Vincent Pouliot has written an important book. It is an early statement on the “practice turn” in international relations theory and will doubtless become a reference point as the conversation unfolds. The practice turn is a relatively new research program, heretofore mostly limited to European journals. The July 2002 Millenium is devoted to this IR subject. At its core is the insight that much of what we do as actors in the social world is not conscious or deliberate, but rather unconscious and habitual. Observable practices, or what we do to go on in the world, “are informed by a substrate of inarticulate knowhow” (p. 6). This is what Anthony Giddens has called “practical consciousness” and Pierre Bourdieu “practical sense.”
Pouliot develops a model of world politics that plays off of Bourdieu's conceptualization of the field, habitus, doxa, and cultural capital. Pouliot could have gone in many different directions with his theorization of practice and international politics, and it would be a good thing if he and his readers would pick up on his model and apply it beyond the evolution of NATO–Russian relations since 1991. I say this not because Pouliot made a poor choice, but rather because his model is so rich with possibilities that one instantiation only limits its reach. It is important in the very earliest stages of an emerging research program that multiple theorizations of practice be kept alive so that the program can develop.
The author offers a solution to one of the more embarrassing lacunae in constructivist theory in IR: the absence of a credible account of change. He makes use of Bourdieu's conceptualization of hysteresis, or the disconnect between one's objective position in a field and one's dispositions. We get change when “dispositions are out of phase and practices are objectively ill-adapted to present conditions because they are objectively adjusted to conditions that no longer obtain” (p. 48). Pouliot then explains the deterioration of Russia's relations with the West in the 1990s in terms of Russia's being equipped with the wrong kind of capital, namely, military power and Realpolitik thinking, in a world that was objectively arranging itself for economic interdependence and globalization. It is a very clever theoretical device and should be developed and elaborated still more.
Pouliot usefully reminds constructivist scholars that identity and norms are not the only way that intersubjective structures make themselves felt in the social world and international politics. In his view, identities and norms, to the extent that they are consciously referred to by actors before they act, mislead us to ignore the implicit knowhow that underlies them in the first place. One important implication of Pouliot's concern is that there is far more cooperation between and among states without any shared identities or norms than conventional constructivism can explain. He suggests that it is the shared implicit knowledge, the habitus and doxa, that account for this underestimated cooperation.
For an original contribution to an emergent research program, there are of course directions in which I would have liked to see Pouliot go that he did not. For example, there is a large underlying assumption of the practice turn that needs empirical exploration. The author, following the practice turn's canon, argues that all rules are untaught, and are just learned through practical experience, and then, less ambitiously, that there is always some part of implicit learning in any practice (p. 31). Are these statements true? Do we know how much of the social world is accounted for by practical sense, rather than reflective learning? The second argument, that there is always implicit learning, is also debatable. How much of the social world we explicitly learn from our parents and significant others, and how much we merely imitate, absorb, and improvise, remains an open question. We need an answer to that question before we can know just where the practice turn is likely to apply in world politics. Another way of putting it would be to say that the practice turn's proponents need to begin establishing the conditions under which practical sense matters more than reflective thought, to elaborate some scope conditions, if you will.
The question of how much of the world is implicit relates directly to the unclear relationship between the logic of practice and the logics of appropriateness and consequences. The latter two logics have heretofore dominated the study of political science and international relations. Appropriateness corresponds very closely to Max Weber's Wertrationalitat, or value rationality. It suggests that people make choices based upon a consideration of shoulds and should nots, given one's identity and context. The logic of consequences, or Weber's Zweckrationalitat, is still more familiar as instrumental rationality calculating costs and benefits before making a choice. On one page, Pouliot argues that the logic of practice has ontological priority (p. 13), but then on the next page he writes that all the logics have a complementary relationship. I do not think we know the answer to this question, but it would be useful to imagine the scope conditions for the various logics, or at least mull over when we would most and least expect each logic to obtain.
One assumption of the practice turn that does have vast empirical support is the notion that much of what we do is habitual, automatic, and nonreflective. Pouliot mentions this literature in passing (pp. 24–26), but neurocognitive science deserves more attention, and not only because it establishes that we really do perceive, feel, and act before we think but because it offers what is rarely offered in social science: an empirically grounded set of microfoundations undergirding a fundamental assumption. Moreover, it offers methodological benefits, in that it provides scholars of the practice turn with testable implications for the ways that actors respond to the world. Neurocognitive research also might suggest some scope conditions for the operation of both the automatic and reflective parts of the brain, and so offer some preliminary purchase on disentangling the different logics, as well as their likely domains of operation.
Pouliot should be applauded for devoting an entire chapter to constructivist methodology. But he has a methodological problem not of his own making. The best, if not only, way to study the implicit knowhow that is the centerpiece of the practice turn is ethnography and/or participant observation. He rightly promises that he will concentrate on “what practitioners actually do when they interact on the diplomatic floor” (p. 7). But he cannot deliver on that promise because he had no access to the practices and deliberations he describes. While conducting 69 interviews in six countries and reading secondary sources is laudable, it really does not test the propositions that follow from the practice turn. It was impossible to get at the taken-for-granted doxa of diplomatic practitioners with these techniques.
Finally, beyond the theoretical advances Pouliot has made in this text, he has also offered a unique interpretation of the relationship among NATO, the United States, and Russia after the Cold War. In short, he argues that the Soviet Union and the West were out of phase because their respective habitus were moving in two different directions. While the West in the 1990s and beyond was increasingly emphasizing the importance of domestic democratic governance as a criterion for being a legitimate player in international politics, Russia, after 1992 at least, increasingly understood the world in Realpolitik terms. The creeping expansion of NATO and the European Union to the East, understood in the East as the natural progress of democratization and liberalism, was understood in Moscow as continuing efforts to squeeze them out of Europe.
It is unclear, however, whether the logic of practice was necessary to yield these empirical findings. The evidence Pouliot presents certainly supports his narrative of events, but absent a more systematic consideration of alternative accounts, it is very hard to know whether other approaches might have written the same story.
Nevertheless, I would say that Pouliot has written one of the first words in IR's practice turn. In so doing, he has raised more than a few thorny issues, theoretical, methodological, and empirical, that will doubtless be an impetus for a broader discussion in the field.
