The Dynamics of Social Practice

Everyday Life and how it Changes

Elizabeth Shove, Mika Pantzar, Matt Watson

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780857020437, 9780857020420
• eBook ISBN: 9781446290033
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

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 of social transformation addressing questions such as:

• how do practices emerge, exist and die?
• what are the elements from which practices are made?
• how do practices recruit practitioners?
• how are elements, practices and the links between them generated, renewed and reproduced?

Precise, relevant and persuasive this book will inspire students and researchers from across the social sciences.

Elizabeth Shove is Professor of Sociology at Lancaster University. Mika Pantzar is Research Professor at the National Consumer Research Centre, Helsinki. Matt Watson is Lecturer in Social and Cultural Geography at University of Sheffield.

1

THE DYNAMICS OF SOCIAL PRACTICE

How do societies change? Why do they stay so much the same? Within the social sciences, contrasting theoretical traditions have grown up around these enduring concerns. The problem of understanding novelty and persistence is surely not new, but it is one to which this book brings a fresh approach. It does so by developing a series of concepts with which to capture the dynamic aspects of social practice.

Our opening contention is that theories of practice have as yet untapped potential for understanding change. Realizing their potential depends on developing a means of systematically exploring processes of transformation and stability within social practices and between them. This is the task to which most of the following chapters are devoted. Whilst this is an important exercise in its own right, it is of more than academic concern.

In showing how practices change and stay the same we hope to realize another also latent promise, which is for social theory to make a difference. We do not offer instant solutions but we contend that our analysis is of value in responding to complex challenges like those of climate change and obesity, and in addressing persistent patterns of inequality. Theories of practice have yet to make much impact on public policy but it seems obvious that if ‘the source of changed behaviour lies in the development of practices’ (Warde, 2005: 140), understanding their emergence, persistence and disappearance is of the essence. It also seems obvious that the reproduction and transformation of social practices has implications for patterns of consumption and for institutions and infrastructures associated with them. In the final chapter we argue that policy initiatives to promote more sustainable ways of life could and should be rooted in an understanding of the elements of which practices and systems of practice are formed, and of the connective tissue that holds them together.

The theoretical and practical significance of comprehending social change and stability is clear enough, but why do we need yet another book? What more is there to add to the many methods and perspectives already on offer? Detailed answers to these questions are woven through the chapters that follow, but the next few paragraphs give a sense of the position from which we begin, the resources on which we draw and the contribution we make to the project of understanding and analysing the dynamics of social practice.

For us, as for everyone else, methods of conceptualizing change reflect prior understandings of the relation between agency and structure. The idea that new social arrangements result from an accumulation of millions of individual decisions about how best to act is enormously influential in everyday discourse, in contemporary policy-making and in certain areas of social science. This idea, which carries with it multiple assumptions about human agency and choice, resonates with common sense theories as to why people do what they do. It also fits comfortably with the notion that behaviours are driven by beliefs and values and that lifestyles and tastes are expressions of personal choice. Although now so pervasive as to seem natural, interpretations of this kind belong within a specific tradition that is grounded in the utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill, and that runs consistently through to contemporary versions of rational choice theory. This is a tradition in which action is, in essence, explained by the pursuit of individual interests. While we recognize the popularity of this position and its importance in legitimizing efforts to induce change, for example, by educating people about the consequences of their actions or by modifying economic costs and benefits through taxes or incentives, this is not a position we share. Nor do we go along with the view that change is an outcome of external forces, technological innovation or social structure, somehow bearing down on the detail of daily life. Instead, when it comes to matters of agency and structure, our response is to side with Giddens (1984).

Giddens’ structuration theory revolves around the conclusion that human activity, and the social structures which shape it are recursively related. That is, activities are shaped and enabled by structures of rules and meanings, and these structures are, at the same time, reproduced in the flow of human action. This flow is neither the conscious, voluntary purpose of human actors, nor the determining force of given social structures. While people can discursively account for their actions, often framing them in terms of conscious purposes and intentions, Giddens emphasizes that the greater part of the processes at stake do not lie within the realm of discursive consciousness. The capability to ‘go on’ through the flow of largely routinized social life depends on forms of practical knowledge, guided by structural features – rules and resources – of the social systems which shape daily conduct. In Giddens’ words, it is through practices that the ‘constitution of agents and structures are not two independently given sets of phenomena, a dualism, but represent a duality’ (1984: 25). He consequently claims that

the basic domain of study of the social sciences, according to the theory of structuration, is neither the experience of the individual actor, nor the existence of any form of social totality, but social practices ordered across space and time.

