Abstract
Among news production scholars, interest in the theories of Bourdieu, Giddens, Latour, and related authors has grown in the last 20 years. However, few have recognized that these theories contribute to a broader practice perspective in social theory that traces back to the writings of Heidegger, and more directly, to Wittgenstein. In this essay, I outline four basic elements of this approach that are shared across these theories. Among these elements is the notion that social action is organized into discrete practices, and that these practices are produced and reproduced in their performance by individuals. I then assess the practice scholarship in the sociology of news in the context of these elements. I show that while a great deal of research has focused on news practices, relatively little has investigated journalistic performance. Thus, the field has not exploited, as well as it might, the panoply of tools and concepts developed by practice theorists.
In recent years, the social theories of Bourdieu, Giddens, Latour, and related authors have attracted great interest among news production scholars. At least six book-length projects grounded in one or more of these theories have appeared (e.g. Anderson, 2013; Benson, 2014; Cook, 1998; Ryfe, 2012; Sparrow, 1999; Waisbord, 2013). In addition, several special journal issues featuring these theories have been published (e.g. Anderson and De Maeyer, 2015; Benson and Neveu, 2005; Ryfe, 2006; Ryfe and Blach-Ørsten, 2011), and the number of individual articles they inform increases monthly (see Appendix 1). Collectively, this work has the potential to greatly advance theory building on news production. However, realizing this potential requires a discussion of the shared intellectual lineage of these theories. Too often, journalism scholars treat the theories in isolation, or worse, as in antagonism to one another (e.g. Benson, 2014). But as has been recognized by several observers (e.g. Cetina et al., 2001; Reckwitz, 2002; Schatzki, 1996), all of these social theories offer variations of a ‘practice perspective’ that stretches back to the writings of Wittgenstein. As such, they hold a number of basic premises in common that, to my knowledge, have not been discussed thematically by news production scholars (but see Couldry, 2004, 2008). Doing so may allow empirical researchers to more fully exploit this approach.
In what follows, I draw on Bourdieu, Giddens, Latour, and related writings to sketch the basic elements of a practice approach to social action. I discuss these commonalities under four general topics: (a) the centrality of practice to social action, (b) the special role of performance in social practice, (c) how social practices weave together into more or less discrete environments, (d) and finally, how oscillations of practice and performance help produce social order and change. In discussing these commonalities, I do not wish to suggest that the authors agree on every particular. In fact, they disagree, sometimes vehemently, on many details. Bourdieu’s conception of ‘structure’, for instance, is different in important ways from that of Giddens (e.g. Lizardo, 2010). Latour’s relativism can grate against the more objectivist theories of Giddens and Bourdieu (Schinkel, 2007). Acknowledging these differences, however, does not detract from the underlying view of social activity they share.
After laying out the approach, I assess the recent news production literature in its context. My data set for the literature includes 72 articles taken from journals and edited books and an additional eight single-author monographs (see Appendix 1). To create this list, I used keyword searches in the Web of Science database (e.g. ‘field theory’ and ‘journalism’; ‘institutionalism’ and ‘news’; ‘actor-network theory’ and ‘news’). I also consulted the lists of citations for the articles I discovered. I cannot say that this list is comprehensive. For one thing, it does not include work published in languages other than English. For another, in the time between the writing and publication of this essay more articles have likely appeared. I am more confident, however, that it is representative of how scholars have typically employed a practice perspective.
Read as a whole, the extant literature skews in obvious ways. In total, 35 of the essays offer broad introductions to practice theory. Given that the use of practice theory in news production is relatively new, this is not necessarily surprising. A majority of the rest – 26 out of the 43 remaining projects – attend to practice, that is, to the persistent sets of doings and sayings that constitute news production. Put another way, less than a quarter of the total (18 of the 79 publications) attend to a primary empirical point of practice theory, namely, that social order (or practice) is produced and reproduced in performance. Moreover, even here, scholars are more apt to infer the performance of journalism indirectly – from interviews with journalists, or from content analyses – than they are to actually observe journalists doing journalism. The lack of direct observation of journalistic performance has an important consequence: scholars rarely observe the contingency and negotiation inherent to the choices journalists make. This is especially worrisome at a time when so many verities have been thrown into doubt across the field of journalism (e.g. Dickinson, 2007; Zelizer, 2015). I conclude with the thought that scholars of journalism would do well to make greater use of the full panoply of theoretical tools the approach offers.
