affective structures. Understanding is the ability to perform a practice, rules are explicit
formulations that prescribe how the practice should be carried out and teleo-affective
structure is the range of aims, intentions, ends and even emotions that are acceptable in a
practice. Understandings how to do a practice can be distinguished as practical and
general understandings. Practical understandings refers to the specific knowledge about
how to perform a practice, such as detailed procedures in preparing a budget, while
general understandings refers to less detailed knowledge about particular activities but the
level of understanding is sufficient to make sense of the practices.
The understandings, rules and teleo-affective structure are the property of a practice and
not the property of an individual or the sum of the individuals’ properties. Thus, in this
study, a practice of accountability reflects a set of understandings, rules and range of ends
that is independent of the understandings, rules and intentions of the participants in a
practice. An individual is said to be a member of a given practice if he expresses similar
understandings, observes similar rules and share similar intentions that characterises a
practice. Nevertheless, Schatzki’s practice theory is not ignorant of the role of the
practitioner that brought about the practice.
Schatzki makes his point in discussing the perpetuation of academic practice (2005; p. 475):
“As for perpetuation, the practice component of a practice-arrangement bundle is perpetuated largely by individuals being incorporated into and carrying them forward. Academic practices vary only so much across the various universities where students learn and graduate students receive training and gain employment. In learning to carry out such practices at one school, graduate students and students are introduced to, or at least provided analogues of, the practices they encounter in their subsequent places of education or employment. Similar remarks apply to arrangements. Carrying on the variant practices requires drawing on acquired know-how, acquiring additional know-
how, and becoming familiar with whatever different rules, ends, projects, and equipment are germane to the new practice-arrangement bundle.”
In the present study, Schatzki’s conceptualisation of practical intelligibility is useful in
understanding how organisational members selected what mattered to them and how they
proceeded towards these ends. For example, when there was a request for urgent delivery,
they were presented with options either to accept or to reject the request. In deciding on a
solution, members may have drawn from their experience, from their understanding of
organisational priorities or from their assessment of the urgency of the request. Those
sources of understandings influenced their cognitions by indicating to them what actions
had to be followed in the continuous flow of activities (Schatzki, 2001, 2002).
In this regard Schatzki (2002) explains that practical intelligibility is individualist
phenomena (p. 75), i.e. the selection of what makes sense to humans is always a function
of human features. For example, why A instead of B matters most to an individual and
what she did to pursue A is determined by her desire, belief, intentions or emotions.
The determination of what people do in Schatzki’s account is:
“What I mean is not whatever mechanisms might be causally responsible for the carrying out of bodily doings that constitutes the performance of the actions. Rather, I mean the specification of x-and not y or z-as the action a person intentionally and knowingly (seeks to) carry out at a given moment (via his or her bodily doings). The actions that people intend knowingly to perform are those that make sense to perform. I call the state of affairs that action makes sense to someone to do ‘practical intelligibility’. I should explain that practical intelligibility is not the same as rationality. What makes sense to people to do is, intrinsically, neither what is nor what seems rational to do.” (Schatzki, 2001, p. 47)
not necessarily the same as what others might view as the most rational things to pursue.
For this reason, some actions in the day-to-day activities within an organisation could not
be interpreted as a result of rationality or normativity. For example, a doctor is always
confronted with the problem of whether to keep in hospital patients with symptoms of
disease until they are proven well, or to discharge them as it is costly to keep them in
when they show only symptoms. In this instance, a doctor might decide to observe the
patient in the hospital since their experience may tell them that 90% of those with such
symptoms would come back a few days later with more serious conditions. This might
seem to other practitioners, faced with shrinking resources, and believing that such
symptoms are rarely caused by severe virus attack, to be an irrational means of fulfilling
the public demand for health care. Such a decision is a reflection of practical
intelligibility. This is what is meant by Schatzki’s assertion:
“What people, at almost any moment, are in the first place doing is whatever at that moment makes sense to them to do.” (2002, p. 76, emphasis in original)