Explaining Showering: a Discussion of the Material, Conventional, and Temporal Dimensions of Practice

This article considers the increasing popularity of showering in the UK. We use this case as a means of exploring some of the dimensions and dynamics of everyday practice. Drawing upon a range of documentary evidence, we begin by sketching three possible explanations for the current constitution of showering as a private, increasingly resource-intensive routine. We begin by reviewing the changing infrastructural, technological, rhetorical and moral positioning of showering. We then consider how the multiple and contingent constituents of showering are arranged and re-arranged in and through the practice itself. In taking this approach, we address a number of more abstract questions about the relation between practices, technologies and infrastructures and about what these relationships mean for the fixity and fluidity of ordinary routines and for associated patterns of consumption. The result is a method that allows us to analyze the ways in which material cultures and conventions are reproduced and transformed. This has practical implications for those seeking to contain the environmental consequences of resource-intensive practices.Xx

The Social Ordering of an Everyday Practice:The Case of Laundry

Sociological contributions to debates surrounding sustainable consumption have presented strong critiques of methodological individualism and technological determinism. Drawing from a range of sociological insights from the fields of consumption, everyday life and science and technology studies, these critiques emphasize the recursivity between (a) everyday performances and object use, and (b) how those performances are socially ordered. Empirical studies have, however, been criticized as being descriptive of micro-level phenomena to the exclusion of explanations of processes of reproduction or change. Developing a methodological approach that examines sequences of activities this article explores different forms of coordination (activity, inter-personal and material) that condition the temporal and material flows of laundry practices. Doing so produces an analysis that de-centres technologies and individual performances, allowing for the identification of mechanisms that order the practice of laundry at the personal, household and societal levels. These are: social relations; cultural conventions; domestic materiality; and institutionalized temporal rhythms. In conclusion, we suggest that addressing such mechanisms offers fruitful avenues for fostering more sustainable consumption, compared to dominant approaches that are founded within ‘deficit models’ of action.</jats:p

Interventions in practice:reframing policy approaches to consumer behaviour

This report introduces a novel approach to sustainability policy— a practice perspective. We argue that social practices are a better target of intervention for sustainability policy than ‘behaviour’, ‘choice’ or technical innovation alone. Understanding the dynamics of practices offers us a window into transitions towards sustainability. We consume resources as part of the practices that make up everyday life—showering, doing the laundry, cooking or driving—what we might call inconspicuous or ordinary consumption. While we may have degrees of choice in how we perform these practices, access to resources (economic, social, cultural), norms of social interaction, as well as infrastructures and institutional organisation constrain our autonomy. Practices are social phenomena—their performance entails the reproduction of cultural meanings, socially learnt skills and common tools, technologies and products. This shift of perspective places practices, not individuals or infrastructures, at the centre stage of analysis. Taking practices as the unit of analysis moves policy beyond false alternatives—beyond individual or social, behaviour or infrastructure. A practice perspective re-frames the question from “How do we change individuals’ behaviours to be more sustainable?” to “How do we shift everyday practices to be more sustainable?” After all, ‘behaviours’ are largely individuals’ performances of social practices