Fermenting Fish: Innovation in Practice

In the previous chapter, I sought to provide an introduction and over-view of the case that I investigated, so that the following more detailed descriptions would be easier to comprehend. Also in the previous chapter, I situated the case study within a larger set of interconnected networks that together form what are often referred to as industries, structures, infrastructures, political discourses and institutions and markets. I would not agree that this is the ‘context’ of the case study as it is often described. Rather, it should be understood as an attempt at ‘stretching’ the networks beyond what is common within actor-network theory, in order to describe how local practices interact and become intertwined with other practices, sometimes due to their need for simple coordination or for close collaboration across domains, and sometimes in their collaboration towards forming and distributing new practices to the extent that Practice (with a capital P), or what we might call ‘macro-practice’, emerges. Examples of the latter could be the emergence of a new profession, a new category of products or new constellations of users creating a new ‘market’. Here, I am arguing, along with a number of process and practice theorists (e.g., Latour, 1999b; Law, 2004; Pickering, 1995; Araujo, 1998; Hernes, 2007), that what is global is built from interconnecting local practices and processes.