In the following, I work my way to this point, beginning with a review of the core elements of a practice approach to social action.
Elements of a practice approach
Since at least the early 20th century, sociologists have been concerned with the issue of how and why social action tends toward order (e.g. Durkheim, 1958; Schatzki, 2002). A practice approach to order is a variation of a culturally oriented explanation (e.g. Reckwitz, 2002). For practice theorists such as Bourdieu, Giddens, and Latour, the root of order lies in social practice. For these authors, it is here where we will find, as Schatzki (2002) puts it, the ‘site of the social’.
Practice
To begin unpacking this perspective, we might start with a definition of a ‘social practice’. Not surprisingly, no two authors agree precisely on this key issue, but together they conjure a general definition that contains the following parts. A practice is (a) a set of actions, or doings and sayings; (b) that are logically linked to one another so that they form blocks or strips of activity; (c) by what are variously called conventions, rules, or strategies; (d) and they extend in time, meaning that practices persist as recognizable sets of actions. Examples include everything from cooking and cleaning, praying and shopping, teaching and, of course, news production.
As I say, no two authors put this definition in precisely the same way. Bourdieu, for instance, refers to a ‘practical sense’ or ‘disposition’ (e.g. Bourdieu, 1977: 15, 1992: 13). To him, dispositions are amalgamations of emotions, beliefs, and arrangements of the body (e.g. sitting up straight, or using a tool in a particular way) that imbue individuals with a ‘feel for the game’, (Bourdieu, 1992: 66), or what it is possible to do and say in particular situations. Using slightly different language, Giddens (1984: 21) argues that practices are composed of ‘generalized procedures’ or ‘tacit knowledge’. It is this knowledge that informs an individual’s ‘practical consciousness’ (e.g. Giddens, 1979: 104), a fusion of mind and body into composites of activity. ‘For the body operates’, he writes (Giddens, 1984: 66), ‘and is understood as a “body” by its owner, only in the contextualities of action’. Latour and other actor–network theorists put the matter in still other terms. For them, to act is to ‘make someone [or something] do something’ (Latour, 2005: 58). No act, on this view, is singular. Rather, acts (and actors) are responses to other acts, linked together into what Latour (2005: 196) calls ‘structuring templates’. In turn, these templates form ‘networks’ of interaction (e.g. Callon, 1999; Latour, 2011; Law, 1994). For these researchers, networks represent the basic building blocks of society. ‘Literally’, Latour (1996: 370) writes, ‘there is nothing but networks, there is nothing in between them, or … there is no aether in which networks should be immersed …’.
Practice scholars also share a sense that practices come ontologically prior to actions, or even individuals who might act (e.g. Schatzki, 1997: 285). This thought follows directly from the notion that to know what to do or say in a given situation, individuals must have access to the shared understanding contained in the blocks of activity that render their actions sensible to others. It is only in the context of practice, therefore, that an action becomes meaningful, or that an individual becomes an actor. Thus, the existence of practices must not depend on the actions of any particular individual. Instead, they pre-exist individual actions in the form of practical knowledge, or shared understandings of what to do and say.
Performance
This is not to say that practices exist separate from individuals. A key proposition of practice theory is that practices are made manifest in the world only through what Schatzki (1996: 53) refers to as ‘expressive bodies’, or more mundanely, people. Here is Bourdieu on the same point: ‘Practical belief’, Bourdieu (1992: 68, 69) writes, is not a ‘state of mind … but rather a state of the body … Practical sense, social necessity turned into nature, converted into motor schemes and body automatisms, is what causes practices …’. And Giddens (1976: 15, 16), The production of society is a skilled performance, sustained and ‘made to happen’ by human beings. It is indeed only made possible because very (competent) member of society is a practical social theorist: in sustaining any sort of encounter he draws upon his knowledge and theories, normally in an unforced and routine way, and the use of these practical resources is precisely the condition of the production of the encounter at all. (Italics mine)
Or, as Latour (2005: 37) more pithily puts it, ‘If a dancer stops dancing, the dance is finished. No inertia will carry the show forward’. Without practice there are no practices.
