A functional approach tells us that routines accomplish many things in daily existence. By creating order they reduce the complexity of tasks and uncertainty, save time and energy, and reduce what economists call transaction costs. This in turn makes life feel more safe and secure, and makes our behaviour predictable both to ourselves and to others, a predictability which makes elaborate social interactions possible (Giddens 1986; Ilmonen 2001: 15–17). To a large extent, public social behaviour like crowds walking on sidewalks, moving in orderly ways in and out of doorways and driving safely on streets is dependent on unconsciously learned habits and routines of gaze, bodily movement, turn taking and coordination based on elaborate non-verbal cues and subtle gestures (Goffman, 1971; Hall 1966). The dividing line between routine and ritual is especially difficult to locate when these gestures, postures and behaviours become an unconscious element of everyday social behaviour.
One way to understand the continual attraction of simple models which oppose choice versus habit in social life is that they resonate with our daily experience as human beings (Jackson 1989). In other words, rather than being profound statements whose veracity is based on empirical research, they are general statements about human nature which correspond to the folk models we use to explain or rationalize our own behaviour and the behaviour of those around us (Wilk 1996).
Theories of agency and practice can be seen as attempts to deal with this contradiction between views of human beings as active decision makers involved in making rational choices, and humans as habitual crowd-followers of fashion, ritual, customs and routine (Ilmonen 2001). At a large scale, when we are thinking of societies and historical time scales, the interplay of structure and agency is easy to imagine. But as we move to the level of daily life, it is far too easy to lose sight of the micro-level processes through which people make and break routines and habits. Ilmonen points out that when it comes down to actual cases, Giddens ‘sets aside routines, stresses the discursive side of the agent’s consciousness and thus ends up closer to the idea of the voluntaristic, reflective agent which features in economic theory’ (2001: 17).
How can we get closer to what we really mean by the process Giddens calls ‘structuration’, the interaction in daily life between the decisions and choices we make, and the structures which determine and limit our scope for decision and action? As Shove et al. (2007) point out, daily habits and routines are deeply encoded in every bit of material culture, in the spatial topography of home and work as well as the social codes which interest Giddens. But routines, which are structures of time, are another key component which, though often dependent upon or involving machines or objects, can also be entirely internal. They can best be studied phenomenologically, and there are questions we need to ask which reflect on the mysterious nature of routines themselves. For example, why do we sometimes experience routines and habits as functional, relaxing, comforting and time-saving, while at other times they are annoying, restrictive and even intolerable (see Löfgren 2007)? Why are some kinds of habits so easy to make and break, while others are hard to form, or hard to end? When are we in charge of our routines and when are they in charge of us, and is this a matter of objectivity, or purely an issue of subjectivity?
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