work together she makes herself good on my abilities, and she gets hired again. (Joe, m, 37)

As Jess and Joe’s cases showed, power involves an instrumentalist confrontation between opposing parties, strategically concerned about getting the other to do what they wanted (Foucault, 2000), imposing a definition of the social world that is best suited to their interests (Bourdieu, 1979). While some informants, like Jess, indirectly opposed colleagues perceived as too competent, others more openly played out through their skills. Take Gemma, one of the few who said she often initiated conflict:

He was lagging behind the speaker, didn’t know his terminology, pausing a lot. So I overtook the turn. I felt bad, but it was a high-profile company, I was thinking, why not showing myself off . . . I’ll pass as better than him . . . It was like advertising myself – they contacted me afterwards. (Gemma, f, 45)

Gemma seized the potential for power by taking advantage of the temporary discrepancy between skills (and visibility). Albeit incorporated into a larger competitive strategy of not pushing the colleague to fail but rather comparatively emerging as more expert, she used an ‘acceptable’ form of competition played through practical understanding.

Power and materiality

Simultaneous interpreting occurs in the bounded spatio-materiality of the booth, involving technologies as microphones, headphones, consoles (for delivering the interpretation), and mundane objects as documents, pens, and notepads to write down terms or cues to the partner, and so on. The booth’s front stage is where the interpreter puts the personal and team front on display to the audience, but is also constrained to maintain expressive control (Goffman, 1959). This material infrastructure mediated the scene of action, but its detraction suffused power by impeding others to perform well:

There are a few people . . . not helping you . . . not sharing materials, leaving the booth in difficult moments. This may put you in a complex position – without help and checks you may more often make mistakes . . . if the client picks on this, they may not hire you next time. (Charlene, f, 36)

Impeding access to materiality distributed unequal positions, so particular objects assumed a different value for the informants engaged in teamwork. Most informants associated another similar material sabotage dimension to keeping the microphone when a turn is over, a behaviour implying a lack of trust managing the task successfully:

You have those stealing your microphone, meaning ‘I’ll keep it, I’ll do it better, you’re not really doing well’, or pushing the ‘mute’ button to whisper . . . whatever they think better versions of the same stuff. (Helen, f, 44)

In contrast, power suffused also when informants made objects overly present, causing strategic material disturbance (Svabo, 2009) through too much ‘assistance’:

You have these people constantly writing down things for you, putting the note-pad under your nose – it’s fine if I don’t know a word or didn’t catch a number, but if I am interpreting smoothly and you keep writing down synonyms, then I think you’re doing it deliberately to disturb my performance. (Fiona, f, 45)

Denying or taking over materiality was a source of conflict in collaborative work that impeded and drove power by negating opportunities to perform and display expertise.

In sum, whether aimed at career advancement, sabotage, or self-protection, power manifested through the elements underpinning practice. While materiality located power through its presence, detraction, and distribution, normative and practical understandings around ‘invisibility’ prompted the informants to competitive rule-breaking. In turn, conflict suffused teleo-affectivity, through the gamesmanship needed for balancing the less visible nature of success and exposing nature of failure.

Discussion and conclusion

This article integrates a composite practice-theoretics to expand beyond the predominant conceptualisation of power as ‘the ordering and the churn of innumerable moments of practices’ which ‘flows between moments of performance’ (Watson, 2017: 10). The study elucidates how the logic of practice become the logics of power (Bourdieu, 1977) by arguing that it is the organisation of practices – competencies, materials, meanings, rules (Schatzki, 2002; Shove et al., 2012; Nicolini, 2012) – that coalesces in particular ways and shapes power before it is performed.

The study contributes arguments through the case of interpreting, foregrounding power as tied to the situated nature of practices. To redress the precariousness of their work, interpreters hold onto power as not simply something they oppose but also something they harbour (Butler, 1997). Attending to the situated elements of interpreting shows that the specific nature of power in this practice could be summarised as struggling to assert individual visibility. Interpreters normatively shape their conduct around an appearance of easiness to sustain a ‘natural’ flow of interaction; in turn, their expertise becomes ‘invisibilised’ in the performance itself. Of course, interpreters are never truly ‘invisible’. Steered by their practice’s configuration, they produce a performance of invisibility to proceed unhampered. When they fail, they can be sanctioned with potentially dangerous professional repercussions. Furthermore, the teamwork orientation of interpreting sees interpreters cooperating with colleagues to achieve quality service. Linked by reciprocal dependence, interpreters demonstrate ambivalent team allegiance, even if needed to achieve the practice aims (Goffman, 1959) because their expertise remains embedded into group action. Playing on the visibility of breakdowns, interpreters could push colleagues to fail to showcase individual professionalism to clients.