(Giddens, 1984: 2)

In 1984, Giddens provided what was then, and perhaps is still, the clearest account of how theories of practice might transcend the dualisms of structure and agency, determination and voluntarism. By implication such theories should also provide a means of explaining processes of change without prioritizing human agency and choice, and of conceptualizing stability without treating it as an outcome of given structures. Sure enough, Giddens makes the point that ‘the day to day activity of social actors draws upon and reproduces structural features of wider social systems’ (1984: 24). Statements of this kind are entirely plausible, but in emphasizing societal reproduction, and in being framed at such a general level, they leave many questions hanging. Of these the most important have to do with exactly how practices emerge, evolve and disappear.

In tackling these questions head on this book takes up the challenge of developing and articulating methods of understanding social order, stability and change in terms that are required and informed by theories of practice. Although this is a complicated task, it is one we approach with the help of a relatively simple conceptual framework assembled from ideas and strands of thought gathered from a range of disciplines and traditions. There is no shortage of writing about practice, and as such no need to start from scratch. In the remainder of this chapter we outline the theoretical foundations on which we build and introduce some of the materials we use.

INTRODUCING THEORIES OF PRACTICE

Theories of practice have roots stretching at least as far back as Wittgenstein and Heidegger. Whilst Wittgenstein does not write directly about ‘practices’, his work conveys many of the key features of theories of practice. For Schatzki (1996), Wittgenstein’s location of intelligibility and understanding, not within discrete human minds but in the flow of praxis, and his articulation of how intelligibility and understanding structure of human action and the social realm provides a basis for a theorization of practices which recognizes that ‘both social order and individuality ... result from practices’ (1996: 13). Heidegger, in Being and Time (1962), identifies praxis, as much as language, as a source of meaning. His account of Dasein and its relation to human activity and to equipment resonates with the ontological grounding of theories of practice, again emphasizing that human action is always already in the world. There are points of connection between some of these ideas and earlier contributions from pragmatists like James and Dewey. These include the importance accorded to embodied skills and know-how and the contention that experience is best understood not as an outcome of events and intentional actions, but as an ongoing process or flow in which habits and routines are continually challenged and transformed. Despite differences of origin and emphasis, these philosophical precursors are alike in suggesting that practices are not simply points of passage between human subjects and social structure. Rather, practice is positioned centre stage.

From these early twentieth-century origins, somewhat more integrated accounts emerged in the 1970s and into the 1980s. Charles Taylor employed the idea of practice as a means to contest behaviourism, again locating practices as a primary unit of analysis,

meanings and norms implicit in [...] practices are not just in the minds of the actors but are out there in the practices themselves, practices which cannot be conceived as a set of individual actions, but which are essentially modes of social relations, of mutual action.

(Taylor, 1971: 27)

Meanwhile, in the social sciences, Bourdieu’s work is more widely known. Despite titles like Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977) or The Logic of Practice (1990), Bourdieu did not develop a consistent theory of practice over his works. Within his writings, practices are more generally seen as a means of approaching his more central concern: that of theorizing habitus – a concept which in Bourdieu’s hands embodies aspects of practical consciousness and of norms and rules of conduct, aspects that other theorists take to be part of practices themselves. Here it is habitus and practices which are in recursive relation, such that habitus is ‘constituted in practice and is always oriented towards practical functions’ (1990: 52). Nevertheless, Bourdieu was influential in bringing concepts of practice into the social theoretical debates of the 1980s, doing so at a time when these ideas resonated with other work, including that of Foucault.

Through these routes, theories of practice entered the vocabulary of social scientific enquiry. Although notions of practice figure in different strands of social science through the 1980s and 1990s, they gained fresh theoretical impetus towards the close of the twentieth century, primarily through the work of philosopher Theodore Schatzki. His exposition of a Wittgensteinian theory of practice (Schatzki, 1996) helped bring practices back into the firmament of ideas as the influence of the linguistic turn in social theory began to fade. In retrospect, The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory (Schatzki et al., 2001) did not define a neat manoeuvre in social theory, but it did mark the start of what has become a diffuse movement, the shape and extent of which remains to be seen.

The essays collected in The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory demonstrated a continuing variety of theoretical positions gathering under the practice banner. In 2002, cultural sociologist Andreas Reckwitz sought to make sense of this diversity and in so doing provided a cogent summary of key features common to the most prominent approaches, using this as a platform from which to characterize an ‘ideal type of practice theory’ (Reckwitz, 2002: 244). Reckwitz positions practice theories in relation to other cultural theories, all of which ‘highlight the significance of shared or collective symbolic structures of knowledge in order to grasp both action and social order’ (246). He groups cultural theories into three types, each distinguished by where they locate the social. ‘Culturalist mentalism’ locates the social in the mind, in the heads of humans, this being where knowledge and meaning structures are taken to reside. For ‘culturalist textualism’ the social is situated not in the mind but ‘in chains of signs, in symbols, discourse, communication ... or “texts”’ (248). Finally, ‘culturalist intersubjectivism ... locates the social in interactions’ (249), most obviously through the intersubjectivity of ordinary speech acts. In contrast to these three alternatives, theories of practice are distinct in contending that the social is situated in practice.

