This paper aims at making more explicit the notion of “change in practices” by proving wrong the common assumption that fieldwork experience helps clarify such fundamental assumptions as the understanding of change. Fieldwork descriptions imply an interpretation of the notion of change, but it does not tell us what is change. To prove our case, we use strategy as practice (SAP) as a reference to explore the notion of change: we use rich data and observed interactions in the field to describe changing practices and we attempt to capture all the relevant dimensions of change. We conclude that, when using an SAP approach, the notion of change is implicitly used, making it an inconsistent object of the world as can be found in empiricism and modal realist ontologies.
