Another feature, also revealed by close inspection of what practitioners do, is that timing frequently constitutes an aspect of competence and procedure integral to the effective accomplishment of practices like those of phoning, eating and sleeping. To have a three-course ‘dinner’ at 7 a.m. or to start with the sweet and end with soup is to challenge conventional procedures of formal dining. More pragmatically, sequences like those of first preparing and then cooking vegetables are difficult to circumvent. In other words, doing dinner is not just a process that takes time, it is also a process that is internally differentiated, structured and sequenced in ways that are part of and that are reproduced through the practice itself.
The mutually constitutive relation between time and practice is even more evident with respect to the doing of things that require or that are better done in the company of others. For example, eating together involves an allocation of minutes, the nifty sequencing of chopping and boiling and the momentary conjunction of individual paths in time and space. More telling still, recognizable infrastructures of objective time – the day, the week, the morning routine, the annual holiday – are made so because they are made by distinctive kinds of practice. The week-end is the weekend precisely because we do things on Saturdays and Sundays that we don’t do on Mondays and Tuesdays.
In combination, these introductory comments hint at new questions and lines of inquiry strung between the study of time and practice. For example, should we interpret experiences of rushing around as the result not of a time squeeze but of practice compression, and if so, how might we identify and describe the processes involved? More abstractly, is it possible to characterize or compare the temporal and spatial qualities of the complex and often interlocking systems of practice that constitute society? I come back to these questions in the last part of the chapter, but begin by elaborating on the theoretical and methodological implications of thinking about practices as consumers of resources like time, energy and water.
Practices as Consumers: Of Time and Other Resources
The proposition that much consumption, not only of time but also of money and other material and natural resources, is occasioned by people’s involvement in relationships, activities and taken-for-granted routines makes a lot of sense (Warde 2005). Whether we like it or not, much of what we do, individually and collectively, leaves behind a trail of variously sticky footprints.<sup>1</sup> Some of these indicators are more directly revealing than others. For example, records of the timing and duration of telephone calls provide a relatively clear picture of how phoning is located in the daily and weekly schedule. In Finland, telephone conversations tend to be longer in the countryside than in the city; winter Mondays are peak times for calling and the fewest calls are made on summer Sundays. By comparison, data from the UK Electricity Association’s load research group imply that (averaged over the year) people are engaged in practices that require different forms of illumination at the week-end as compared with the week. In terms of energy consumption, this supports the rather diffuse conclusion that demand is an outcome of ‘interplay between the activity of the occupants and the availability of daylight’ (Stokes et al. 2006: 3). Getting up later seems to be part of the story, but because illumination is a prerequisite for doing so many different things, it is hard to glean much about the details of daily life from data showing when artificial light is being used.
Everyday Practice
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