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Towards a Practice Turn in EU Studies:
The Everyday of European Integration*
REBECCA ADLER-NISSEN
University of Copenhagen
Abstract
This article explores how practice theory can be recruited for the study of European integration.
New generations of EU researchers are fascinated by the prospect of leaving the armchair and
studying the people and artefacts that make the EU on an everyday level. This article surveys
key practice-oriented, anthropological and micro-sociological studies of the EU and European in-
tegration and shows how their findings challenge more traditional understandings of the dynamics
of European integration. Moving beyond a stock-taking, the article distinguishes between ‘order-
ing’and ‘disordering’practices and explores the potential of a practice turn in EU studies for both
theory (overcoming dualism, replacing substantialism with processualism and rethinking power)
and methods (including unstructured interviews, fieldwork and participant observation). A practice
turn will force us to rethink core assumptions about the EU and allow us to grasp otherwise
uncharted performances and social activities that are crucial for European integration.
Keywords: anthropology; European integration theory; everyday; micro-sociology; participant
observation; practice theory
Introduction
European integration continues to deepen and affect people’s lives. The European Union
influences the labels of nutrition information we use on food products, the environmental
standards for our water and the standards of AC power plugs in our homes. The EU –and
European integration –is even implicated in our emotions; from a junior Commission
official’s frustrations with her Head of Unit to the exhausted Syrian boat refugee’sfirst
meeting with a Frontex border guard in the Mediterranean. While these experiences
may seem particular and personal, they are crucial to making the EU what it is. Without
these materialized and embodied experiences, the EU would only exist on paper.
However, existing approaches within EU studies, be they rationalist or constructivist in
orientation, often ignore routines and habits that are integral to making the EU what it is.
Insiders such as George Ross (1994), who was a ‘fly on the wall’in Jacques Delors’
cabinet in the European Commission, and memoirs such as Jean Monnet’s (1976) have
provided inspiring but anecdotal glimpses of the importance of everyday practices. While
anthropologists have studied lived, culturally embedded experiences for several decades,
such experiences are often not even considered as meaningful research objects by EU
scholars. Yet, new generations of EU researchers are fascinated by the prospect of leaving
*I wish to thank Michelle Cini, Christine la Cour, Stephan Engelkamp, François Foret, Clara Lambert, Jonna Nyman,
Vincent Pouliot, Leonard Seabrooke, the other contributors to this special issue and the two anonymous referees for
helpful comments.
JCMS 2016 Volume 54. Number 1. pp. 87–103 DOI: 10.1111/jcms.12329
© 2015 The Author(s) JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies © 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
the armchair and exploring the EU from the point of view of the people actually producing
it ‘from above’and ‘from below’(e.g. Guiraudon and Favell eds, 2011; Kauppi 2003;
Mérand 2006; Adler-Nissen 2008; 2014, Sassatelli 2007). Fieldwork, participant observa-
tion and other ethnographic methods are now making their way into EU studies.
This article argues that a practice turn in EU studies will allow us to grasp otherwise
uncharted experiences and practices that are crucial for the performance of European
integration. The article is organized as follows. The next section briefly introduces
practice theory. The subsequent sections show how political scientists, sociologists and
anthropologists have begun to explore the mundane and often unspoken ways in which
people make sense of ‘Europe’, thereby challenging more traditional understandings of
the mechanisms of European integration, including how EU institutions work, how
Member States become influential and what European identities might mean. The second
part of the article explores the potential of the meeting between practice theory and EU
studies at the level of theory (rethinking dualisms, substantialism and power) and methods
(e.g. unstructured interviews, fieldwork and participant observation). The article
concludes that a practice approach is ‘dissident’(Manners and Whitman, 2016) not by
asking us to stop focusing on voting behaviour, institutional turf-wars, Europeanization
or democracy, but by offering alternative accounts for such phenomena –and for what
drives European integration more broadly.
I. The Emerging Practice Turn in EU Studies
Practice theories constitute a broad intellectual landscape with roots in pragmatism, phe-
nomenology and critical theory. The seeds of the current practice turn (sometimes labelled
‘cultural’or ‘practical’turn) in the social and human sciences were planted in the late
1960s, at the same time as some of the canonical texts of the linguistic turn. Originating
in philosophy, sociology and anthropology, where it lives on, it has also had considerable
success in organization and management studies, professional education and, more
recently, in international relations (Polyakov, 2012). Its main theoretical purpose has been
to resolve the tension between structure and agency in the moment of practice, to suggest
a processual ontology and to rethink how power works.
Practice can be defined as ‘open-ended, spatially-temporally dispersed nexus of doings
and sayings’(Schatzki, 2012, p. 14). Practice theory aims to liberate agency –and the human,
bodily experience of the world –‘from the constrictions of structuralist and systemic models
while avoiding the trap of methodological individualism’(Postill, 2010, p. 7). Indeed, as
Pouliot explains, ‘practice theory’s most important contribution is in specifying the unit of
analysis: practice; that is, socially meaningful patterns of action. By telling scholars where
to start from –practices –practice theory moves beyond the usual social–theoretical
dichotomies that have hitherto led to a metaphysical dead end’(Pouliot, 2016, forthcoming).
