Social Practices, Intervention and Sustainability

Beyond behaviour change

Yolande Strengers, Cecily Maller, Yolande Strengers, Cecily Maller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317810797
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Volkswirtschaftslehre
• Subtopic: Entwicklungsökonomie

In an era of dramatic environmental change, social change is desperately needed to curb burgeoning consumption. Many calls to action have focused on individual behaviour or technological innovation, with relative silence from the social sciences on other modes and methods of intervening in social life. This book shows how we can go beyond behaviour change in the pursuit of sustainability.

Inspired by the 'practice turn' in consumption studies, this interdisciplinary book looks through the lens of social practice theory to explore important and timely questions about how to intervene in social life. It discusses a range of applied sustainability topics including energy consumption, housing provision, water demand, transport, climate change, curbside recycling and smart grids, seeking to redefine what intervention is, how it happens, and who or what can intervene to address the growing list of environmental calamities facing contemporary societies. These issues are explored through a range of specific case studies from Australia, the UK and the US, providing theoretical insights that are of international relevance.

The book will be of interest to researchers and students in the fields of sociology, consumption studies, environmental studies, geography, and science and technology studies, as well as policy makers and practitioners seeking to intervene in social life for sustainability.

Part I Interventions in theory

DOI: 10.4324/9781315816494-2

1 Practices, governance and sustainability

Theodore Schatzki

DOI: 10.4324/9781315816494-3

Part one of this book offers theoretical reflections on the topic of how to govern, steer, or otherwise intervene in practices for the sake of fostering sustainability. The present chapter tackles this task directly. It elaborates an intuitive notion of governance and embeds this notion in a practice-theoretical social ontology. The resulting analysis of governance as a denizen of the plenum of practices and materiality then sets the terms for considering how society might be induced, through governance, to develop more sustainably.

The chapter is organised as follows. Section one depicts social life as transpiring in a plenum of practices and material arrangements. Section two conceptualises governance as intentional shaping and directing, and explains what shaping and directing amount to as features of this plenum. The final section considers how the US, through governance so analysed, might, in general, be induced to develop more sustainably. Emphasis is placed on the role of fronts of distributed governance.

The plenum of social life

Elsewhere (Schatzki 2002) I have argued that social life, or human coexistence, transpires as part of bundles of practices and material arrangements. By ‘practices’ I mean open spatial-temporal nexuses of doings and sayings that are linked by arrays of understandings, rules and end-task-action combinations (also emotions and even moods) that are acceptable for or enjoined of participants. Examples are cooking practices, protest practices, religious practices, planning practices, mining practices, practices of democratic deliberation, and the like. By ‘material arrangements’ I mean collections of people, artefacts, organisms and things that are linked by such matters as contiguity, causality and physical connections. As the expression ‘bundles’ suggests, practices and arrangements connect. While practices effect, use, react to, bestow meaning on and are inseparable from the entities that compose linked arrangements, arrangements induce, channel, prefigure and are essential to practices. To say that social life transpires as part of practice-arrangement bundles is to say that human lives hang together through features and components of bundled practices and arrangements.

Not only are practices and arrangements linked to each other, but practices connect to other practices, just as arrangements connect to other arrangements. Prominent examples of relations among practices are shared ends or activities and chains of action. The practices that cross in an environmental activist organisation, for example, share ends and are linked by numerous chains of communication and coordination. Prominent examples of relations among arrangements, meanwhile, are intermediate physical connections (for example, telecommunication lines between offices) and common elements (for example, a large table in the activist organisation’s office, which is common to the arrangement bundled with meeting practices and to those arrangements that help make up preparations for a demonstration). As the latter example suggests, practices and arrangements that link through relations of the just mentioned sorts can belong to the same or different bundles. Another example of the latter possibility is the practices of an activist organisation and those of a litigation-pursuing environmental organisation sharing ends and enjoining orchestrated projects, while the offices that these organisations occupy are linked through the physical connections of electronic communication systems. Like practices and arrangements, in other words, bundles connect and form larger constellations. The just mentioned environmental organisations form a larger constellation, as do these organisations together with the bundles that constitute city governments and law courts. At bottom, however, constellations are nothing but linked practices and arrangements. They are simply larger nexuses of practices and arrangements, larger shapes or patterns that appear in the total plenum of linked practices and arrangements.