The emphasis practice theorists place on embodied performance is their way of resolving the subject/object dualism that has plagued social theory since its inception. It is true, practice theorists admit, that relatively formalized and regular sets of rules, strategies, or conventions (e.g. practices) organize social life. However, it is also true, they insist, that practices only make an appearance in social life in the actions of individuals (e.g. Warde, 2005: 134). Schatzki (1996) summarizes this view: ‘The activities of … semiautonomous agents are alone responsible for whatever contingent and processual states of sociality exist at any point in time’ (p. 17).
It is worth pointing out that the emphasis practice theorists place on performance highlights the role of skill, and also, therefore, the roles of esthetics and politics, in the production of practice. Fligstein and McAdam (2012) define social skill as ‘the ability to induce cooperation by appealing to and helping to create shared meanings and collective identities’ (p. 46). A skilled social actor is someone who has a particularly well developed ‘feel for the game’, someone who, in the stream of activity, is able to induce cooperation by interpreting shared understandings in particular ways.
Ethnomethodologists like Goffman (1974) refer to this skill as the ability to frame, or manipulate the ‘principles of organization that govern events’ (p. 10). Bourdieu’s (1977: 79) concept of the ‘virtuoso’ implies an esthetic dimension to social skill. A virtuoso is a highly skilled player who, imbued with a sense of the game, creatively and strategically manipulates the conditions of practice. Such persons make social interaction look easy, and perhaps even beautiful. The political dimension of social skill arises from the fact that individuals with greater skills are likely to reap more symbolic and material rewards. Over time, they may amass more of such rewards, creating the conditions for symbolic and material social stratification.
Environment
So far, we know that actions linked together form more and less persistent social practices. Scholars go on to argue that practices may also be linked together to constitute what are variously called social ‘fields’, ‘environments’, ‘sectors’, ‘networks’, ‘systems’, or ‘domains’ (e.g. Fligstein and McAdam, 2012: 9). For simplicity’s sake, we will use the term ‘field’ to refer to these agglomerations of practice. Bourdieu (1971) borrows the term ‘field’ from science, which uses it to describe invisible ‘relations of force’, like a gravity field (e.g. Martin, 2003). Applied to society, the intuition is that formerly separate practices may begin to ‘hang together’ into particular arrangements (Schatzki, 2002: 18). When this happens, Giddens (1984) observes, ‘social systems … [come to be] organized as regularized social practices, sustained in encounters dispersed across time-space’ (p. 83).
Practice theorists argue that common purposes, or shared understandings of what is at stake, serve as the ‘relations of force’ that bind practices together (e.g. Fligstein and McAdam, 2012: 168). Something like this idea goes back to the differentiation theory of modern society first outlined by Durkheim (1893/1933). According to Durkheim, modern social institutions have become increasingly specialized (e.g. Alexander and Colomy, 1990; Luhmann, 1982; Parsons, 1966). Political institutions have become separate from economic organizations and from civil associations, and so on. Meaning that politics and its associated practices now orbit around a distinct purpose (say, to win elections), just as economics and its attendant practices do (to build capital), and civil society as well (to foster feelings of association and belonging). In each case, actors within these fields share common purposes. These shared purposes serve as social glue that link practices within a field together in relatively consistent ways. It is the logical arrangement of social practices within a field that gives society a veneer of order and stability.
Order and change
Ultimately, practice theorists have developed the tools above to explain the presence and absence of social order. Bourdieu, for instance, interests himself in how and why the social world exhibits regularity: ‘The social game’, he writes (Bourdieu, 1992: 64, 65), ‘is regulated, it is the locus of certain regularities. Things happen in regular fashion in it …’ (italics in original). Giddens tackles the topic from many directions (e.g. psychology, social structure). Most often, however, he refers to routines. ‘The routine’, he (Giddens, 1984: xxiii) writes, ‘is a basic element of day-to-day social activity … The repetitiveness of activities which are undertaken in like manner day after day is the material grounding of what I call the recursive nature of social life’. For their part, actor–network theorists are more likely to write of ordering than order (e.g. Law, 1994). It is their way of insisting that social order is never a given, but is always unstable and contingent, requiring constant work from actors. Still, at bottom, they also are interested to explain how social practices become regular, routine features of social life.