Before presenting key elements of practice theories and their implications for EU stud-
ies, I will briefly discuss the way in which everyday practices have hitherto been studied
in relation to the EU, suggesting that the time for a practice turn is ripe. While many of the
scholars discussed do not explicitly ascribe to practice theory, they point to the impor-
tance of everyday and mundane practices for analysing the EU. However, as will become
clear, what is lacking is a theorization of the nature of these practices. This will be the
purpose of the second part of the article.
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Implicit Understandings of Practice in EU Studies: Europeanization and Socialization
Interestingly, some of the early European integration scholars were more focused on quo-
tidian practices than current EU scholarship. Karl W. Deutsch’s (1953) transactionalism,
for instance, argued that channels of communications, the mobility of people across bor-
ders, telephone calls, density of trade, etc. would create common interests and identities
(what he called a ‘we-feeling’) and thereby promote European integration. Deutsch
suggested that repetition of relatively mundane activities, such as talking on the phone,
would be crucial for Europe as a security community. This argument is not far from a
practice-theoretical argument, although the practice dimension was never made explicit
in Deutsch’s theory.
In the past decades, a number of theoretical turns have marked the study of European
integration and drawn attention to its mundane workings. While these turns have
challenged existing notions of European integration, they had one thing in common: they
largely focused on the institutional and regulatory dimensions of the EU system. In the
1980s and 1990s, the EU was conceptualized in terms of ‘new modes of governance’
(Kohler-Koch and Rittberger, 2006). EU scholars imported concepts from policy analysis
and effectively sidelined the gridlocked debate between abstract European integration the-
ories by explaining the EU as a hybrid mix of a state and non-state actors (Hix, 1998). At
the tail end of the governance turn came an increased focus on Europeanization, moving
EU scholarship closer to everyday practices. Scholars began to study the implementation
of EU legislation in specific policy areas or across Member States (Radaelli, 2008). They
developed ever more sophisticated accounts of EU institutions and the relations between
them (Naurin and Rasmussen, 2011; Naurin and Wallace, 2009). Yet the main drivers of
European integration and Europeanization were found in rather classic political science
spaces –sectoral policies, sub-national government, political parties and interest groups.
Moreover, the main goal was often to capture particular cause–effect relationships,
identifying intervening variables such as ‘veto players’(see Exadaktylos and Radaeilli,
2012), not to analyze dimensions of everyday life, which are mediated by habit and ritual.
In the 1990s and 2000s, constructivist-leaning scholars began to raise questions resonating
with practice theory. They argued that EU leaders have been ‘rhetorically entrapped’to con-
tinue with the Eastern enlargement (Schimmelfennig, 2001), that identity politics shaped the
EMU (Risse, 2003) and that European ‘others’affected European identities (Diez, 2004). Cen-
tral for constructivist EU scholars was a focus on discourse for institutionalized, authoritative
political decisions and European identity, socialization and learning (Christiansen et al.,
1999). A number of constructivist-oriented EU scholars focused on routinized and everyday
practices (see Wiener, 1998, for practice-oriented work on citizenship). However, this litera-
ture differs from practice theory in at least two important ways: first, it tends to focus on dis-
cursive practices and disregard ‘the implicit, tacit or unconscious layer of knowledge which
enables a symbolic organization of reality’(Reckwitz, quoted in Bueger and Gadinger,
2015a p. 451; see also Pouliot, 2008); second, constructivism has traditionally been interested
in how Member States and officials demonstrate ‘pro-normative’behaviour, but downplay the
accidental and unintentional developments in European integration.
Scholars examining how tacit rules and negotiation culture within, e.g., the Commission
or COREPER impact the outcome of negotiations (Lewis, 1998, 2005; Checkel, 2005,
2007) have begun to explore the rituals and performances that help produce particularities
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such as the ‘consensus-reflex’in Council negotiations. As I will argue in more depth be-
low, their interest in informal practices of negotiations takes us some way, but explicit
attention to practices opens space for the possibility that power need not be ‘authoritative’
(or discursively articulated) to actually shape European integration. Contrary to work on norm
transfer and socialization, a practice approach connects such phenomena to lived and
embodied experiences, from the European Commission official to the unemployed EU citizen.
Organizational and public management-oriented EU scholars have perhaps come the
closest in capturing the everyday of European governance. They recognize routines of daily
activities as the backbone of social organization and its stability. Three examples are Michelle
Cini’s (2007) pioneering study of how the European Commission handled ethical concerns
following its resignation in 1999, Radaelli’s work on policy-learning in the open method
of co-ordination (Radaelli, 2008) and Carolyn Ban’s (2013) analysis of the management cul-
ture in the European Commission after the Kinnock reforms and enlargement process.
Through 140 interviews and extensive fieldwork, Ban provides a detailed professional soci-
ology of EU civil servants, including how individuals became aware of the possibility to ap-
ply for EU jobs and how new staff end up fitting the typical profile of a European official.
