Neo-institutional theory has become a dominant guide in the study of legitimacy and normativity in the social sciences. Practice theories have only recently garnered attention as an alternative way of treating normativity through a renewed interest in social practices. While the foci of these approaches vary, most obviously by the kind of studies each inspire, both conceptualize the issue of normativity as a worthwhile point of inquiry. At the heart of each lies a concern for the question of why people act as they do, hinting at the necessity to understand socially appropriate ways of behaving in order to answer such a question. This commonality is seldom explicitly touched upon, and neither have recent appeals to use practice theory or recent developments in the study of neo-institutional theory seriously worked on bridging potential lines of inquiry. The purpose of this paper is to touch upon the issue of how a concern for practices and institutions, as understood by practice theory and neo-institutional theory, have the potential to provide ways of studying the social that expand each into possibilities in a shared research direction.