Practice theorists generally share a common explanation for the presence of social order. Such order arises, they argue, when the shared knowledge that constitutes practices becomes naturalized, or made to appear ordinary, legitimate, reasonable, sensible, appropriate, and/or commonsensical. ‘Habitus’, Bourdieu (1992) writes, ‘tends to generate … “reasonable,” “common-sense,” behaviors which are possible within the limits of [social practices]’ (p. 55). In a discussion of constraint, Giddens (1984) expresses much the same idea: ‘Why is it that some social forces have an apparently “inevitable” look to them? It is because … the actors in question … behave rationally – “rationally” in this case meaning [that they have] “good reasons” for what they do …’ (p. 178). In this argument, social order emerges just to the extent that the ‘rules of social life’, as March and Olsen (2008) put it, ‘come to seem natural, rightful, expected, and legitimate’ (p. 1). By acting ‘reasonably’, individuals tend to reproduce social practices and thus lend them a measure of durability.
The process of naturalizing social practices is not innocent. ‘Structures of signification’, Giddens (1984) writes, ‘always have to be grasped in connection with domination and legitimation’ (p. 31). That is, practice theorists suggest that social order is a consequence of what Bourdieu refers to as ‘symbolic domination’: the effort of particular groups or classes of people to impose their views of what it is legitimate to say and do in the social fields they inhabit. The goal of such groups is, as he writes in one place (Bourdieu, 1987), “to turn their own vision of the social world, and the principles of division upon which it is based, into the official vision … the official principle of vision and division” (p. 13).
But it is made possible by several features of social activity that we have considered above. Among them are the following: (a) some actors possess great social skill, (b) due to their enhanced social skill, these actors accrue material and symbolic resources, (c) they use these resources to embed their preferred ideas and behaviors in the material and symbolic arrangement of the social world, (d) over time, this arrangement confronts other actors as the taken-for-granted background of social action. Putting these points together, we see that conventional social practices create possibilities for acting in the world, and that, in acting, individuals tend to produce and reproduce a given social practice (or order).
For practice theorists, the tendency of individuals to reproduce the social order is a matter of statistical regularity rather than an inevitable aspect of social life. In fact, they see possibilities for change at every turn. One such place is in the nature of the very rules/conventions embedded in social practices. Since Wittgenstein (1953), practice theorists have noted that such rules are not so detailed, or so comprehensive, that they can account for every possible way of acting (e.g. Croce, 2015; King, 2000a; 2000b; Schatzki, 1996). The rules of practice are not exhaustive, but generative and emergent. Consider, for instance, the archetypal example discussed at length by Wittgenstein, the rules of language. Wittgenstein observes that a relatively small number of language rules make possible an infinite range of speech acts. He takes from this observation the idea that speech rules do not prescribe the act of speaking but rather generate the conditions in which many speech acts may ensue. Subsequent practice scholars have extrapolated from this point the notion that there is a necessary gap between the rules of every social practice and its performance. This gap is filled by the interpretations of individuals who must choose a course of action. As we have seen, Giddens often refers to individuals as ‘social theorists’, and Bourdieu as ‘virtuosos’. These labels are meant to convey the sense that individuals contemplate; they reflect on the situations they face and make choices about which actions to take. The necessity of choice introduces a measure of contingency into the performance of any practice.
The fact that social fields exist in time represents another potential source of change. Spatially, fields may overlap and abut one another in complicated ways. This allows for the possibility that individuals may straddle social fields, for example, the world of politics and of the media, or the world of the academy and of the market. Partly socialized in several fields at once, individuals may transport ideas about what it is appropriate or sensible to do from one context to another. This process ensures that new ideas about how to act constantly circulate through social fields.
Social fields also exist in time. Individuals may be socialized in different fields at different moments of their lives. A child, for instance, may be socialized into one socio-economic class only to find herself as an adult thrust into another. Or, a social field once organized in one way may undergo massive disruption at a later date. In this instance, individuals in that field may experience a sense of dislocation: the dispositions they inherited at Time1 from that field may mean something else entirely, or even no longer be relevant, at Time2. ‘Even the most routine, traditional, and silent implements’, Latour (2005) writes, ‘stop being taken for granted when they are approached by users rendered ignorant and clumsy by distance …’ (p. 80).