Linked bundles and constellations form a plenum, an immense maze of interconnected practices and arrangements (see Schatzki, forthcoming). Particularly dense thickets of relations of the above sorts define bundles, and concentrations of relations among such bundles mark constellations. The relations that link the practices and arrangements of the environmental activist organisation, for instance, are thicker than the sets of relations between this bundle and the bundles that compose other environmental organisations, government agencies and industrial firms. All social phenomena, however, are slices or sets of features of the plenum of practices and arrangements, differing simply in the continuity, density and spatial-temporal spread and form of the practices, arrangements and relations that compose them. It follows that all social phenomena – large or small, fleeting or persistent, micro or macro – have the same basic ingredients and constitution.

Because social phenomena transpire in a plenum of bundled practices and arrangements, it is fruitful to think of social life as laid out on a single plane or level. Pace some of the theorists who highlight contrasts between micro and macro or global and local, social life does not embrace multiple levels. The idea that social phenomena lie on a single level is contained in the thesis that all such phenomena have the same basic composition. This idea also implies, among other things, that it is misleading to characterise the relationship between governors and governed – or between policy and planning, on the one hand and the social phenomena they aim to manipulate or affect on the other – as top-down (or bottom-up). More revealing are characterisations such as here-there or here and all around. The flatness of social life suggests, further, that an important feature of social phenomena is scale. Scale is the continuum between small and large and is a matter of lesser and greater spatial-temporal spread. Although all social phenomena are slices or features of bundles, they differ in the spatial-temporal spread of their constituent practices, arrangements, features and relations.

Because social phenomena transpire in a plenum of linked practices and arrangements, social change consists of changes in bundles – in the practices, arrangements and relations that compose bundles. This composition implies that the emergence, maintenance and dissolution of bundles are central to the dynamics of social life. I do not believe, furthermore, that any one mechanism, process, theory or dynamic template does justice to the variety of ways that bundles emerge, persist and dissolve. Bundles are too varied, and too tied to particulars, circumstances and happenstance, for this reduction to succeed.

Another dimension of social change is what I call the ‘uneven front’ of change. As I have elucidated in a recent book (2010), human activity is indeterminate. What this means is that it is only with the happening of the activity that what a person does and why – the end and purposes she pursues and what motivates her – become definite. The past does not determine the present. Rather, each present activity is self-organising, itself responsible for what in the past determines it (cf. Mead 1980). As a result, each present activity is potentially a new start, potentially itself a change or the beginning of change. Whether present activity is a new start depends on what is done and how others react to this. Of course, most activities perpetuate the past. Nonetheless, shifts and immediately significant or eventually far-reaching changes can occur or begin anytime. Novelty and innovation can also burst forth at any moment and set social affairs heading in a new direction. It is wrong, consequently, to think (as many theorists do) that some sort of breakdown or dislocation – some break in the flow or routine advance of ongoing life – is required for change to begin or take place. Changes of all kinds constantly befall practices, arrangements and bundles, which undergo halting, irregular, not necessarily infrequent, and sometimes rapid development. This is the labile, uneven front of change that marks bundles and constellations over time, often constituting gradual, even predictable developments and sometimes amounting to precipitous, unpredictable collapses or shifts. Which small or fleeting social phenomena exist constantly evolves, and larger social phenomena such as governments, cultures and economies, even if they persist, embrace evolving mixes of stability and change.

Notice that I am not claiming that social life is in constant flux. At any moment some elements of society change, while many more stay the same. What I am saying is that small or local changes always occur, that which bits change shifts, that big changes include and arise from small ones, that whether small changes lead to bigger ones partly depends on how people and practices respond, and that every activity is thus potentially a beginning. According to pace thinkers such as Bennett (2009) and Connolly (2011), society does not become or flow. It is, instead, an evolving mosaic of continuity and change.