In sum, what characterizes existing approaches within EU studies –with some important
exceptions –is a tendency to focus on what could be called the authoritative dimension of
the EU decision-making machinery and its effects outside of Brussels (for a sociology of
knowledge explanation, see Adler-Nissen and Kropp, 2015). This reflects a tendency to
disregard practices that may appear too ‘banal’or ‘apolitical’to be of importance.
Anthropology’s (Overlooked) Contribution to EU Studies
Anthropology’s key characteristic has been its attachment to the ‘field’. Of course, this
has changed with the anthropology of globalization and networks, but it is still in the
DNA of much anthropological work. But where do people ‘live’Europe? The answer,
for pioneering anthropologists such as Maryon McDonnald, Marc Abélès, Irène Bellier
and Thomas Wilson (Abélès, 1992; Bellier and Wilson, 2000; Shore, 2000), is to go
inside the EU institutions. Through an ethnography of the European Commission,
McDonald has shown that officials identify with various units in the organizational
structure –for example, ‘we in the translation section’, and so on (McDonald, 2000,
p. 53) –but, despite an official rhetoric of unity and (benign) diversity, Commission
officials continuously construct new cultural distinctions that shape the EU politics.
In Building Europe (2000), Shore analyses the EU’s cultural policies after the
Maastricht crisis and provides an inside view of the European Commission. Drawing
on his experiences as a stagiaire as well as interviews, Shore shows how European identity
has been sought and established ‘from above’through technocratic and managerial initia-
tives in the Commission such as subsidies given to EU studies at universities and efforts to
encourage a more widespread use of the European flag and anthem. Methodologically,
Shore analyses otherwise abstract notions of ‘European identity’and ‘European public’
from the perspectives of civil servants, examining the ‘trajectory or nature of the
European idea at the level of practice’(Shore, 2000, p. 5; for a critique of the Commis-
sion’s embrace of neoliberal governance, see Shore, 2011). More recently, Koskinen
(2008) was embedded in the Finnish translation unit at the European Commission and dis-
covered that irony and laughter were crucial for dealing with ambiguity and for making a
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multi-lingual EU work. Such findings go significantly beyond the socialization literature
about ‘dual loyalties’(Trondal, 2004).
Turning to how EU integration works ‘from below’, since the late 1980s, anthropolo-
gists have studied everyday life and politics in various localities in Europe (for an excellent
overview, see Wilken, 2012). Many of these studies have focused on people and places
with ambiguous relationships to Europe and the EU, such as Herzfeld (1989) and Mitchell
(2002). Sassatelli uses participant observation and unstructured interviews to trace how the
‘European City of Culture’and culture policies are implemented by officials and artists
(Sassatelli, 2002, p. 441). She demonstrates how local communities co-construct European
culture. Sassatelli suggests not only that the outcomes of EU cultural politics cannot be
reduced to the intentions of the policies (something that implementation studies would also
confirm), but also that such funding and official rhetoric of ‘unity in diversity’gains its
own unpredictable life on the ground, leading for instance to artists ‘hijacking’EU cultural
policies for local purposes (Sassatelli, 2007, pp. 37–8). This is clearly an alternative take
on Europeanization and goes beyond domestic ‘veto-players’(Sedelmeier, 2012).
There have also been studies that explore how some groups of people identify them-
selves as Europeans. A model example of anthropology’s engagement with such issues
is Adrian Favell’s (2008) Eurostars and Eurocities:The Free Movement and Mobility
in Europe. Favell traces European citizens as they move across borders, exploiting the free
movement of people. Building on ten years of ethnographical research in Amsterdam,
Brussels and London, Favell mixes interviews and life histories of 60 higher-educated
Europeans (the ‘Eurostars’) with theoretical insights on mobility, migration and
integration within a unifying Europe. Favell’s book demonstrates why relatively few EU
citizens use their right to free movement by seeking employment in another Member State.
This goes beyond the usual explanations of lack of mutual recognition of education and
qualifications, portability of pensions and differences in social security schemes.
As Meeus points out, ‘An excellent illustration in the book is how the Eurostars have to
engage with the after-work drinking behaviour of British Londoners (Meeus 2009, p. 3).
The British custom is essential for maintaining social networks with their British colleagues.
‘Local social networks in general are difficult to enter since they often date back from high
school; however, their access to the nationals’network means, for instance, access to infor-
mation on local cheap housing, which is crucial in London and Amsterdam’(Meeus, 2009,
p. 3). Perhaps Favell’skeyfinding is that the free movement of people differs fundamentally
from traditional migration –afinding he builds on the in-depth study of everyday practices.
‘A denationalized mobility’(Meeus, 2009, p. 3) such as the European ‘compels a person to
break the social contract of the national welfare state’(Meeus, 2009, p. 3).
Together, these rich contributions from anthropologists and practice-oriented scholars
do not merely complement mainstream EU research; they also challenge and sometimes
contradict its findings. To further this agenda and provide a theoretical starting point,
the next section develops key elements of a practice approach for EU studies.