A final source of change lies in the motivation of members of dominant groups to remain dominant. To this end, they compete with one another, and with outside groups that seek to ‘invade’ the social space they occupy (Fligstein and McAdam, 2012: 99). This competition may also engender new actions, and at times wholly new practices.
In all of these ways, change may and does occur within social practices and fields. The necessity of interpretation means that social fields are always, at least to some extent, in motion. External forces may dissipate the symbolic and material resources of dominant groups. Insurgents may compete to offer new interpretations of practice. Individuals may transport ideas and behaviors from one social field to another. Relationships are in flux and positions within social fields are never fixed. Practices are always subject to new ways of doings things, and change is endemic to the process of establishing and re-establishing social order. For practice theorists, social life is best viewed as a process of oscillation between stability and disorder.
These then, are the rudiments of a practice perspective: social life is organized into agglomerations of actions knitted together by rules/conventions that persist over time. These practices become visible in social life through the ‘expressive bodies’ of individuals who interpret the situations they face and make choices about appropriate courses of action. Over time, a shared sense of purpose may link together social practices into broader arenas of social activity, what practice theorists call ‘social fields’. Especially due to dominant actors within them, these fields may become more organized and cohesive. However, the prospects of change lie everywhere, from the core of practices to the relationships between social fields. Social order is never a given, but a constantly negotiated, contingent process.
The practice approach and the sociology of news
Since the late 1990s, the practice approach has animated a great number and variety of research projects in the sociology of news. To gain a better understanding of how scholars have used practice theory, I have collected 72 essays published in journals and edited books, and an additional eight single-author monographs (see Appendix 1). The first of these publications were written in the late 1990s, and the last in the few months before this writing. To generate this list, I relied on keyword searches in the database Web of Science, and the citations lists for every article I discovered. In the following, I organize this literature into three categories: (a) work that presents a general introduction to one or more practice theories (identifiable by its lack of primary data collection and review of conceptual basics), (b) work that investigates practice (recognizable by its attention to the relatively durable and persistent patterns that make up practice, and inattention to journalists actually doing journalism), and (c) finally, work that focuses on performance (identifiable by a focus on particular actions or performances of journalism).
With these categories in hand, a few trends become clear. First, much of the literature – 36 of the 80 projects – takes the form of review articles or books. This writing introduces practice theory, its vocabulary, and its potential contribution to the sociology of news, but presents no empirical research. Except for Couldry (2004) and Cammaerts and Couldry (2016), all of these works focus on one particular variation of the theory: actor–network theory, field theory, or institutionalism – meaning that these efforts describe their preferred theory without mention of its connection to the broader practice perspective. Moreover, most have framed these theories as useful for particular purposes. For example, essays on actor–network theory (e.g. Anderson and De Maeyer, 2015) almost exclusively discuss the theme of technology as a social actor and its uses for studying journalistic innovation. Similarly, essays on field theory tend to be oriented toward comparative research across journalistic fields, and those on institutionalism toward organizational studies.
Among these reviews, it is evident that most are interested in detailing practice rather than in deciphering performance. Schultz’s (2007: 190, 191) account of Bourdieu’s concept of a ‘gut feeling’ is typical. She defines the journalistic ‘gut feeling’ as the ‘seemingly self-evident and self-explaining sense of newsworthiness’ that all journalists share. Schultz offers the term as way of, as she puts it, investigating the ‘doxic news values imbedded in journalistic practice’. Here, ‘doxic’ refers to values that are common, which is to say, embedded in practice. This emphasis on practice isn’t universal. Anderson and De Maeyer (2015: 6), for example, discuss the uses of actor–network theory for examining ‘accidents’ and ‘breakdowns’ in journalistic performance. But the attention to practice is common. Even advocates of actor–network theory, which ostensibly privileges performance over practice, are mostly content to show how the theory is helpful for investigations of journalistic practice.
