Dale Southerton

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 analyse 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.

Defrosting the Freezer: From Novelty to Convenience A Narrative of Normalization

This article examines the ‘normalization’ of the British freezer. It defines three phases in this process: an initial period oriented around the utility of preserving home produce; a second stage marked by the development of a frozen food infrastructure and the establishment of the freezer as a part of the efficient domestic economy; and a third subtle but significant redefinition of the primary benefits of freezing in terms of convenience. Cast in their new role as ‘time machines’, freezers are sold as a means of managing contemporary pressures associated with the scheduling and co-ordination of domestic life. At one level, this is a story of the gradual acceptance of a relatively standardized object. Yet this narrative suggests that the freezer’s promised benefits and functions change along the way. Developing this point, we argue that the normalization of the chameleon-like freezer can only be understood in the context of similarly changing systems of food provisioning, patterns of domestic practice and allied technological devices.

Analysing the temporal organization of daily life: Social constraints, practices and their allocation

There is a tension in time studies between measuring and accounting for the changing distribution of units of time across social activities, and explaining temporal experiences. By analysing in-depth interviews with 27 people, this article employs a theory of practice to explore the relationship between respondents’ ‘non-work’ practices and five dimensions of time. It hypothesizes that practices which demand a fixed location within daily schedules anchor temporal organization, around which are sequenced sets of interrelated practices. A third category of practices fills the gaps that emerge within temporal sequences.The most significant socio-demographic constraints (gender, age, life-course and education) that shaped how respondents engaged and experienced practices in relation to the five dimensions of time are then considered. It is argued that the relationship between different types of social practices, five dimensions of time and sociodemographic constraints presents a conceptual framework for the systematic analysis of differential temporal experiences.

Bringing Children (and Parents) into the Sociology of Consumption Towards a Theoretical and Empirical Agenda

The sociology of consumption pays relatively little detailed and systematic theoretical attention to children, while the sociology of childhood tends to view children’s consumption through what can be called the ‘production of consumption’ approach. This is surprising given the range of empirical and theoretical debate in the sociology of consumption, where ‘mode of consumption’,‘consumption as aesthetics’ and ‘material culture’ represent a further three approaches. By bringing together the sociologies of childhood and consumption, a framework for empirical research is advanced. Four inter-related themes are suggested: learning to consume; lifestyle and identity formation; children’s engagements with material culture; and the parent-child relationship. It is argued that such a framework offers scope to further understandings of how cultures of consumption impact on children, children and parents, and construct notions of childhood. A focus on children’s consumption also represents an opportunity to clarify key processes of influential theories of social change.

'Pressed for time' - The differential impacts of a 'time squeeze'

The ‘time squeeze’ is a phrase often used to describe contemporary concerns about a shortage of time and an acceleration of the pace of daily life. This paper reviews analysis of the Health and Lifestyle Survey (HALS), 1985 and 1992, and draws upon in-depth semi-structured interviews conducted with twenty British suburban households, in order to shed light on ‘senses’ of time squeeze. 75% of HALS respondents felt at least ‘somewhat’ pressed for time, with variables of occupation, gender, age and consumption significantly increasing senses of being ‘pressed for time’. This is not surprising given theories of the ‘time squeeze’. However, identification of variables only offers insights into isolated causal effects and does little to explain how or why so many respondents reported feeling ‘usually pressed for time’. Using interview data to help interpret the HALS findings, this paper identifies three mechanisms associated with the relationship between practices and time (volume, co-ordination and allocation), suggesting that ‘harriedness’ represents multiple experiences of time (substantive, temporal dis-organisation, and temporal density). In conclusion, it is argued that when investigating ‘harriedness’ it is necessary to recognise the different mechanisms that generate multiple experiences of time in order for analysis to move beyond one-dimensional interpretations of the ‘time squeeze’, and in order to account for the relationship between social practices and their conduct within temporalities (or the rhythms of daily life).

Changes in the Practice of Eating A Comparative Analysis of Time-Use

This article examines changes in aspects of the eating habits of the populations of five countries between the early 1970s and the end of the 1990s. Time-use diary data provide the main evidence, which is subjected to techniques of statistical description and regression analysis. The study of France, UK, USA, Norway and the Netherlands shows considerable national variation in patterns of food preparation, eating at home and eating out. Each of these components of the practice of eating is examined for indications of whether there are any tendencies towards dedifferentiation within countries or convergence across countries. There are some common patterns across countries, notably a decline in the amount of time devoted to food preparation. Time spent on eating at home reduces in all countries except France. In the USA, time devoted to domestic food preparation and consumption is minimal. Internal differentiation shows continuities — of gender divisions and age-related behaviour — but also new emergent tendencies — with the presence of children and levels of cultural capital becoming significant predictors of behaviour. It is maintained that the analysis of time-use provides a useful framework for comparing practices in different countries and that the variation revealed might best be understood in terms of different modes of institutionalization of consumption.