II. Practice Theories: Overcoming Dualism, Promoting Processualism and
Rethinking Power
What does it mean to analyse the EU –or European integration –from a practice perspec-
tive? The key assumption is that everyday actions are consequential in producing social
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life. Practice theories interpret human activity by ‘parsing it into practices: stable and
structured clusters of behaviours, communicative actions and accompanying mental and
bodily activities’(Polyakov, 2012, p. 221). Practice theories emphasize situated understand-
ing and unmask the apparent stability of social systems (including the EU) as contingent and
agent-driven productions. Taking the European Council as an example, this means moving
away from treating it only as a formal institution centred on strategic events (summits) to the
process of enactment. This implies tracing the social activities that go into making the Euro-
pean Council what it is. This can only be done by zooming in on the people and materials
involved: for instance, the choice of venue, decoration of meeting rooms, menu and wine
for the dinner of the heads of state and government.
1
Yet such ordinary aspects are difficult
to grasp, because they often belong to the world of the unsaid and taken-for-granted. A first
task is, then, to further clarify key elements in practice theory.
For heuristic reasons (and grossly simplifying), I distinguish between the ‘ordering’
(how practices stabilize the world) and the ‘disordering’(how practices destabilize the
world) theories of practices. The ‘ordering’perspective focuses on how practices become
organizing of social life, it is interested in how people and groups of people become
recognized as more or less competent than others through particular classifications, distinc-
tions and categories of understanding. This happens for instance in social ‘fields’
(Bourdieu, 1977) or ‘communities of practice’(Wenger, 1998). In Bourdieu’s theory of
practice, there is a strong focus on the way in which people come to take their own superior
or subordinate position in a social web for granted, manifesting itself in bodily postures
and stances –ways of standing, sitting, looking, speaking or walking (Bourdieu, 1977,
p. 15). For Wenger the question is more how ‘communities of practice’foster learning
processes and collaboration, rather than how they dominate or exclude particular ideas
or groups of people (Wenger, 1998, p. 85). Drawing on Wenger’s work, Emanuel Adler
and Vincent Pouliot (2011, p. 6) define practices as ‘socially meaningful patterns of action
which, in being performed more or less competently, simultaneously embody, act out and
possibly reify background knowledge and discourse in and on the material world’. They
distinguish practices from two neighbouring concepts: behaviour and action. Behaviour
captures the material aspect of doing; the concept of action adds on a layer of meaningful-
ness, at both the subjective (intentions, beliefs) and intersubjective (norms, identities)
levels. From this perspective, practices can thus be anything from negotiations in the
Council of Ministers to playing hockey or smuggling drugs. Such activities involve skills
and techniques and can be performed better or worse in the eyes of other practitioners. In
terms of EU studies, this ‘ordering’approach would focus on daily activities of EU policy-
makers and EU policies, the people and artefacts populating European institutional sites,
participating in a range of communities of practices, hierarchies and social fields.
The ‘disordering’approach to practices differs from the ‘ordering’in that it does not
require recognition of competent behaviour or social capital. This is what gives it its
emancipatory potential. It focuses on subordinate and ordinary people and their experi-
ences of broader power relationships (for a great overview, see Hobson and Seabrooke,
2009). Disordering perspectives include the ‘everyday life’concern with disciplinary
logics and how the everyday life manifests itself in bodies, urban landscapes, consump-
tion and even boredom (Lefebvre, 2002). Others, in the ‘everyday politics’tradition
1
See Neumann (2012) for an account of the diplomatic meal.
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associated with James C. Scott (1985), are more interested in subtle forms of subaltern
agency and defiance, at the local level. In terms of EU studies, the disordering approach
would focus on seemingly ordinary or subordinate people –non-elite groups, including
the lower-middle and middle classes, migrant labourers and diasporas whose lives are
shaped by and shape the EU ‘from below’–exploring these groups’capacity to change
their own political, economic and social environment.
Overcoming Dualisms
A key principle of practice theories and everyday approaches is as Feldman and Orlikowski
explain, ‘the rejection of dualisms and recognition of the inherent relationship between ele-
ments that have often been treated dichotomously. These include conceptual oppositions such
as mind and body, cognition and action, objective and subjective, structure and agency, indi-
vidual and institutional, free will and determinism’(Feldman and Orlikowski, 2011, p. 1242).
Bourdieu’s (1977) theory of practice, for instance, transcends the dichotomy between agency
and structure with the notion of habitus, which is a disposition to act in particular ways, struc-
turing our daily practices. A primary purpose of Giddens’(1984) structuration theory is also
to ‘transcend the dualism of agency and structure’(Feldman and Orlikowski, 2011, p. 1242).
While analytical oppositions are sometimes useful, practice theory encourages scepticism to-
wards these trying to avoid the twin fallacies of ‘objectivist reification’on the one hand and ‘sub-
jectivist reduction’on the other (Taylor, quoted in Feldman and Orlikowski, 2011, p. 1242).
