Social Practice Theory and Organization

This book presents an at-home ethnography of innovation and innovation workers within a cross-functional engineering team in the medical device industry. Written from the position of a natural insider, it combines theoretical engagement with detailed accounts from the often-forgotten members in organizational research fieldwork, namely through an examination of the workers themselves. Focusing on often-overlooked organizational actors, the study follows engineers through their daily work and life at work during a period of heightened program tension as deadlines intensify.

Attending closely to the team’s social practices and their innate roots, the book examines how work is organized, negotiated, and enacted across R&D and clinical sites, where engineers encounter the needs of clinicians and potential users, at times in surprising ways. Alongside ethnographic description, the analysis engages practice-oriented theory to explore moral, identity, power, and tactical dimensions of organizational life, and their relationship to broader ontological structures of work. The book develops a conceptual model and analytical framework for interrogating the conditions, meanings, and lived realities of work and work life, revealing the depth and humanity embedded in everyday organizational practice as life at work.