A New Perspective, Old Interpretations: Ambivalences in the Polish Reception of Social Practice Theories

Abstract

This review essay examines the ambivalent reception of social practice theories (SPT) in Polish sociology. The analysis focuses primarily on articles published in issue 4/2023 of Studia Socjologiczne, treated as a particularly revealing condensation of broader reception tendencies, as well as selected publications from recent years. The central argument is that the ontological originality of SPT is weakened when they are interpreted through an older sociological vocabulary. This mechanism is described as an ambivalent process of domestication, expressed in the framing of SPT in terms of the “third way”, the sociology of everyday life, the micro–meso–macro grammar, and humanistically understood agency. Such interpretive shortcuts make practice theories recognisable within sociological traditions, while simultaneously limiting their ontological distinctiveness. The article also identifies examples in Polish scholarship that derive their methodological and analytical assumptions more consistently from the ontology of practices. What is at stake is whether SPT are treated as a new idiom for old problems or as a different ontology of social life, locating the social in practices understood as organised nexuses of doings and sayings, bodies, objects, competences, affects, and practical understandings.