For EU studies, this rejection of dualism is important. One of the key discussions in
analyses of decision-making at all levels in the EU is whether it is ideas or interests that
drive actors (be they states or individual negotiators, MEPs or Commission officials;
Hayes-Renshaw et al., 2006). However, this distinction between interests and ideas –
while it makes sense analytically –is difficult to observe empirically. For instance,
Michelle Cini (2013) concludes that both interest and ideas matter in the negotiation of
inter-institutional agreements. A practice approach would argue that the social world
escapes such distinctions.
In my own work, I consider Member State diplomacy in the Council of Ministers as a
particular practice. What distinguishes a practice approach to Member State decision-
making from more traditional approaches is that it tries to overcome the dualism between
interests and ideas by insisting that agents are not (necessarily) socialized into adopting
certain norms (Kauppi, 2003, p. 777); instead, norms are often performed rather than
internalized. For instance, in my research on euro-outsiders and the Council of Ministers,
an official from the Danish Ministry of Finance explains that he is teased (in a friendly
tone) for being outside the eurozone:
My colleagues often ask me if and when there will be a new referendum; if there is any
news. They are teasing a bit. Sometimes when we take a tour de table in the working
group on the preparation on the euro and external communication […] teasing remarks
are made (Official, quoted in Adler-Nissen, 2014, p. 105).
In a similar vein, Saurugger (2010) holds that we need to look at micro-level struggles
to understand the adoption of norms of ‘civil society involvement’and ‘participatory
democracy’in EU decision-making. As she concludes, borrowing from the dramaturgical
approach of Erving Goffman, norms need not be internalized to matter. What matters is
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that they work as a ‘framework of appearances that must be maintained, whether or not
there is a feeling behind the appearances’(Saurugger, 2010, p. 473).
Process, Not Substantialism
A second argument in much of practice theory is that ‘most social forms cannot be
explained without paying attention to the actual doings in and on the world that give them
shape’(Pouliot, 2016, forthcoming). In other words, ‘it is the unfolding of everyday prac-
tices that produces the bigger phenomena and social realities of our world’(Pouliot, 2016,
forthcoming). This goes against the substantialism that dominates much of social science.
Substantialism claims that substances (things, beings, entities, essences) are the ‘units’or
‘levels’of analysis and that they exist prior to the analysis. In modern social theory, this
perspective is expressed in arguments about the existence of the will and methodological
individualism. Within EU studies, rational choice approaches assume that human beings
and states act rationally to maximize utility (e.g. Moravcsik, 1997), while constructivists
find that social norms are the main behavioural driver (Börzel and Risse, 2003).
As Wolfe (2011) has convincingly argued, most EU scholarship presumes that power
resides in a preferred factor (e.g. agent’s motives and resources, rational utility maximiz-
ing options of choice, ideas and norms), which then determines the outcomes or the
relations among determinants. Seen from the perspective of practice theory, the problem
is that such approaches predetermine concepts such as European integration, causality and
power –and hence the very research objects that need to be explored –before even begin-
ning the analysis. EU scholarship tends to bracket practices away or use particular inter-
ests or actors as proxies for everyday moves. It often searches for kicks of exogenous
change (since its units or variables are usually left unchanging), leaving the change itself
unexplainable. In contrast, practice theories interpret the EU through a relational ontol-
ogy, rejecting the idea that objects or structures have a fixed, stable identity or that closure
is achieved at some point (Bueger and Gadinger, 2015a).
As Feldman and Orlikowski explain, ‘That practice is consequential for social life is, for
many practice theorists, associated with the foregrounding of human agency’(Feldman and
Orlikowski, 2011, p. 1242) and attention to bottom-up change within everyday politics: overt
and covert resistance, which is the most common form of everyday activity during ‘normal’
times (Hobson and Seabrooke, 2009, p. 25). Feldman and Orlikowski note that ‘Recent work
in a post-humanist vein has strongly influenced practice theory. Science and technology
scholars –for example, Latour (1987), Pickering (2010) and Jasanoff (2004) –have articulated
the consequential role played by non-humans such as natural objects and technological arte-
facts in producing social life. While these scholars differ as to how they theorize the status
of nonhuman agency relative to human agency –for example, whether these agencies are pos-
ited to be symmetrical (Latour, 1987), intertwined (Pickering, 2010) or entangled (Suchman,
2007) –their work has helped practice scholars acknowledge the importance of materiality in
the production of social life (Feldman and Orlikowski, 2011). As Bueger and Gadinger put it,
‘To stress the impact of objects, things and artefacts on social life is not merely to add the el-
ement of materiality; it is an attempt to give non-humans a more precise role in the ontologies
of the world (Bueger and Gadinger, 2015b, p. 453).
For instance, building on practice theory, Kathleen McNamara (2015) argues that the
legitimation of EU authority rests on technologies and people’s day-to-day experiences of
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‘social facts’such as euro coins and bills and EU public architecture. Following Latour
more explictly, William Walters focuses on ‘inscription’–that is, on the material practices
of making distant events and processes visible, mobile and calculable in terms of
documents, charts, forms, reports, signs and graphs in Justice and Home Affairs (Walters,
2002, p. 84) –seeking to overcome the ideational/material dichotomy and thereby
distinguishing his analysis from traditional social constructivism. But what does Walters
mean when he argues that the approach moves beyond the search for causality and
formulating and testing hypotheses?
