The word ‘routine’ is actually the diminutive of route, the making of small paths in everyday lives, and this metaphor can be useful to remember. When is a chosen route repeated enough to become a trail, and how are trails redirected, narrowed or broadened in ways that slowly may change them? One important aspect of comparing routines with paths is that once the path is established the moment of conscious choice is diminished. Most routines are likewise usually performed without second thoughts. But if you stop people and ask why and how they walk a certain trail or perform their mundane tasks, they are ready to answer you in detail.
There is a striking vagueness in the terminology surrounding the spaces between choice and ingrained habit. The classic discussions of routines and habituation in the works of scholars like Gregory Bateson (1973), Pierre Bourdieu (1977), Michel de Certeau (1984) and Norbert Elias (1978 [1939]) may be contrasted with some more recent studies of the field undertaken by Jean-Claude Kaufmann (1997), Elizabeth Shove (2003; Shove et al. 2007) and Ben Highmore (2004), who all try to develop a more nuanced understanding of how routines work in our daily lives.
The concepts of routine and habit have a specific Western history. The old world was seen as a system where ‘custom was king’, keeping people in the grip of unchangeable traditions. Habits belonged to the reform project of modernity. Bad ones should be exchanged for better ones, new routines should reorganize and discipline the everyday clutter of activities (see, for example, the discussion in Ehn and Löfgren 2007 and Highmore 2004). There are still moral or value charges in these concepts. Just think about the differences between sexual routines, which sound rather dull and mechanic, sexual habits, which may contain whatever one can imagine, and sexual rituals, which point to something more symbolically coded than a simple question of lust and desire.
For most people routines are linked to order, predictability and control, or, as Richard Sennett has put it: ‘To imagine a life of momentary impulses, of short-term action, devoid of sustainable routines, a life without habits, is to imagine indeed a mindless existence’ (1998: 44). They can be seen as tools for organizing the flow of time, and in this process create temporal rhythms and patterns, by sequencing and synchronization. They can also be seen as manuals for what has to be done in everyday life or as maps of our lives where some activities are charted in detail. As economizing devices they may help us to avoid making a myriad choices or reflect about alternatives in recurring situations, something that otherwise may drive us crazy.
Routines are of course much more than a survival technique; they constitute a cultural field full of tensions and paradoxes. What kinds of meanings and values are hidden in daily routines, and how are they related to questions of power, control or freedom? Routines can often provoke conflicts, but again their invisibility or takenfor-grantedness often makes such conflicts difficult to grasp and handle.
100
Billy Ehn and Orvar Löfgren