New publication: Seeing Style by Niklas Woermann
“Seeing Style: How Style Orients Phenopractices across Action, Media, Space, and Time”
Niklas Woermann (University of Southern Denmark)
How do media practices shape our perception and interaction? Niklas Woermann, 2021 Mercator Fellow at the CRC, explores this question in his book Seeing Style.
About the Book
Based on an ethnographic study of the freeskiing subculture, the book develops a theory of phenopractices – embodied practices of the perception and expression of style. By combining approaches from phenomenology, cultural sociology and media research, Woermann provides new impulses on the role of visual order in social practices. An exciting read for anyone concerned with media, practices and cultural perception!
Editoral text:
“How do social practices prefigure experiences, and how does embodied experience organize the performance of practices? This book suggests that the classic concept of style offers a fresh answer to the question how doings and sayings are linked into practice bundles.
Based on a rich ethnographic study of the visual practices of the German-speaking freeskiing subculture, this work develops a theory of phenopractices, or embodied cultural practices dedicated to apprehending and expressing style. Focusing on the visual dimension, it extends the thought of Garfinkel and Schatzki using recent insights from science and technology studies and research at the intersection of neuroscience and phenomenology. This offers a new perspective on fundamental practice-theoretical questions about the nature of practice elements, social order in the context of rules and regularity, or action and practical intelligibility.
Each chapter discusses and develops foundational concepts such as time, space, action, emotion, or perception based on an analysis of freeskiing practices such as planning a route in the backcountry, testing a new ski model, or judging freestyle contests. The central argument is that cultural styles of conduct are not only symbolic structures, but a functional resource which organizes situational intelligibility and thus enables social order based on aligned and managed embodied routines. Because the stabilization, dissemination, and evolution of such styles happens via different media, practice change is primarily influenced by media rather than symbolic, rational, or functional needs or ends.
A rich ethnography and provocative theoretical argument of interest to anyone working on contemporary practice thought, advancing phenomenology, the sociology of vision, lifestyle sports, media, or practice evolution.”
Niklas Woermann is Head of Studies and Associate Professor at the Department of Marketing and Management at SDU Business School at the University of Southern Denmark. He was appointed Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago in 2018 and 2021 Mercator Fellow in the CRC 11877 “Media of Cooperation” at the University of Siegen and is associated with Project B08 – Agentic Media: Formations of Semi-Autonomy. His research focuses how technology shapes consumer experience, services, and interactions. Multidisciplinary in his education, research and outlook, Niklas has published his work in outlets such as the Journal of Consumer Research, Marketing Theory and American Behavioural Scientist, as well as key publishers in sociology. Niklas, a distinguished marketing and sociology scholar, served on editorial boards, won the “Outstanding Reviewer Award” at JCR, and reviewed for the ERC. He received the “Sidney J. Levy Award” and a “Swiss National Research Foundation” scholarship.
The “Beiträge zur Praxeologie / Contributions to Praxeology” aim to place practice above all other explanatory variables and to gain, clarify or correct the basic theoretical concepts from this pre-ordering. Both the works of Wittgenstein and those of Schütz and Garfinkel refer to a common Central European genealogy of “praxeology”, which has, however, remained largely unknown to this day. The series therefore aims to develop in three directions: through philosophical theoretical work, through empirical contributions to theory formation and through contributions to the revision of the history of science.