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The Dynamics of Social Practice
Everyday life is defined and characterised by the rise, transformation and fall of social practices. Using terminology that is both accessible and sophisticated, this essential book guides the reader through a multi-level analysis of this dynamic. In working through core propositions about social practices and how they change the book is clear and accessible; real world examples, including the history of car driving, the emergence of frozen food, and the fate of hula hooping, bring abstract concepts to life and firmly ground them in empirical case-studies and new research. Demonstrating the relevance of social theory for public policy problems, the authors show that the everyday is the basis...
The Nexus of Practices
The Nexus of Practices: connections, constellations, practitioners brings leading theorists of practice together to provide a fresh set of theoretical impulses for the surge of practice-focused studies currently sweeping across the social disciplines. The book addresses key issues facing practice theory, expands practice theory’s conceptual repertoire, and explores new empirical terrain. With each intellectual move, it generates further opportunities for social research. More specifically, the book’s chapters offer new approaches to analysing connections within the nexus of practices, to exploring the dynamics and implications of the constellations that practices form, and to understandi...
Connecting Practices
Connecting Practices develops a distinctive method of conceptualising significant trends and global issues including environmental sustainability and inequalities in wealth and health, arguing that these are outcomes of the ways in which social practices interact and combine across space and time. Engaging with the question of how connections are made between practices and how past and present combinations make some futures more likely than others, this book brings practice theory to bear on large problems in society. Richly illustrated with examples from the spreading of germs to the history of shipping containers, this powerful analysis of how societies hang together and how they change will appeal to scholars and students of sociology and social theory.
Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience
Shove maintains that habits are not just changing, but are changing in ways that imply escalating and standardizing patterns of consumption.
Sustainable Practices
Climate change is widely agreed to be one the greatest challenges facing society today. Mitigating and adapting to it is certain to require new ways of living. Thus far efforts to promote less resource-intensive habits and routines have centred on typically limited understandings of individual agency, choice and change. This book shows how much more the social sciences have to offer. The contributors to Sustainable Practices: Social Theory and Climate Change come from different disciplines – sociology, geography, economics and philosophy – but are alike in taking social theories of practice as a common point of reference. This volume explores questions which arise from this distinctive a...
The Sociology of Energy, Buildings and the Environment
Bringing the social sciences to the heart of environmental debate, this book demonstrates the relevance of sociological analysis for environmentally critical issues like energy consumption. Focusing on energy efficiency and the built environment, the authors take a critical look at the production and use of technical knowledge and energy-related expertise. Challenging the conventional assumptions of scientists and energy policy-makers, the book outlines a new role for social research and a new paradigm for environmental policy.
Time, Consumption and Everyday Life
Has material civilization spun out of control, becoming too fast for our own well-being and that of the planet? This book confronts these anxieties and examines the changing rhythms and temporal organization of everyday life. How do people handle hurriedness, burn-out and stress? Are slower forms of consumption viable? This volume brings together international experts from geography, sociology, history, anthropology and philosophy. In case studies covering the United States, Asia and Europe, contributors follow routines and rhythms, their emotional and political dynamics and show how they are anchored in material culture and everyday practice. Running themes of the book are questions of coordination and disruption; cycles and seasons; and the interplay between power and freedom, and between material and natural forces. The result is a volume that brings studies of practice, temporality and material culture together to open up a new intellectual agenda.
The Design of Everyday Life
How do common household items such as basic plastic house wares or high-tech digital cameras transform our daily lives? This title considers this question, from the design of products through to their use in the home. It looks at how everyday objects, ranging from screwdrivers to photo management software, are used on a practical level.
Energy Fables
Energy Fables: Challenging Ideas in the Energy Sector takes a fresh look at key terms and concepts around which energy research and policy are organised. Drawing on recent research in energy and transport studies, and combining this with concepts from sociology, economics, social theory and technology studies, the chapters in this collection review and challenge different aspects of received wisdom. Brief but critical introductions to classic notions like those of ‘energy efficiency’, ‘elasticity’, ‘energy services’ and the ‘energy trilemma’, together with discussions and analyses of well-worn phrases about ‘low hanging fruit’ and ‘keeping the lights on’, articulate aspects of the energy debate that are often taken for granted. In re-working these established themes and adding twists to familiar tales, the authors develop a repertoire of new ideas about the fundamentals of energy demand and carbon reduction. This book presents a valuable and thought-provoking resource for students, researchers and policy-makers interested in energy demand, politics and policy.
Conceptualising Demand
This book addresses fundamental questions about the very idea of demand: how is it constituted, how does it change and how might it be steered? Conceptualising Demand focuses on five core propositions: that demand is derived from social practices; that it is made and not simply met; that it is materially embedded and temporally unfolding; and that it is modulated through many forms of policy and governance. In working through these claims, the book weaves concepts from the sociology of consumption, science and technology studies, policy analyses and social theories of practice together with empirical cases and new research into such topics as the rise of refrigerated foods, the emergence of online shopping and the transformation of energy demanding services. This innovative book takes a fresh look at the very idea of demand, a concept that is often taken for granted, but that is vital for scholars and students of energy, mobility, climate change and consumption, and anyone interested in the subject.