The methodological situationalism of the practice approach has consequences for our
explanation of social phenomena. It raises important issues concerning where we look for
the action. In assuming a priori that Member States have certain interests or that voters
will particular preferences, we ignore the role that other social mechanisms may play.
The practice approach insists on holding such questions more open, in an inductive
approach, which begins not with theoretically deducted hypotheses but with an interest
in the stories and accounts that practitioners –or objects –of European integration tell.
This is where practice scholarship differs from the qualitative approach found in, for in-
stance, process-tracing, which aims to measure and test ‘hypothesized causal mechanisms’
(Bennett and Checkel, 2014, pp. 3–4). In contrast, practice approaches insist that situations
constitute a sui generis reality, which cannot be predicted from knowledge of the attributes
of participating agents (Knorr-Cetina, 1988, p. 27). This requires suspending the view that
the researcher has a privileged version of the social world, be it ECJ rulings or first readings.
Only then, and building on this information, does it make sense to formulate more general
statements about the patterns or trends in a particular social field. A good example is Virginie
Van Ingelgom’s (2014) excellent book on citizens’indifference to the EU, which builds on a
combination of quantitative and qualitative research, asking people to describe how they feel
about the EU in their own words. Van Ingelgom reminds us that studying events, institutions
or actors that may be invisible from non-ethnographic vantage points can be of consequence to
politics (e.g. apathy or non-participation in elections or social movements).
Power as Relations, Not Capabilities
A third principle of practice theory is that ‘relations of continuous processes of mutual consti-
tution do not imply equal relations. Rather, these are relations of power, laden with asymmet-
rical capacities for action, differential access to resources and conflicting interests and norms’
(Feldman and Orlikowski, 2011, p. 1242). While those ‘in power’make decisions, which may
affect the powerless, the latter also make decisions, which may affect the former. Practice the-
orists do not agree on how to conceptualize power. In Bourdieu’s (1977) work, for instance,
power occurs through the objectification and institutionalization of subjective relations. For
Giddens, ‘power is identified with the agentic capacity to ‘make a difference’in the world
and is defined as the ‘the means of getting things done’(Giddens, 1984, p. 283)’(Feldman
and Orlikowski, 2011, p. 1242). Importantly, a practice turn is not interested in motivations
or intentions when it comes to analysing power; the fundamental building blocks of social life
are not individuals but social interactions.
For the ‘disordering’or everyday perspective, the question is not about competence but
about how everyday agents mediate and refract elite policies (Hobson and Seabrooke, 2009,
p. 9). According to Lefebvre, the logic of discipline runs through, informs and replicates
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everyday experiences of non-elite actors, so that discipline becomes self-disciplinary
(somewhat similar to Bourdieu’shabitus or Goffman’s‘sense of one’s place’). Yet, as
Pouliot explains, this still leaves ‘agency to resist through revealing the potential of ordinary
actors to transform their lives, from subtle expressions of resistance to more dramatic exer-
cises of defiance and unintended change’(Pouliot, 2016, forthcoming).
For the ‘ordering’version of practice theory, any enactment of practice contains an
implicit claim of authority –that ‘this is how things are done’. What renders a given
practice more competent than others in a given context is a highly complex question.
Markers of standing tend to be shifting and contingent (Adler and Pouliot, 2011, p. 8).
In other words, power as a micro-process of social life is central to the practice turn.
This is also the case in the EU. In COREPER diplomacy, for instance, Lewis (2005)
identifies a long list of ‘sources of influence’for ambassadors, including personal expertise,
experience, personality, interest, importance of the country, seniority, relationship with
others, formal leadership positions, etc. These are very interesting insights, but as Pouliot
(2016) underlines, unless they are contextualized, it is hard to learn any insightful lessons
about how practice generates social hierarchies. How does ‘personality’play out in a Coun-
cil of Ministers negotiation, for instance? What does ‘interest’mean in a Council working
group, specifically? Studies of turn-taking in conversation provide a wealth of information
about how encounters work in cues and body language and patterns of argumentation.
In my own work, I have identified a particular form of power: the ‘diplomatic capital’in
the Council of Ministers. It is a composite form of capital and its meaning is constantly
negotiated. For example, to influence the development of the EMU, officials enter a classi-
fication game about what a sound economy is and how well –as a Member State –one per-
forms as a European capital. Diplomatic capital can only be translated into influence in
concrete negotiations. Thus, while a Member State can be said to possess different degrees
of objectified power –for instance, the UK has 29 votes and Denmark has seven votes in the
Council of Ministers –this resource can only be exercised effectively if channelled through
narrowly defined and accepted roles and scripts defined by the Council. To be influential,
one must respect the informal norms of problem-solving and consensus-seeking. Indeed,
voting power may never apply as an effective resource (Adler-Nissen, 2014, p. 161).