What, then, is practice? For Reckwitz, it is ‘a routinized type of behavior’ (2002: 249). Taken in isolation, this phrase is potentially misleading in that it risks equating practices with the habits of individuals. Such an interpretation would miss the point in that it would overlook the recursive character of practice. This becomes obvious as Reckwitz goes on to explain that a practice exists as a ‘block’ or ‘a pattern which can be filled out by a multitude of single and often unique actions’ (2002: 250). In this sense, a practice endures between and across specific moments of enactment (Shove et al., 2007). As Schatzki puts it, a practice is ‘a temporally and spatially dispersed nexus of doings and sayings’ (1996: 89).

Reckwitz takes these ideas one step further in suggesting that a practice, as a block or pattern, consists of interdependencies between diverse elements including ‘forms of bodily activities, forms of mental activities, “things” and their use, a background knowledge in the form of understanding, know-how, states of emotion and motivational knowledge’ (2002: 249). To give a practical illustration, skateboarding consists of a complex amalgam of skateboards and street spaces along with the bodily competencies required to ride the board and to use the affordances of the street to turn tricks; the rules and norms that define the practice of skateboarding; its meanings to practitioners and to outsiders including its partially oppositional character, and so on. As such skateboarding exists as a recognizable conjunction of elements, consequently figuring as an entity which can be spoken about and more importantly drawn upon as a set of resources when doing skateboarding.

At the same time, practices exist as performances.It is through performance, through the immediacy of doing, that the ‘pattern’ provided by the practice-as-an-entity is filled out and reproduced. It is only through successive moments of performance that the interdependencies between elements which constitute the practice as entity are sustained over time. Accordingly, skateboarding only exists and endures because of countless recurrent enactments, each reproducing the interdependencies of which the practice is comprised.

In this analysis, individuals feature as the carriers or hosts of a practice. This is a radical departure from more conventional approaches in which understandings, know-how, meanings and purposes are taken to be personal attributes. Reckwitz argues that it makes better sense to treat these not as the qualities of an individual but as ‘elements and qualities of a practice in which the single individual participates’ (2002: 250). By implication, the significance, purpose and skill of skateboarding are not simply contained within the heads or bodies of skateboarders; rather these features constitute the practice of skateboarding, of which the rider is merely a carrier.

Much of the literature referred to above takes practices to be enduring entities reproduced through recurrent performance. There is nothing inherently wrong with this interpretation, but something more is required if we are to develop a convincing account of change and order with practice at its heart. To give a simple example, skateboarding has a short but turbulent history during which it has undergone multiple transformations – starting when surfers added wheels to boards, moving through skate parks and now on to more contemporary forms of street skateboarding (Borden, 2001). With each transition, elements, including the shape of the board, the details of know-how, the meanings and purposes of the practice and its characteristics – as entity and as performance – have been reconfigured. At a minimum, we need to find ways of describing and analysing processes like these while also accounting for more faithful, more consistent forms of reproduction.

In showing how practice theories might be developed to better account for change we make extensive use of many of the ideas sketched above. For example, the proposition that practices are composed of elements and the suggestion that people are usefully understood as the carriers of practice figure prominently in our account. The analytic distinction between practice-as-performance and practice-as-entity also proves useful, allowing us to show how novel combinations of competence, material and meaning are enacted and reproduced. Like the practitioners and everyday innovators about whom we write, we appropriate ideas from here and there, making new connections between existing arguments as required. In the next section we highlight some of the other literatures from which we borrow.

MATERIALS AND RESOURCES

Reckwitz classifies theories of practice as cultural theories. While they differ from other cultural theories in where they situate the social, they are alike in how the realm of the social is defined and in what it includes. For the most part, theories of practice have focused on the significance of shared understandings, norms, meanings, practical consciousness and purposes, all of which count as classically ‘social’ phenomena.

More recently, other less obvious elements have entered the frame. Schatzki argues that ‘understanding specific practices always involves apprehending material configurations’ (Schatzki et al., 2001: 3). Reckwitz is even more explicit. Using a very ordinary example he makes the point that: ‘in order to play football we need a ball and goals as indispensable “resources”’ (2002: 252). A ball alone does not make the game – an idea of playing, people to play with and a measure of competence are also necessary, and questions remain about how material and other elements combine...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures and table
• About the authors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 THE DYNAMICS OF SOCIAL PRACTICE
• 2 MAKING AND BREAKING LINKS
• 3 THE LIFE OF ELEMENTS
• 4 RECRUITMENT, DEFECTION AND REPRODUCTION
• 5 CONNECTIONS BETWEEN PRACTICES
• 6 CIRCUITS OF REPRODUCTION
• 7 REPRESENTING THE DYNAMICS OF SOCIAL PRACTICE
• 8 PROMOTING TRANSITIONS IN PRACTICE
• References
• Index