Microsoft Word Bueger isa 2007 Seven ways of studying ir draft doc

Practice 
Practice Rouse conceives in a way similar as 
pragmatism
and 
symbolic interactionism
have done. 
Practices are patterns of activity in response to a situation. Thus, practices are here understood in 
a non-representational way. They are not understood as the concrete doings of human agents by 
which agents created meanings, but as the meaningful situations by which doings are meaningful. 
As Rouse (1996:38, my emphasis) puts this, “meaningful patterns are not bestowed 
on
the world 
by
agents or their shared forms of life, but 
emerge from
patterns of interaction 
within
the world”. 
Practices are dynamic because patterns only exist by being continuously reproduced. Coherence 
and continuity of practice hence depends on the coordination work of multiple persons and 
things and the continuous maintenance of it. Such maintenance work is incredible hard work in 
the case of scientific practice, as scientists operate in very different environments (local contexts). 
Hence there is room for considerable slippage in the ongoing reconstruction the ‘same’ scientific 
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Although some doubts needs to be raised, if Adler has not misunderstood this concept by stressing the 
coherence of communities, over their network, entangled character. If the social is constituted by a 
meshed, intertwined plurality of communities organized around one practice, how can there be anything 
like an ‘epistemic community’ with shared values, beliefs and common policy project? This problem might 
however be well a problem of Wengger’s account as he continues to use the problematic term 
‘community’. 

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C. Büger – Seven ways of studying IR 
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practice, practices are interpreted very differently, and sometimes the pattern even breaks down
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. 
Scientific practice thus is catched in a continual tension between significance and incoherence. 
Scientists manage this tension by what Rouse calls “the narrative reconstruction of science”.
Narrative 
By narrative Rouse does not understand the literary form (a story with a beginning and an end), 
but “a way of comprehending the temporality of one’s own actions in their very enactment” (27). 
Scientific practices and achievements are intelligible if they have a place within enacted narratives 
that constitute a developing field of knowledge, and they are important to the extent that they 
develop or transform these narratives (170). The appeal of such an understanding of scientific 
practice as narrative reconstruction lies for Rouse in being an alternative to standard view that 
scientific work “becomes intelligible and important against a background of a research 
community’s shared belief and desires”. Such a view is not plausible as it overstretches 
coherence, hence do not consider the interplay between significance and incoherence and cannot 
cope with situations in which scientific practice transforms a community’s prior commitments or 
changes what counts as the relevant scientific community. Instead of what constitutes a scientific 
community, what is its history and future is frequently at stake.
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What is hence in common 
among researchers “is a field of interpretative conflict rather than any uncontested commitments 
about beliefs, values, standards, or meanings” (172). The future and the past become intertwined 
in these constitutive conflicts. “Conflicts of over what is to be the future course of research in 
the field […] are simultaneously conflicts over how to interpret its past.” (172). To engage in one 
research project rather than another is to (attempt to) reconfigure the story that would make 
sense of that project within its historical situation. With similarities to Actor-Network Theory 
Rouse also speaks of narratives as “epistemic alignments”: “Skills, models, concepts, and 
statements become informative about their objects only when other people and things interact in 
constructive alignment with them” (27).