{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","title":"Time, Consumption and Everyday Life Practice, Materiality and Culture","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":null,"requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","id":"1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","uuid":"1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","title":"Time, Consumption and Everyday Life Practice, Materiality and Culture","normalized_title":"timeconsumptionandeverydaylifepracticematerialityandculture","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":null,"isbns":[],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":236,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Time%2C%20Consumption%20and%20Everyday%20Life%20Practice%2C%20Materiality%20and%20Culture","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e/search"},"page":{"printed_page":24,"pdf_page":29,"physical_index":29,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"8012a8c5782a6425b5e2cddad2b42306d494516d87fd503a4ee1a287f9f90e45"},"chapter":"List of Tables and Figures","content":"By way of illustration, the respondents involved in Kaufmann’s research discuss the feeling of being impelled to do the laundry or complete the ironing. For some, ironing had apparently acquired such a grip that they had ‘no option’ but to organize their schedules according to the demands of this particular practice (the boat owners studied by Jalas, this volume, describe much the same sort of experience). How much time ironing required, and when, differed depending upon related understandings of a minimum acceptable standard. Since there are always many things to do, the advantages of taking short-cuts or of deferring tasks are continually set against the demands of doing things ‘properly’.<sup>3</sup> It is therefore no wonder that tensions between concepts of care and convenience (Warde 1997) run through the fine-grained juggling of domestic obligations (Thompson 1996) or that they result in strategies like those of deliberately rushing and hurrying some activities in order to make time for others (Southerton 2003). Exactly what these other pursuits might be is sure to differ and is likely to do so in ways that relate to a household’s moral economy, the details of which, in turn, reflect the temporal embedding and disembedding of coexisting practices (Silverstone 1993). As Silverstone (1993) argues, the manner in which new technologies – specifically televisions, telephones, computers and videos – are appropriated, the kinds of practices they engender, and their impact on individual and collective schedules depends above all upon how they are defined in relation to existing habits and routines. For Silverstone, it is this relationality that matters in understanding how innovations in practice do and do not take hold.\n\nTaking a step back, this line of argument suggests that discussions purporting to be about the use of time might be more appropriately framed as discussions about the relation between new, existing and competing practices. If so, the methodological challenge is to somehow represent these dynamic processes. Within any one household there might be ways of describing and perhaps analysing the resequencing of episodes and re-chaining of events (Ellegård 1999: 168) that goes on as new practices take hold and as others are edged out of the frame, but how to characterize the practice-time fabric of society as a whole? As indicated above, it is possible to imagine active forms of rivalry or competition between practices as they seek to capture recruits, resources and ‘carriers’ (Reckwitz 2002). It is – at least in theory – also possible to imagine tracking the temporal and material commitments that specific practices require of those who do them and somehow plotting the cumulative implications of such demands both for the diffusion of the practices in question and for consequent patterns of consumption, including the consumption of time. Anther way of approaching this question is to switch the balance of attention away from time as a resource and to see it instead as an integral part of the complex systems of practice in which we are all engaged.\n\n24\n\nElizabeth Shove","previous_page":23,"next_page":25}