Sustainability transitions and final consumption: Practices and socio-technical systems

This article examines the significance of final consumption processes for understandings of prospective transitions towards more sustainable societies. It argues that most existing conceptualisations either place too much emphasis on technology or on ‘consumer behaviour’, ignoring the deeply intertwined relationships between the two. After briefly reviewing recent contributions to the technology-oriented multi-level perspective (MLP) and to social scientific explanations of ‘behavioural change’, we outline a practice-based approach to understanding final consumption and sustainability. Practice-based approaches reveal processes of reproduction (stasis) and change in forms of consumption, which we argue present conceptual insights into sustainability transitions. By examining the tensions and crossovers between the MLP and practice-based approaches to consumption, three specific forms of interaction are identified for further conceptual and empirical exploration: the social relations of consumption; co-dependent changes in production and consumption; and, technologies, practices and consumption.

Habits, routines and temporalities of consumption: From individual behaviours to the reproduction of everyday practices

The terms habit and routine have come to be used with increasing frequency in debates about ‘behaviour’ change and sustainable consumption, where dominant approaches, dubbed as ‘portfolio models of action’ by their critics, employ these terms to capture human deficiencies in the translation of pro-environmental values into corresponding actions (the ‘value–action’ gap). Alternative approaches present habits and routines as the observable performances of stable practices. Informed by these approaches, this article makes three ‘conceptual moves’ in order to demonstrate the need for empirical attention to the temporal conditioning of everyday practices. First, it is argued that conceptual usages of the terms ‘habit’ and ‘routine’ are often imprecise and used generically to capture many different aspects of human action. A threefold conceptual framework comprising of ‘dispositions’, ‘procedures’ and ‘sequences’ is proposed as a preliminary step in dealing with this problem. Second, it is suggested that generic uses of the terms ‘habit’ and ‘routine’ imply multiple forms of temporality. Again, as a conceptual sorting exercise, three categories of temporality pertinent to understanding the performance of practices are examined: time as a resource; the temporal demands of practices; and temporal rhythms. Third, the relationships between the conceptual variants of habitual and routine actions and temporalities of practices are examined through reference to empirical research. In conclusion, it is argued that reducing habits and routines to generic descriptions of behaviour within portfolio models of action is inadequate for developing understandings of the reproduction of everyday practices. Rather, empirical and conceptual attention to the relationships between practices, temporalities and different forms of action are required if the challenge of fostering more sustainable ways of life is to be met.

Home Extensions in the United Kingdom: Space, Time, and Practice

This paper begins with two observations: that UK homes appear to have accumulated increasing numbers of domestic technologies, yet new houses are smaller, on average, than those built before 1980. The spatial pressures placed on homes that result from the accumulation of technologies are explored by drawing upon forty household interviews which enquired into the domestic organisation of kitchen and bathroom technologies and practices. Many households have responded to such spatial pressures by extending or reformulating their domestic spaces: such that kitchens are becoming increasingly multifunctional spaces and bathrooms are multiplying. It is argued that these trends are not simply driven by an unstoppable tide of material possession but reflect context-specific arrangements related to the temporal and ideological structuring of domestic practices. Technologies and practices coevolve with the result that new demands are made on homes—the commodities and objects with which we live our lives influence our experience of space and the value placed on different physical configurations. Domestic technologies are therefore implicated in the structure and reproduction of practice and hence in the choreography of things and people in time and space.

Consuming Kitchens Taste, context and identity formation

The role that consumption might play in processes of identity formation has been subject to much recent sociological debate. This article explores four principles of kitchen consumption orientations that were described by three groups (differentiated by levels of economic and cultural resources) who live in an English new town. The varying meanings applied to kitchen usage are also explored. It is argued that the similarity of kitchen tastes and the meanings applied to its usage within the three groups cast doubt over theories that suggest consumption and identity formation are increasingly free from normative group constraints. In conclusion it is argued that association within locality-based ‘taste communities’ acted to confirm shared tastes which respondents mapped onto generic social categorizations of class, a confirmation made possible through varying degrees of sociability within local contexts.