Before exploring arithmetic practice in the supermarket it may be useful to present a primer of dialectical percepts and examples to give more precise meaning to the proposition that practice is constituted in a dialectical relation between persons acting and the settings of their activity. The task is a very general one, for I assume that social processes of all kinds are dialectical in character. This implies first that while the focus is clearly on the everyday activity of persons acting in setting, the properties ascribed to it must be consistent with the properties of a general dialectical theory of social order of which practice is a part. Secondly, conceived in dialectical terms, central aspects of activity include its self-generative and open character, whose structuring grows (dialectically) out of conflict. Dialectical theory describes self-generative processes in formal terms as thesis, antithesis and synthesis. These apply directly at the level of sociocultural order and its open working out over time. But “conflict” rather than “contradiction” seems a more appropriate term for the multiplicity of experienced disjunctions of social practice which motivate activity (see Giddens 1979, chapter 4).

Dialectical theory has the capacity to avoid certain theoretical entanglements that could well prevent the working out of a theory of practice. One of these is an idealism which leads to the conclusion that to understand cognition and the social world one need only study cognition.