Time, Consumption and Everyday Life Practice, Materiality and Culture

List of Tables and Figures

Tables

3.1 Basic socio-demographic profile of sample diarists, Mass
Observation Archive, 1937 52
3.2 Reported leisure activities of sixty-three diarists, for Saturday,
12 June 1937 54

Figures

1.1 Water use of T10149 (a two-person household) in 2003 20
1.2 Time use, France, 2000 22
1.3 Time use, Finland, 2000 23
9.1 A simple model of the movement of practices in and out of conscious
reflection (hexis) and everyday normality (habitus) 151
11.1 A sacred rope placed over a sign that advertises a number of businesses
situated on the ground floor of an apartment block in the centre of
Kyoto during January 2003 179
11.2 Advertisement for New Year’s decorations 180
11.3 A decorated mirror-rice cake on display in the Kuwaharas’ decorative
alcove on 1 January 2003 181
12.1 Billboard advertising of a mobile operator at Istanbul Airport 191

vii

List of Contributors

Inge Daniels is a Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford. Her book The Japanese House: Material Culture in the Modern Home is due to be published by Berg in 2010.

Billy Ehn is Professor of European Ethnology at the University of Umeå. He has published a number of books on different aspects of everyday life, including Vad konstigt: Om undran och oförståelse (How Odd: On Curioisity and Disbelief; Studentlitteratur, 2005) and När ingenting särskilt händer (with Orvar Löfgren, Brutus Östlings Bokförlag Symposion, 2007, Engl. translation: The Secret World of Doing Nothing, University of California Press, in press).

Güliz Ger is Professor of Marketing at Bilkent University, Ankara. Her research interests involve issues of consumption, culture and globalization. She has co-authored ‘Constructing and Representing the Islamic Consumer in Turkey’, in Fashion Theory (2007), ‘Aesthetics, Ethics and the Politics of the Turkish Headscarf’, in Suzanne Kuechler and Daniel Miller, eds, Clothing as Material Culture (Berg, 2005), and ‘The Fire of Desire: A Multi-sited Inquiry into Consumer Passion’, in Journal of Consumer Research (2003).

Jukka Gronow is Professor of Sociology at the University of Uppsala. He has written widely on consumption, taste and style, including Sociology of Taste (Routledge, 1997) and Caviar with Champagne (Berg, 2003).

Mikko Jalas is a Research Fellow in Organization and Management at the Helsinki School of Economics. His work has focused on environmental policy and the politics of time and temporality in everyday life. He has published articles in Time & Society and Ecological Economics.

Olga Kravets is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at Bilkent University, Ankara. She has worked at A.C. Nielsen Australia, a market research company, as well as conducting academic research on consumption and marketing in transitional economies.

ix

x • Contributors

Orvar Löfgren is Professor of European Ethnology at the University of Lund. Among his recent books are Off the Edge: Experiments in Cultural Analysis (edited with Rick Wilk; Museum Tusculanum Press, 2006) and Magic, Culture and the New Economy (edited with Robert Willim; Berg, 2005).

Daniel Miller is Professor of Material Culture at the Department of Anthropology, University College London. Recent publications include The Comfort of Things (Polity, 2008), The Cell Phone (with Heather Horst; Berg, 2006) and the edited volume Materiality (Duke University Press, 2005).

Marina Moskowitz is a Reader in History and American Studies at the University of Glasgow. She focuses on the intersection of culture and business in American history, which she has explored in Standard of Living: The Measure of the Middle Class in Modern America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004) and the collection Cultures of Commerce: Representation and American Business Culture, 1877–1960 (edited with Elspeth Brown and Catherine Gudis; Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

Tom O’Dell is Professor in the Department of Service Management, Lund University, Campus Helsingborg. He is the author of Culture Unbound: Americanization and Everyday Life in Sweden (Nordic Academic Press, 1997) and has also edited several volumes on tourism and the experience economy, including Upplevelsens materialitet (Studentlitteratur, 2002) and Experiencescapes: Tourism, Culture, and Economy (with Peter Billing; Copenhagen Business School Press, 2004).

Ted Schatzki is Professor of Philosophy and Dean of Faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Kentucky. He has written much on social philosophy and the theory of human activity and is author of Social Practices (Cambridge University Press, 1996), The Site of the Social (Penn State Press, 2002), and Martin Heidegger: Theorist of Space (Steiner Verlag, 2007).