A third, related theme is that empirical researchers also concentrate most of their attention on journalistic practice. Of the 44 empirically oriented articles and books in my sample, over half (26) attend to practice. Cook (1998) and Sparrow (1999) announced this orientation early on. Both volumes offer the insight that a relatively finite set of production practices meld seemingly discrete news organizations into a single institution. More recent work extends this interest. Some of this work traces the development of news practices over time (e.g. Chalaby, 1996, 1998; Kaplan, 2002; Keith, 2015). For instance, Krause (2011) uses field theory to trace the emergence and expansion of the journalistic field, and its characteristic newsgathering practices, as they appeared in the United States at the turn of the 20th century. Other work explores how various news practices emerge and are positioned within various journalistic fields (e.g. Benson, 2013; Lei, 2016; Powers and Zambrano, 2016). And some of this work investigates the interaction of various practices across social fields. Bernanke and Phelan (2016), for example, examine the interaction of the journalistic and artistic fields in New Zealand. Similarly, Annany and Crawford (2015) explore the recent interaction of the technology field with the field of journalism.
The majority of this scholarship, however, devotes itself to an investigation of particular news practices set in discrete, synchronic contexts. For example, Hess and Waller (2016) study constructions of the ‘local’ in small town Australian news as an expression of ‘longstanding dispositions of the mind and body’ (p. 270). Similarly, Spyridou et al. (2013: 92) discuss the ‘standardized work routines’ that shape how Macedonian journalists understand technology innovation. And Lei (2016) is interested to show how the practice of ‘critical news reporting’ in China is shaped by the peculiar arrangement of that journalistic field. In these instances and many others, scholars concentrate on the relatively durable and persistent practices characteristic of news production.
A much smaller number of research projects, 18 of the 43 in my sample, attend to journalistic performance. Even here, however, little of this work assesses the actual performance of journalism. Instead, it infers the practice of news production through interviews with journalists who explain what they do, surveys that detect large-scale trends in performance, or content analyses of news. Plesner’s (2009) study of Macedonian journalists is typical. At one point, she is interested to learn how journalists use Google searches in their reporting. Rather than watching journalists perform this activity, she asks a journalist during an interview to describe the process. Similarly, rather than watching developers produce Open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) in news organizations, Aitamurto and Lewis (2012) interview a number of developers. And rather than watching journalists’ use of twitter, Barnard (2016) analyzes journalists’ tweets. In these instances and most others, researchers rely on indirect evidence – journalists’ accounts, or journalists’ news products – to make inferences about journalistic performance.
All of this means that most of the practice scholarship in news production remains at least one step removed from performance. This distance from performance has left critics with the impression that advocates of practice theory have little interest in journalistic agency (e.g. Dickinson, 2007; Zelizer, 2015). Rather, in their hands, practice theory is a way of cataloging a set of relatively static practices, and/or documenting changes in these practices. The critics have a point. Consider again Barnard’s (2016) analysis of journalists’ tweeting practices. He argues that these practices illustrate a ‘hybridity that is now so common of the modern journalistic disposition’, and that this hybridity places ‘significant strain [on] the field’s values’ (pp. 199, 200). Yet, Barnard has little to say about the way in which journalists negotiate the new practices. Instead, the reader is treated to a nicely organized list of six new journalistic practices, from ‘information collection’ to ‘sourcing’. Most of the literature on journalistic performance takes the same form. It suggests that news practices are changing and documents some of these changes, but provides no examples of journalists negotiating these changes in practice.
The few studies in my corpus (six in total) that observe journalists doing journalism reintroduce an element of contingency and negotiation in news production. For example, in a study featuring a close examination of a story meeting, Van Hout and Jacobs (2008) trace the way in which a reporter marshals the shared knowledge of news writing to argue in favor of his story. In so doing, they demonstrate a primary theme of practice theory: how a ‘virtuoso’ actor may play a social game in creative and improvisational ways, yet in the end reproduce conventional practices of news writing. In a chapter (Chapter 2) devoted entirely to one day in the lives of three business reporters, Usher (2014) illuminates how negotiations between reporters, sources, and editors have accelerated in the fast-paced world of online journalism. She follows one of these reporters from 8:00 a.m., when he arrived in the newsroom to hear an earnings announcement report from Goldman Sachs, to 4:30 p.m., when he turned in a last draft of a story on that announcement. In between, Usher watches as the actors continuously negotiate to produce and repetitively update a single story. By the end of the day, Usher’s reporter had written five versions of the story, updated it 26 times, and appeared on a mid-day video show, all the while tweeting incessantly.
