Matt Watson

Product, Competence, Project and Practice DIY and the dynamics of craft consumption

Studies of ordinary (as distinct from spectacular) forms of consumption have generated new questions and new ways of thinking about mechanisms and processes of change and about the conceptual status of consumer goods. No longer exclusively framed as semiotic resources deployed in the expression and reproduction of identities and social relations, products are increasingly viewed as essential ingredients in the effective accomplishment of everyday life. In this article, we examine the recursive relation between products, projects and practices with reference to do-it-yourself (DIY) and home improvement — an important area of craft consumption and a field in which consumers are actively and creatively engaged in integrating and transforming complex arrays of material goods. Interviews with DIY practitioners and retailers point to a circuit of interdependent relations between the hardware of consumption (tools, materials, etc.); distributions of competence (between humans and non-humans); the emergence of consumer projects and, with them, new patterns of demand. In elaborating on these practical and theoretical linkages we develop an analysis of the material dynamics of craft consumption that bridges approaches rooted in science studies, material culture and consumption.

Modes of governing municipal waste

From recent debates on governance and governmentality, two key analytical imperatives arise: the need to engage simultaneously with the structures and processes of governing, and the need to recognise the plurality and multiplicity of governing sites and activities. In seeking to address these imperatives, we develop an analytical approach, the modes of governing approach, which engages with the rationalities, agencies, institutional relations, and technologies of governing that coalesce around particular objectives and entities to be governed. Drawing on the example of municipal waste management, we illustrate how this framework can illuminate the dynamic and multiple nature of governing, and outline the key modes of governing which currently shape the policy and practice of municipal waste.

Food, waste and safety: negotiating conflicting social anxieties into the practices of domestic provisioning

Two significant realms of social anxiety, visible in the discourses of media and public policy, potentially pull practices of home food provisioning in conflicting directions. On the one hand, campaigns to reduce the astonishing levels of food waste generated in the UK moralize acts of both food saving (such as keeping and finding creative culinary uses for leftovers) and food disposal. On the other hand, agencies concerned with food safety, including food-poisoning, problematize common practices of thrift, saving and reuse around provisioning. The tensions that arise as these public discourses are negotiated together into domestic practices open up moments in which ‘stuff’ crosses the line from being food to being waste. This paper pursues this through the lens of qualitative and ethnographic data collected as part of a four-year European research programme concerned with consumer anxieties about food. Through focus groups, life-history interviews and observations, data emerged which give critical insights into processes from which food waste results. With a particular focus on how research participants negotiate use-by dates, we argue that interventions to reduce food waste can be enhanced by appreciating how food becomes waste through everyday practices.

Products and practices. Selected concepts from science and technology studies and from social theories of consumption and practice

Design researchers and practitioners are increasingly interested in how designed artefacts shape and are shaped by the contexts in which they are used. Despite a long if selective history of theoretical engagement between design and social science, there has yet to be an effective exchange of ideas on this subject in particular. In this article, we present a selection of concepts drawn from recent debates in science and technology studies and consumption theory. We introduce notions of acquisition; scripting; appropriation; assembly; normalisation and practice with the aim of initiating an inter- disciplinary conversation about how designed artefacts are configured and appropriated and about how they structure the social practices and situations of which they are a part.

Conceptualizing connections Energy demand, infrastructures and social practices

Problems of climate change present new challenges for social theory. In this article we focus on the task of understanding and analyzing car dependence, using this as a case through which to introduce and explore what we take to be central but underdeveloped questions about how infrastructures and complexes of social practice connect across space and time. In taking this approach we work with the proposition that forms of energy consumption, including those associated with automobility, are usefully understood as outcomes of interconnected patterns of social practices, including working, shopping, visiting friends and family, going to school, and so forth. We also acknowledge that social practices are partly constituted by, and always embedded in material arrangements. Linking these two features together, we suggest that forms of car dependence emerge through the intersection of infrastructural arrangements that are integral to the conduct of many practices at once. We consequently explore the significance of professional – and not only ‘ordinary’ – practices, especially those of planners and designers who are involved in reconfiguring infrastructures of different scales, and in the practice dynamics that follow.

