Understanding Professional Practice: A synoptic framework

The chapter aims to give a broad, synoptic view of the notion of practice. First, it outlines five ways of looking at practice, each of which seems to be adopted in a characteristic tradition of research into practice, and lists a number of features of practice. Second, it offers a view of practice as constituted in 'sayings', 'doings' and 'relatings'. Third, it suggests that practices are shaped by mediating preconditions that prefigure possibilities for action by practitioners, and that changing professional practices therefore requires not only changing professional practitioners' 'professional practice knowledge' but also the mediating preconditions that compose the 'practice architectures' within which practices are practised.