To conclude, power is not something that can be assessed as a general resource or
capability. It is deeply contextual (see Adler-Nissen and Pouliot, 2014). Comptence or
recognition is fought for through competing authority claims; it is the object of political
struggles. Therefore, it must be studied inductively and through ‘thick contextualization’
(Pouliot 2016, forthcoming). This is a crucial insight of analysing the role of practice in
the constitution of power and influence in the EU (Pouliot 2016, forthcoming).
III. Methods: Practising Practice Theory
How does one apply practice theory? The favourite methods chosen by practice theorists are
not necessarily specific to practice theory, but they are carried out in particular ways. One in-
sightful suggestion by Pouliot (2012) is a threefold research strategy. First, he argues, ‘one
needs access to practices, either directly or indirectly. Because it is often complicated to get
direct access, methodological proxies must sometimes be imagined, with their merits and
limits’(Pouliot, 2012, p. 49). Second, ‘one should reconstruct the dispositional logic of prac-
tices. In order for practice X to do something in and on the world, what tacit expertise would
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practitioners need to have?’(Pouliot, 2012, p. 49). Whether ‘practices are ‘seen’(ethnography,
participant observation), ‘talked about’(interviews) or ‘read’(textual analysis), practical
logics can be interpretively inferred through a variety of methods, including the combination
of different methods or mixed methods (Pouliot, 2012, p. 48). Third, ‘one has to construct the
positional logic of practices. This task includes both the interpretation of intersubjective rules
of the game and the mapping of the distribution of resources across participants’(Pouliot,
2012, p. 48). Other practice scholars adopt different research strategies, but there are some
common characteristics that I will brieflytouchuponbelow.
Interviews, Ethnographic Fieldwork and Written Sources
The main method that practice theorists have used in gathering data is qualitative interviewing.
Semi- and un-structured interviews can help ‘reconstruct the situational and dispositional
spaces, but what kind of information can be generated from interviews (Pouliot, 2012, p. 50)?
Interviews are important, not because informants know the ‘big-T’truth, but because their
particular truths are valuable. From a practice viewpoint, interviewers and informants are
always actively engaged in constructing meaning. Practice scholars spend time asking
interviewees to describe in detail how they and their colleagues and friends go about their
business –what their daily schedule looks like, with whom they meet regularly, the kinds
of negotiations they conduct, etc.
Construction of the interview guide and interpretation of the interview data do not begin
with already defined coding rules. Instead, the interpretation builds on a careful construction
of how the agents perceive themselves and their conditions for action. This does not neces-
sarily mean long-term fieldwork, but it may involve spending more time in e.g. Brussels than
one would usually do for a standard qualitative interview (Adler-Nissen, 2014, pp. 22–3).
A second method is ethnography: ‘close-up, on-the-ground observation of people and
institutions in real time’, where the investigator detects ‘how and why agents act, think
and feel’(Wacquant, 2003, p. 5), which can offer special insights for the study of the
EU. Participant observation’s major advantage, of course, lies in the possibility to closely
understand political processes by observing paths of decisions as they take place and
having direct access to the political actors involved. Participant observation allows the
researcher to bring up the mundane details that can affect politics, providing a ‘thick de-
scription’. Only this closeness enables us to identify a previously under-evaluated array
of conflict patterns, hierarchy and identities. Often participant observation is combined
with formal interviews and informal talks. As Bellier (2002, p. 16) writes, observing con-
crete social and cultural relations is much more efficient in terms of the quality of the data
than ‘trying to justify a pre-established theoretical model of interaction that would have
been set without knowing any of the social conditions that are part of the institution’s life’.
Ethnography of EU institutions and beyond can deliver exceptional results. One example
is Stacia Zabusky’s (2011) analysis of the Space Science Department (SSD) of the
European Space Agency (ESA). Zabusky is explicitly drawing on practice theory, including
the work of Ortner and Giddens, as she studies ‘dynamic, temporal processes of everyday
work (the practice of “working together”)’(Zabusky, 2011, p. 20). Her research, based
on nearly one year of fieldwork at the SSD headquarters in the Netherlands, focuses on
the various meanings of co-operation among space scientists. Zabusky asserts that scientists
actively transform their everyday practices into something sacred. The scientists’dream of
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modernity, according to Zabusky, is the quest for unity through the sacred journey into outer
space, where pure nature is absorbed through the medium of the satellite and its instruments.
Characteristically for good ethnographic –and practice –approaches, Zabusky systemati-
cally accounts for her own methodology: how she defined her ‘field’, how she gained access,
how she interacted with the scientists, how her own position changed as she came back to the
field and how she used field notes. The field is constructed by already overlapping relations,
and of course shaped by the conceptual, professional, financial and relational opportunities
and resources of the scholar. The value of reflexivity lies both in a more systematic collection
andtreatmentofdataandinincreasingintersubjectivity and transparency.