Concerning practice theory, these acts of gamesmanship are used by interpreters to disempower others. Practices carry interwoven understandings of what one is capable of based on what is ready at hand (Knorr-Cetina et al., 2001), and interpreters play with power by sensing what they can (or not) do through competent action (practical understanding). As ways of acting in practice are not necessarily equal, interpreters can disempower colleagues by exploiting skill discrepancies, making themselves relatively visible according to the stakes at hand. Moving to a complementary aspect of manifesting expertise, teleo-affectivity, the study shows how ends and emotions can be brought together to theorise power. Interpreting is organised through an intrinsic aim of maximal communication effectiveness, which ensures successful, orderly service provision as a tacit feature of competent conduct. Moreover, interpreting operates through a ‘negative affectivity’ by avoiding visible failure to achieve intrinsic, yet professional rewards. Within this process, interpreters partake to the invisibilisation of their labour to stakeholders. The problematic ‘inconspicuous display’ of individual excellence pushes interpreters towards ‘absorbing and coordinating them [failures], in some cases even generating them’ (Trentmann, 2009: 80), to win over colleagues and attract clientele’s attention. These findings extend basic accounts of power found in practice theories as emerging via the teleo-affective structures that govern practices (Schatzki, 1997, Knorr-Cetina et al., 2001) by uncovering the situated ways in which power moves across internal and reward-oriented logics of acting.

Likewise, for practice theory, the problematic relationality embedding ‘acceptable’ forms of interpreters’ gamesmanship warrants further interest. The result is power integrated with normative relations of mutual interaction (Foucault, 1979) that ‘constitute something at issue and at stake in their outcome’ (Rouse, 2007: 50). Most practice theorists argue that power depends upon normatively acceptable behaviour (or successful conduct) because rules shape individual and others’ behaviour (Shove et al., 2012; Watson, 2017). However, this is too simplistic. The findings show that power also suffuses through rule-bending. Interpreters’ adversarial strategies create the basis for achieving ends, pushing the rules to the limit without getting caught or destroying the practice’s configuration. Opposing colleagues, interpreters approach a patterned adaptation to invisibility and teamwork rules, not simple conformity to, nor complete deviation from them. This finding provides the nexus, missed by previous studies, between the codification and use of rules: power sits between a display of rule-following and a strategic coordination of rule-breaking, as gamesmanship is always an issue within the practice. Practitioners who act with power can thus deviate from formally instituted rules, partly acting ‘in accord’ with them to maintain the same successful outcome as foreseen by the rule, but also engaging in rule negotiation as a feature of expert conduct (Rouse, 2007; Zimmerman, 1970). Therefore, this finding contributes to sociological knowledge by showing that power is negotiated against the norms of practical, everyday orders of action. In other words, power rests upon a negotiation of rule-breaking and rule-following, which is both an advantage to the successful, competent achievement of practical goals, and to the manifestation of competitive conduct for individual gain. Incorporated into larger competitive and rule strategies at the intersection of human and non-human activity, materiality also suffuses power by allowing informants to maintain or disrupt the practice’s social order (Svabo, 2009; Swan et al., 2007).

This analysis informs the theorisation of power of a discrete practice; thus, it is tied to a specific empirical context and is most useful for practices showing similar configurations. For instance, the exchangeable, ‘disposable’ nature of platform workers, moving in a digital environment, makes their skills invisible and replaceable in the eyes of stakeholders, so these workers compete to secure gigs and positive public evaluations to heighten their visibility (Holtgrewe, 2014). However, this does not discredit the argument. Rather the power and relations practitioners engage in require us to consider practices’ situated configuration. Since power occurs through the same criteria rooted in and across practices, there is validity in arguing a pattern following a certain overarching logic. This analysis identifies synergies for future analyses of practices for uncovering how power ‘come[s] about and what exactly is the nature of these issues of access, inclusions, and exclusion’ (Arcari, 2018: 66). In turn, it invites sociological reflections on power as practically motivating human activities and meanings through the internal codification of collective action, which shapes everyday life.