Re-viewing routines through a Pragmatist lens

The practice-based view that currently dominates the routines literature is based on an ostensive-performative duality. However, from the perspective of process philosophy, this duality, or at least the manner in which it is applied, presents four key obstacles to a more processual theorization of routines. This chapter offers an alternative approach that builds on Pragmatist philosophy, especially the ideas of John Dewey and George Herbert Mead, which inform a performative rather than a representational approach to understanding ordinary everyday actions. The argument provides an account of the social and temporal situatedness of human conduct in terms of the inter-related processes of habit, inquiry, and conversational trans-actions