shaping that recurrence (e.g., Tomm et al., 2014). In zooming out to research socio-material practices we alternate between considering their recurrence within assemblages and/or networks. The notion of assemblages comes from Deleuze and Guattari (1988) and addresses conditions under which phenomena like practices commingle and develop together. Assemblages have been used to conceptualize emergent health conditions (e.g., Duff, 2013) and political developments (Massumi, 2015). They function as ecologies inside which unpredictable developments emerge, even go viral, in ways unique yet consistent with their interactive elements. It took a particular convergence of factors like Facebook and Twitter, a cultural disgust for political prevarication, online editing tools, etc., for today's creative political meme practices to develop on the Internet.
Networks acquire a procedural familiarity enabling one interaction or practice to foretell the need to engage in a next familiar practice. This is a view some associate with cybernetics (Bateson, 1972) and entails tacitly knowing what to do next in a patterned sequence. However, there is usually an interpretive interactional gap that any practice stitches together (Latour, 2013) – a gap humans fill with their doings, sayings, and relatings. Often such gaps acquire a recurring sense that Guattari (1995) referred to as ‘machinic’. The familiarity and predictability of recurring practices inside networks makes them interesting and potentially liberating targets of critical reflection and reflexive inquiry.
Reflexive Research of Socio-Material Practices
One aspect of reflexivity is that questions, whether asked in therapy or in research, are anything but neutral data-retrieval procedures. Karl Tomm's seminal writing on reflexive questions in therapy (1987) paralleled how action researchers (e.g., Heron and Reason, 1997) saw questions potentially inviting consideration and enactment of new social realities – they could be ‘future-forming’ in Ken Gergen's language (2015). Furthermore, reflexivity has an ethnomethodological meaning (e.g., Heritage, 1984) shared by process-oriented philosophers (Nail, 2019; Stengers, 2011); that posthuman life is normally in flux. Socio-material practices are ways humans responsively try to stabilize or bring familiar order to that flux. Thus, we sought to research socio-material practices without reifying them, and to instead find generative ways to identify and represent them.
Clarke's Situational Analysis (SA; Clarke et al., 2017) offers mapping procedures useful for zooming in and out to better understand socio-material practices. Macroscopically, John Shotter (2006) referred to ‘responsive orders’ that we see as stitched together by socio-material practices tacitly perpetuated in assemblages and networks of practice. Zooming in helps us look at specific socio-material practices, to revisit alternative sense-making that had become closed up or made seamless by such practices (Schegloff and Sacks, 1972). SA maps, in other words give us lenses for considering the actual and the possible.
Researching Excessive Behaviours
Excessive behaviours are common, practised excessively and tacitly, and often experienced as unacceptably familiar, as ‘addictions’. We draw from examples of inquiries into excessive behaviours (Mudry, 2016), specifically gambling, to demonstrate how we have researched socio-material practices. We aim to show how to reflexively probe and uncouple the ways socio-material practices are tacitly reproduced to create and sustain gambling, so that individuals can better change practices they deem are no longer acceptable.
In Tanya's original study, participants who self-identified as feeling ‘stuck’ in, or having concerns related to eating, Internet use, or gambling were interviewed about specific practices they deemed important to sustaining or interrupting these concerns. Nicolini's (2012) orienting questions were used to attend to the doings, sayings (beliefs, ideas, talk within the practice), timing, tempo, embodied choreography, objects, and place (see Mudry, 2016 for details). Through analysing interview transcripts, we zoomed out to examine participants’ social worlds and arenas to consider which conditions and practices were most relevant or salient to our inquiry, while zooming in to see how unacceptably familiar practices are sustained. For Nicolini (2012) ‘zooming in and out is achieved by switching theoretical lenses, the result is both a representation of practice and an exercise of diffraction whereby understanding is enriched through reading the results of one form of theorization through another’ (p. 219). Here we use data from an interview with one participant, ‘Tom Jackson’ (his chosen pseudonym), to illustrate how researchers might examine socio-material practices by zooming out and zooming in, through using lenses afforded by the earlier mentioned assemblage and network approaches.
Social Worlds Arena
Drawing from Situational Analysis (SA, Clarke, 2005) we created our version of a social worlds/arenas map to depict gambling as a situation pertaining to individuals (Tom Jackson in particular) who gamble. In our social worlds/arenas map (Figure 10.1), we portray the actors engage in this situated form of coordinated action (gambling), as social worlds, or meso-level arena(s) where these actors have something at stake. While not exhaustive, four broad social arenas were identified in the map as salient to the situation of gambling: Mental Health and Addiction; Political; Personal and Community; and Gambling Industry. Within each of these arenas are actors that have a stake in gambling, some of which are in tension with others. For example, policy makers, research bodies, funding bodies, and government are situated and motivated within all four arenas. Tom Jackson lives in a jurisdiction where gambling is legal and regulated by the government, which receives tax revenues from gambling to fund service providers and treatment facilities for ‘problematic gamblers’. In seeking profit, the casino and gambling industry design casinos and games accordingly, to accelerate play, extend duration, and increase spending (Schüll, 2012). Such goals are in direct conflict with policy makers advocating for responsible gambling, who also benefit from the profits of the casino and gambling industry. Those who gamble (i.e., Tom Jackson), do so within a tension between the government's role to help and protect their citizens, while profiting from the gambling revenues through taxation.
Figure 10.1 Gambling social worlds/arena map
Depending upon the participant, different social arenas may play a larger or smaller role in (i.e., have claims on) the practices in which they engage. If the participant uses mental health or addiction services, the mental health and addiction arena may be more relevant to investigate. If the participant gambles during work hours, or gambling harms their social relationships, the personal or community arenas (i.e., workplace, social relationships) may be relevant for the inquiry. Social worlds are not fixed, and the porosity of social worlds/arenas are depicted through the use of dotted lines. Tom Jackson's social worlds involved formal counselling to reduce gambling, as well as Gambler's Anonymous (peer-based 12-step recovery), both of which sit within the mental health and addiction arena and have stakes in him reducing gambling. Conversely, the casinos and developers of video lottery terminals (VLTs) (gambling industry arena) have a stake in increasing Tom Jackson's gambling through technology and environment to increase play. Therein lies an important tension between Tom Jackson's relevant social worlds, each with opposing stakes in him continuing to gamble. When Tom Jackson is engaged in practices that sustain excessive gambling, he does so within and as part of these social worlds.
In light of our interest in socio-material practices, we focused on practices involving the Personal and Community (workplace, family, friends) and Gambling Industry (i.e., casinos and VLTs) social worlds.
Zooming Out: Assemblages of Practices
We used an assemblage approach to attend to and identify the conditions and influences under which situated elements commingle and develop into socio-material practices, all occurring within and as part of social worlds. Given Tom Jackson's social worlds, and our interview with him, we identified the following conditions and influences that likely converged
