1st Edition
Connecting Practices Large Topics in Society and Social Theory
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.
1 Introduction
Three ambitions
Starting points: practices, connections and large social phenomena
Organising ideas
Part one: spreading out
Part two: amalgamating and adapting
Part three: textures of advantage
Part I: Spreading out
2 Infusing
Paradigms in practice
Epistemic communities and communities of practice
Patterns of infusion
Conceptualising epistemic convergence
3 Circulating
Configuring commodities
Configuring trade
Configuring cargo
Conceptualising multi-directional trajectories
Part II: Amalgamating and adapting
4 Merging and emerging
Hybridising
Scaffolding
Relaying
Fertile soil
5 Cross-referencing
Codifying colour
Markets and their standards
Driving around the world
Coordination in practice
6 Interweaving
The warp
The weft
Repeating patterns
Multiple entanglement
Practice theory, climate change and sustainability: a footnote
Part III: Textures of advantage
7 Accumulating
Accumulating plastic waste
– Amassing microplastics: disposability and deposition
– Storing microplastics: durable relations
– Microplastics in practice
Accumulating body mass
– Amassing fat: systems of provision, consumption and practice
– Storing fat: the biosocial body
– Obesity in practice
Accumulating wealth
– Amassing wealth
– Storing wealth
– Wealth in practice
Accumulating insights
8 Dividing
Reproducing distinctions: Learning to labour
Reproducing social gradients: the Marmot review
Inclusion, exclusion and participation
Inequalities in practice
9 Joining up the dots
How connections connect
Crossing points
Connectivity as such?
Biography
Elizabeth Shove is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University, UK, and Visiting Professor at the Centre for Consumer Society Research at the University of Helsinki, Finland. She is co-author of The Dynamics of Social Practice: Everyday Life and How it Changes (SAGE, 2012) and co-editor of The Nexus of Practices: Connections, Constellations, Practitioners (Routledge, 2016). Her other books include Conceptualising Demand: A Distinctive Approach to Consumption and Practice (Routledge, 2020), Energy Fables: Challenging Ideas in the Energy Sector (Routledge, 2019), and Infrastructures in Practice: The Dynamics of Demand in Networked Societies (Routledge, 2018).