Latour’s ontology challenges the idea of an uneven front of change, and considering his ideas leads to further ideas about social change relevant to section three of this chapter. Latour (for example, 2005) holds that social entities are associations. Associations are held together and brought about by particular ties among associated entities (mediators), not by any encompassing structure or system. It follows that scale is produced: that is, that largeness arises from actions and events that take place in specific associations. According to Latour, moreover, the actions that are responsible for larger social entities are concentrated in those associations – more specifically, in those sites (local associations where interactions occur) that are linked with many others. Examples of such sites are provost offices, corporate boardrooms, police headquarters and government budget suites. Such sites, which can be dubbed ‘power centres’, anchor large phenomena. Scale is achieved largely through actions performed at power centres because large phenomena exist only when many sites are linked, and many sites are linked largely via actions performed in these centres.

I concur that largeness is produced and that bundles that are densely connected with others make a difference to the advance of social life. The complexes of relations that mark large phenomena, however, need not centre on or be anchored in bundles that are connected to many others. A university, for instance, does not develop primarily dependent on or under the aegis of administrative and financial offices, even less under the direction of any external office. Such offices certainly make a difference, but what happens at a university – including in these offices – equally depends on what goes on in many other bundles. This example contrasts with military institutions, on the one side, and popular political movements on the other, whose existence and development depend more or less (respectively) on the activities of recognised power centres. In all three cases, however, whatever success power centres enjoy in directing social affairs utterly depends, as Hegel (1976) famously observed, on actions performed in the directed bundles. Sometimes, moreover, cascading actions sweep through social phenomena and the power centres that help compose or determine them, leaving behind transformed phenomena. Examples are housing market collapses and sudden dislocations of longstanding political arrangements. In these cases, power centres are likely to be involved in what happens but also to be ‘carried along’ by the cascading streams.

In short, nexuses of practices and arrangements are contingent, embrace a myriad of relations, and constantly, if unevenly and only infrequently rapidly, evolve. Overall change rests on developments along the entire uneven front of change, not just on the actions taken in power centres.

Finally, I wrote above that social phenomena are slices or sets of features of bundles and constellations. Taking seriously the idea that social entities have such a composition entails two things: (1) that investigations of these entities be examinations of bundles and constellations and (2) that explanations of such entities be couched in concepts that denote or explicitly capture aspects of the practice-arrangement plenum. Advocating the ontology while failing to respect these implications is to pay lip service to it. Advocates of this ontology should, accordingly, think of their objects not as groups, structures, institutions or systems, but as (features and slices of) practice-arrangement nexuses. The phenomena that they study, discuss and cite should thus include practices, practice organisations, interrelated timespaces, objective space-times, arrangements, bundles, constellations and relations among practices, among arrangements, between practices and arrangements and among bundles (for discussion of these phenomena, see Schatzki 2010 and forthcoming). This list is expandable and potentially includes all aspects of life within bundles (for example, interactions, knowledge, power, experience). As my remarks about change suggest, moreover, investigators should anticipate the need to delve into the details of such matters.

Governance

The notion of governance has become familiar of late. In some political science or policy study circles (see Hajer and Wagenaar 2003) it captures both the proliferation of governing agencies in social life and the demise of the state as the (alleged) master governing agency in society: ‘The essence of governance is its focus on governing mechanisms which do not rest on recourse to the authority and sanctions of government’ (Stoker 1998: 17). Discussions of governance have sometimes focused on partnerships or connections among institutions, organisations and stakeholders, the increasing frequency of which is a feature of contemporary societies.

This sense of governance will play a role in my discussion of sustainability. I want, however, both to cast the concept of governance more broadly and to locate the phenomenon in the details of social life. Governance, as I understand it, is intentional shaping, directing or influencing. This is what both governments and the networks of organisations that have partially supplanted them have always sought to achieve. It is also the intentional form of intervention, the subject matter of this book. Governance is not, however, found only in those institutions and offices that inherently possess or are expressly given the task of governance. It is found in families, ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Global Institutions
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Epigraph
• Table Of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction Social practices, intervention and sustainability: beyond behaviour change
• PART I Interventions in theory
• PART II Intervening through policies and programmes
• PART III Innovative interventions
• Conclusion
• Index