Wouldn’t you know it! The same week that my JASIST article (“The Production of Practice Theories”) goes online, I find that one last thing that I would have loved to include: Martha Feldman and Wanda Orlikowski have an article called “Practicing Theory and Theorizing Practice” that will appear in a forthcoming issue of Organization Science (which I haven’t seen except as a rough draft on Martha Feldman’s website, and it’s too late to add anything to my lengthy lit review anyway, though I did cite Orlikowski’s excellent earlier work on practice.) Oh, well, at least I didn’t use their title for my article!!
Reading Bill Crowley’s Spanning the Theory-Practice Divide in Library & Information Science, which has garnered surprisingly few citations in the five years since its publication by Scarecrow (four book reviews were all I could find in Web of Science). His points about the critical importance of theory to faculty careers and the critical lack of importance of theory in library practice are well-taken, his “cultural pragmatism” oriented glossary of terms such as “intellectual predestination” is unusual, and his Levels 1, 2, and 3 of interaction in research on tacit knowledge are about to be very useful to me. I suspect that the chapter on “theory and revelation” may have put some people off (on both sides of this particular “fence”), but, again, since I’m one of the few people that I know of who is fascinated by things like the role of the mandatum in Catholic institutions, this was actually one of my favorite chapters. Crowley is obviously unafraid of taking on both sacred cows and shibboleths: this isn’t his tenure year!
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m working with some practice theories right now, notably Dorothea Orem’s self-care and self-care deficiency theoretical framework for nursing, which is well-developed and well-respected. I’ve seen some proposed additions, such as those that deal with patients who “self-neglect.” But I don’t think that anyone has thought about a place for, say, someone like engineer John Kanzius, who developed a new radio-wave treatment for cancer during his terminal illness from the same disease. Where on the “self-care” continuum do you place a “patient” who will probably be responsible for saving many lives after his death?
And a brilliant example of “practice-in-theory” is reflective practitioner par excellence Thomas Mann, the reference maven and fearless gadfly of the Library of Congress. His most recent paper, “What is Distinctive about the Library of Congress in Both its Collections and its Means of Access to Them And The Reasons LC Needs to Maintain Classified Shelving of Books Onsite, And A Way to Deal Effectively with the Problem of ‘Books on the Floor’” can be found at the Library of Congress Professional Guild website. While it’s not formally “published,” it most certainly is “diffusing” rapidly throughout the community of practice!
I haven’t mentioned my interest in “practice” for a while, but it’s continuing to strengthen as I work on my revised theory model, so I may be devoting some attention to it here. For instance, the Theory into Practice database is a very useful repository for learning theories, many of which are quite new to me. I especially like Kurt Van Lehn’s “Repair Theory,” as I can see multiple applications for it beyond the basic arithmetic domain in which it’s mostly been explored to date. For instance, in teaching citation styles, as the concept of “bug migration” (incomplete procedural knowledge applied to unfamiliar examples) seems to apply to that as well.