In an ethnographic study of news aggregators (2013: 1020), Anderson makes a different observation: it can be dangerous for scholars to simply accept what people say about what they do. Comparing arguments made during a Federal Communication Commission (FCC) workshop – sometimes by aggregators themselves – to his observations of aggregators’ practice, Anderson observes that the ‘material practice’ of aggregators and mainstream journalists ‘are not actually all that different’. Both exercise news judgment, for instance, in mostly the same ways. This discovery leads him to conclude that in the ‘hybrid’ environment of journalism, lines between the practice of new and traditional journalism are more difficult to draw than one might suspect.
When mapped on to the elements of practice theory, the trends in practice-based news production scholarship are clear: the field skews toward analyses of relatively durable and persistence practices. There is some interest in linking these practices to broader fields of journalism, though more might be done to compare these fields cross-nationally, and more still to investigate the relation of the journalistic field to contiguous social fields within particular societies. Comparatively less interest has been shown in the performance of news production, and studies that do exist mostly remain at some remove from journalists doing journalism. Assuming for a moment this is a fair description of the state of things, where do we go from here?
Moving forward
A great virtue of practice theory is that it provides tools for working across levels of analysis: from the micro-level of performance, to the meso-level of practice, to the macro-level of social fields. My review of the literature suggests that the record of news production scholars in taking advantage of this virtue is spotty. There are now many studies of journalistic fields, and more still that examine particular news practices in discrete contexts. However, fewer studies exist of journalistic performance, and fewer still that observe journalists doing journalism. More empirical work is necessary to fill in these gaps.
This work may be enhanced by greater attention to theory building. For this to happen, scholars will have to overcome a few impediments. One is their tendency to work within one tradition of practice theory (e.g. field theory, actor–network theory, institutionalism) without acknowledgment (or perhaps awareness) of the broader theoretical tradition. This conceptual narrowness has several consequences. For one thing, it leads researchers to spend a great deal of time explaining terms and concepts from their preferred tradition to a broader audience, and when they do cross boundaries of theory, it requires them to do a great deal of translating from one conceptual vocabulary to another. For another, scholars working within one tradition often ignore potentially relevant research published in another. Finally, conceptual siloes push scholars toward disagreements about principles of theory, and thereby to ignore the underlying conceptual foundation that they share.
I should admit that despite this impediment, in recent years a measure of theory building has been accomplished. I think here of Benson’s (2014) comparison of the French and American journalistic fields, a study that links field-level variables to differences in the preferred news practices (what he calls the ‘form of news’) of French and American journalism. I also think of historical work that has traced the emergence of a seemingly universal set of news practices, first in the United States and later elsewhere, and how and why these practices have (and in some cases, have not) migrated around the globe (e.g. Chalaby, 1998; Høyer and Pöttker, 2005; Schudson, 1994). Very early efforts have also been made to link cross-national variations in journalistic fields, to news practices to journalistic performance (e.g. Mellado et al., 2016).
More progress will require overcoming the impediment I describe above. It will also mean dealing with another. Cataloging news practices and changes within them, an exercise that represents the majority of news scholarship in the practice tradition, has its uses. Connecting these changes to broader field-level variables, which is less common but exists, is even more helpful. However, a broader, practice-based theory of news production will remain limited if it does not make greater use of a primary point of practice theory, namely, that practices only manifest in performance. A practice approach to news production that misses this point risks (a) over-estimating the durability of contemporary news practices, (b) effacing important variations in the meaning of news practices cross-culturally and even within journalistic fields, and (c) missing the role of Anderson and De Maeyer’s (2015) ‘mistakes’, ‘accidents’, and ‘breakdowns’ in the maintenance and evolution of conventional news practices and the creation of new ones.
At a time of significant disruption in news production, this last risk seems especially worrisome. By all accounts, news practices are changing. Like any large-scale social change, this process is uneven and messy. In other words, it is likely producing a great number of mistakes, accidents, and breakdowns. As Latour (2005: 80) observes, and Anderson and De Maeyer (2015) recognize, it is precisely on these occasions when the taken-for-grantedness of social practices is destabilized, and thus become open to greater scrutiny. News production scholars will grasp an important opportunity for learning if they attend more to the performative dimension of news production. In so doing, they will not only take better advantage of the full panoply of tools made available by practice theory. They will also hew closer to the spirit and intentions of that theory.
Footnotes
Appendix 1
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.