We explain what a social practice is, its study and various examples. Also, what types of social practices exist.
What is a social practice?
In psychology Y sociology, is called social practices to the different activities that are carried out in a daily, constant and repeated way within a community determined. They can be jobs, exercises, traditions, practices or procedures that serve as an interconnection element between complex social entities, which can range from urban tribes and lifestyles, to societies whole.
Social practices are a form of nexus between the individual and the community, and differ from one culture to another, operating as implicit agreements on how to do things. In general, they are considered the fruit of tradition and the passage of weather historical, since the same community varies its social practices as its notions of morality, society, identity, etc.
However, the adequacy or inadequacy to the social practices of a given community at a given time usually brings with it acceptance or rejection, since they have to do directly with the social structure: the set of rules and tacit and traditional principles that validate certain attitudes and procedures, while overriding others, always depending on a context.
For example, dress codes are a type of social practice. It is not considered appropriate for a man to go to work in shorts and with a naked torso, which it would be if that same individual was, surrounded by his same co-workers, on a beach on vacation. Another example is that these codes allow a man to go bare-chested on the beach, while a woman generally does not.
Thus, social practices have been described by scholars such as the French Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) or his compatriot Michel Foucault (1926-1984) as part of the repressive apparatus of society, through which it legitimizes certain behaviors and disqualifies others, thus imposing a specific order that grants and constrains freedoms. This order, very often, has to do with the values traditional of society.
In this way, when carrying out certain social practices, the presence of certain values in social structures can be strengthened or weakened. For example: the practice of discrimination racial or sexual in the allocation of quotas of can labor, educational or political, will generate a society in which racial or sexual discrimination is more pronounced and accepted as the "norm", and therefore, imposed by the majority on individuals.
But the mechanism also works in the opposite direction: as certain stereotypes Discriminatory social conditions are broken, a more egalitarian social structure becomes more feasible, since the very notion of what is "common", "normal" and "acceptable" is altered.
Types of social practices
There are as many social practices as there are different fields of daily life, but in general they can be classified as:
- Linguistics: those that have to do with the use of language, with the ways of speaking (especially with the "cultured" language and / or with the most valued in the different environments of power) and with the phrases and expressions that are transmitted from generation to generation.
- Religious: those that have to do with the practice of a religion determined or several of them, and that are directly linked to certain forms of morality and / or ethnic identity. Furthermore, religious practices often underlie complex philosophical traditions, of which we barely perceive the surface on a daily basis.
- Cultural: those that involve tradition, celebrations, folklore, national stories and group identity. In general, it refers to the practices that reinforce the idea of belonging to a cultural group and tradition, that is, to a particular history. The media they are important players in this regard.
- Sports: those that are carried out around a physical activity, especially if it has spectacular dimensions, as is the case of football in many European countries or of European cultural affiliation.
- Technological: those that are carried out from the scenarios proposed by the innovation technology, and that are especially relevant in the framework of the globalized and computerized society: social networks, the community 2.0 and other similar scenarios, allowed by the new technologies of information and communications.