Archival material, official documents and other written texts may also be of crucial
value in a practice perspective. Again, text is not taken as some kind of ‘pure’data;
instead, the goal is to try to reconstruct the daily production of decisions and reflections
of practitioners. In my own work on the diplomacy of opting out, accessing archival ma-
terial in the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs proved immensely fruitful. It made it pos-
sible for me to reconstruct how euro-outsiders such as the UK and Denmark challenged
their gradual exclusion, in ways that could not be adequately accounted for in an inter-
view or through observations alone. By going through the email correspondence between
British and Danish representatives, EU institutions and other Member States, drafts,
notes, etc., I found that British officials took active part in the preparatory committee’s
lengthy discussion about the design of the single currency coins and banknotes. For
instance, they suggested that national emblems should take up at least 20 per cent of
the individual coins and notes. This helped me reconstruct the everyday moves of a
Member State that might appear as a convinced euro-outsider in public, but which
negotiates behind the scenes as if it were bound by the same rules as the eurozone members
(Adler-Nissen, 2014, p. 99). Of course, an archive will document some struggles while
silencing others. Practice scholars therefore often combine the analysis of text with interviews
with the people producing them to address issues of self-censorship and self-legitimation.
Fieldwork, participant observation, in-depth interviews and other methods of the prac-
tice turn are not without challenges. First, requests to do participant observation within
EU institutions can be turned down for confidentiality reasons. ‘How does one get in?’
is not a simple question (Bellier, 2002). It involves delicate issues of terms of access.
Due to the high sensitivity of some information, informants will sometimes need to be
anonymized. In building trust and gaining access, the researcher also needs to handle
important ethical issues regarding the treatment of controversial, personal or confidential
material, as well as the protection of informants from dangers of misinterpretation,
attention to issues of cultural and national sensitivities and how to avoid ‘going native’.
Second, the field of European integration cannot necessarily be restricted to a particular
physical site. Here, the practice turn in EU studies will benefit from the past decades’fruitful
debates in anthropology about the limits of the ‘field’. As people become more mobile and as
their worlds are transnationalized, so should our research site approaches be (Gupta and
Ferguson, 1997). ‘Spheres of experience’,‘interconnected social spaces’, borderland and
‘global ethnoscapes’(Appadurai, 1991) are just some conceptual candidates for capturing
the erosion and entanglement of territorial, cultural and communication boundaries. For
the study of the EU and European integration, this proves particularly interesting. It will pro-
vide scholars with analytical models to trace policy-makers, policies, migrants, consultants,
students and refugees as they move around Europe.
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Conclusion
Recent years have seen an increased interest in everyday practices of European integration.
Building on the surge of interest in micro-sociological and anthropological perspectives, this
article has argued that they are part of a practice turn that has the potential to generate impor-
tant insights about the EU and European integration. In this article, I have developed three
theoretical claims from practice theory for EU studies: first, the rejection of dualisms such
as agency–structure, individual–institutional, free will–determinism; second, replacing theo-
retically deducted hypotheses and substantialism with processualism; third, understanding
power as a situated performance that involves displays of competence, defiance or discipline.
Practice theories do not ascribe to one particular method, but are particularly attached to
participant observation and unstructured interviews as ways of generating data. Practice
theory is a deeply inductive approach which starts from the micro to explain the macro;
it is ‘methodological situationalist’, meaning that large-scale social phenomena such as
‘market prices’,‘the state’or ‘euro-scepticism’ultimately come about through mundane
transactions of people (and things) in micro-social situations (see Knorr-Cetina, 1988).
The promise of a practice turn in EU studies is a deeper understanding of the everyday
aspects of European integration ‘from above’and ‘from below’. EU politics –the events,
institutions or actors that are normally considered ‘political’(e.g. states, bureaucracies
and institutions) –can be explored in an ethnographic way: at a smaller scale and as they
happen. Thus, my argument is not that we should stop examining the European Council,
COREPER, cabinet meetings in the European Commission or judgments of the European
Court of Justice. These institutions do deserve our analytical attention. The question is
how we approach them.
We also need a broader view of the everyday. The making of the EU often requires leaving
official buildings of bureaucracies, exploring local performances across and beyond Europe.
A deeper understanding of questions of euroscepticism, Europeanization and inter-
institutional power games often requires a multi-sited ethnography. At a time where the EU
is more controversial than ever, the practice approach may have a particular value: it brings
EU scholars closer to the people who construct, perform and resist the EU on a daily basis.
Practice-oriented scholars do not necessarily agree on where to look for practices. Is it
best to begin with established policy-makers or to study the EU from below? Practice
theorists also disagree on the role of science in society, placing themselves differently
in epistemological debates. At one end of the spectrum, some practice-oriented
approaches buy into most of the aims of standard sciences (in the bridge-building tradi-
tion of social constructivism; Adler and Pouliot, 2011). At the other end of the spectrum,
we find those practice-oriented scholars who are sceptical towards the idea that the
researcher can somehow be separated from her research, and have a more critical agenda
(Bigo and Walker, 2007). This debate within practice theory is ongoing. While it appears
significant in terms of principles, in actual analysis the difference may be less important
because of the shared interest in what happens ‘on the ground’in apparently trivial moves
that turn out to be crucial for European integration.
Correspondence:
Rebecca Adler-Nissen
University of Copenhagen.
email: ran@ifs.ku.dk
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