A Social Practice Perspective

• The work of the SPRG offers a distinctive perspective for understanding, explaining and addressing consumption and everyday life.

• Conspicuous consumption only scratches the surface of the range of processes of consumption

• We consume resources as part of the practices that make up everyday life—showering, doing the laundry, cooking or commuting etc.

SPRG Empirical Projects

• Changing Eating Habits: Cross cultural case studies

• Drinking Water: An international comparison• Patterns of Water Consumption: domestic

water use in the UK• Keeping Cool: escalating use of air

conditioning in the UK• Zero Carbon Living: ‘zero carbon’ housing

What are social practices?

Practices are shared:

People perform practices together

Practices are recognisable ‘blocks of activities’

The everyday office

Elements of Practice MATERIALS: Objects, tools, infrastructures

COMPETENCE: Knowledge, skills and know how

MEANING: Cultural conventions, expectations and understandings

SPRG’s research has explored how practices: • Emerge and disappear• Persist and change• Vary across culture and societies

Patterns of Water Consumption

Patterns of Water Consumption

Drinking Water

Keeping Cool

Zero Carbon Living

After all, I’m a HOME not a CAUSE!

It doesn’t matter what you do to me, I’ve complied with the code, so I can always be called a

‘zero carbon’ house!

Yes I have clever technologies, but there’s nothing

special you need to know or do to live

here

I’m a normal, stylish, modern house like any

other

Anyone can live here and live a

normal life, I’m not one of those weird eco radical homes

THE ZERO CARBON HOME THAT JUST WANTS TO BE SOLDIS THIS WHAT IS NEEDED TO SELL ZERO CARBON HOMES IN THE MASS HOUSING MARKET?

Changing Eating Habits

Changing Eating Habits

Beyond conventional behaviour change

• Social practices as the central unit of analysis• Systematic and coordinated policy frameworks which

affect suites of practices: positive spillovers• Habits and routines are cultural not personal• The challenge is to guide existing trajectories in more

sustainable directions. • A new evidence-base is required focused on varieties

of practices, rather than the environmental impact of goods or individual purchasing patterns and attitudes

Thank you