‘Practice? It’s a Matter of Taste!’ Management Learning,

Abstract: This paper aims to enhance our understanding of how practice is socially sustained, learnt and constantly refined by arguing that practice is much more than a set of activities – it involves, beside instrumental and ethical judgements, taste and appraisal. Taste is a sense of what is aesthetically fitting within a community of practitioners, a preference for ‘the way we do things together’. Taste is based on the subjective attachment to the object of practice and is learnt and taught as part of becoming a practitioner and it is performed as a collective, situated activity within a practice. The elaboration of taste and the refining of practice within a community involves taste-making, which is based on ‘sensible knowledge’ and the continual negotiation of aesthetic categories. The paper examines how in a variety of practices taste-making occurs through three processes: sharing a vocabulary for appraisal, crafting identities within epistemic communities, and refining performances.