Governing municipal waste: Towards a new analytical framework

Abstract Recent years have seen a rapid rise in the political saliency of the ever growing volumes of municipal waste produced in the UK. In this paper, we outline the preliminary findings of a research project that is examining the nature and development of municipal waste policy (MWP) in north-east England. We provide an overview of the changing national, regional and local policy framework for sustainable municipal waste policy, arguing that the European Landfill Directive has had a profound impact on policy priorities and goals at all levels. Nonetheless, commentators and policy makers alike have identified significant ‘barriers’ to progress, including institutional fragmentation, instability and uncertainty, financial constraints, and public participation. While the ‘barriers’ metaphor has served to identify some of the key challenges, we suggest that it offers only a partial view of the issues at hand and can serve to perpetuate an unhelpful division between the ‘technical’ and ‘social’, and between policy making and practice. In this paper, we develop a new conceptual framework for analysing MWP based on an understanding of the multiple modes of governing through which policy is constructed and contested. We argue that this approach is also relevant for other areas of environmental policy and planning which have, to date, only partially engaged with broader debates about the changing nature of the state and governance. Bringing these concerns into the analysis of environmental policy and planning is, we believe, a key challenge for future research.

Just waste? municipal waste management and the politics of environmental justice

Abstract Municipal waste management in the UK has undergone rapid transformation in recent years in pursuit of greater sustainability. In this paper we explore the environmental justice issues and tensions involved in this shift. After a brief overview of environmental justice debates and how they have been related to issues of waste management, we describe how the policies and processes underlying the transformation from an overwhelming dependence on landfill disposal towards more sustainable methods of management has been driven by European legislation embodying principles premised on fundamental environmental concerns of inter- and intra-generational equity. We analyse the key means through which these principles have been translated to restructure local authority practices and the environmental justice issues arising from the implementation of international policy in regional and local context. Finally, we reflect on the implications of this case study for implementation of policies intended to advance both sustainability and environmental justice.

Saints and Slackers: Challenging Discourses About the Decline of Domestic Cooking

Amidst growing concern about both nutrition and food safety, anxiety about a loss of everyday cooking skills is a common part of public discourse. Within both the media and academia, it is widely perceived that there has been an erosion of the skills held by previous generations with the development of convenience foods and kitchen technologies cited as culpable in ‘deskilling’ current and future generations. These discourses are paralleled in policy concerns, where the incidence of indigenous food-borne disease in the UK has led to the emergence of an understanding of consumer behaviour, within the food industry and among food scientists, based on assumptions about consumer ‘ignorance’ and poor food hygiene knowledge and cooking skills. These assumptions are accompanied by perceptions of a loss of ‘common-sense’ understandings about the spoilage and storage characteristics of food, supposedly characteristic of earlier generations. The complexity of cooking skills immediately invites closer attention to discourses of their assumed decline. This paper draws upon early findings from a current qualitative research project which focuses on patterns of continuity and change in families’ domestic kitchen practices across three generations. Drawing mainly upon two family case studies, the data presented problematise assumptions that earlier generations were paragons of virtue in the context of both food hygiene and cooking. In taking a broader, life-course perspective, we highlight the absence of linearity in participants’ engagement with cooking as they move between different transitional points throughout the life-course.

Unpicking Environmental Policy Integration with Tales from Waste Management

Through an exploration of UK municipal waste policy, this paper examines debates on environmental policy integration (EPI) and governance. We argue that this policy arena has been characterised by modes of vertical integration, which have failed to promote the horizontal integration required to move beyond the limits of anachronistic institutional structures and have failed to achieve the paradigm shift needed to make meaningful progress towards sustainability. Through this analysis we develop three critical arguments. First, that the analysis of EPI requires attention to embedded paradigms, structures, and dynamics at all levels of governance, emphasising the importance of incorporating subnational levels of governing to EPI analyses. Second, that both analysis of and arguments for EPI need to engage more fully with broader dynamics of governing and to recognise the coexistence of contradictory processes of integration. Finally, we sound a note of caution in relation to calls for EPI. In the messy, dynamic, and multilevel reality in which EPI has to be implemented, such calls must recognise both sustainability and policy integration as iterative processes rather than as predetermined blueprints.

Locating anxiety in the social: The cultural mediation of food fears

Drawing on current research about food-related anxieties, this article argues for an expanded understanding of the presence and location of anxiety in the social. It contends that anxiety is usefully conceptualised as collective and distributed, rather than solely as a property or experience of the individual. Focusing on anxiety as a social condition, the article explores how anxieties become embedded and embodied within routinised practices, technologies and institutions. It draws out and demonstrates the processes and practices through which anxieties are socially constituted and culturally mediated, and through which they travel across spaces and scales. This is exemplified through the case of Jamie’s Ministry of Food (a 2008 television series and media campaign featuring the British celebrity chef Jamie Oliver). The article shows how food serves as a vehicle for the circulation of a variety of related concerns, including anxieties about class and gender relations, notions of place identity and regional stereotyping.