Elizabeth Shove is Professor of Sociology at Lancaster University. Recent publications include The Design of Everyday Life (with Matt Watson, Martin Hand and Jack Ingram; Berg, 2007), Infrastructures of Consumption (with Bas Van Vliet and Heather Chappells; Earthscan, 2005) and Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience (Berg, 2003).

Don Slater is Reader in Sociology at the London School of Economics. His research interests include new media and development; markets and consumer culture; and visual sociology. Publications include Consumer Culture and Modernity (Polity, 1997), The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach (with Daniel Miller; Berg 2000) and The Technological Economy (with Andrew Barry; Routledge, 2005).

Dale Southerton is a Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Manchester. Recent publications include Sustainable Consumption: The Implications of Changing Infrastructures of Provision (co-edited with Heather Chappells and Bas Van Vliet; Edward Elgar, 2004) and ‘Analysing the Temporal Organization of Daily Life: Social Constraints, Practices and their Allocation’, in Sociology (2006).

Frank Trentmann is Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London. His recent publications include Free Trade Nation: Commerce, Consumption and Civil Society in Modern Britain (Oxford University Press, 2008), Consuming Cultures, Global Perspectives (edited with John Brewer; Berg, 2006) and Citizenship and Consumption (edited with Kate Soper; Palgrave, 2007).

Richard Wilk is Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Indiana University. He has done research in the rainforest of Belize, in West African markets and in the wilds of suburban California. His most recent books are Home Cooking in the Global Village (Berg, 2006) and the edited Fast Food/Slow Food (AltaMira, 2006).

Contributors •

xi

Acknowledgements

This volume is the product of an evolving series of creative experiments as well as more conventional preparations to capture the dynamics of time. Time has multiple rhythms, and there is no reason, beyond the routinized imperatives of academic culture, to believe that scholarship might not also be advanced by occasionally switching the rhythms of academic protocol. A first exploratory meeting was hosted at Birkbeck College, London, in the winter of 2005, where many ideas, approaches and methods were first aired, with the generous help of games, hands-on-exercises and good talk. In spring 2007, a group of scholars came back together to discuss illustrative cases in Florence at the European University Institute. We should like to thank all participants and researchers who contributed their thoughts to these meetings and kept our momentum going. That we were able to make maximum use of everyone’s time was in no small part thanks to the administrative assistance offered by Stefanie Nixon in London and Sergio Amadei in Florence, where Professor Heinz-Gerhard Haupt kindly acted as our local host. The Cultures of Consumption research programme (ESRC–AHRC) generously offered help with travel and expenses to explore this neglected dimension of everyday consumption. We should also like to thank Sheena Ketchum for her help in preparing the final manuscript.

xiii

Introduction

Elizabeth Shove, Frank Trentmann and Richard Wilk

I think mankind is more than waist-deep in daily routine. Countless inherited acts, accumulated pell-mell and repeated time after time to this very day, become habits that help us live, imprison us, and make decisions for us throughout our lives.

Braudel 1979: 7

Time, Consumption and Everyday Life

‘Time’ has become a central topic of debate in the academy, just as it has in public life. Experiences of time poverty and hurriedness, burnout and stress are staples of popular discussion, media hype and political concern. Some commentators have even go so far as to diagnose ‘the arrival of time politics’ (Mulgan 2005; Virilio 2006 [1977]). The scope of the debate is considerable, stretching from alarmist critiques to more positive evaluations which revel in the busyness and fast pace of city life. On one end are critics of hyper-consumerism, denouncing a ‘too much, too fast’ life-style. Social movements are trying to slow down the speed of life, campaigning for a new ‘simplicity’, for slow food, slow cities, slow conferences, even slow sex (Christensen 2007; Elgin 1993; Honoré 2004; Parkins and Craig 2006). In this view, material civilization in affluent, wealth-orientated consumer societies has been spinning out of control, and the pace of life is becoming too fast for personal wellbeing and environmental sustainability (Aldrich 2005; Schor 1999). On the other end stands a view that sees busyness as a sign of full and active participation in society, based on an historical analysis which shows people working less and having much more leisure than ever before (Easterlin 2001).

This book responds to these divergent positions and ambivalent perceptions, seeing them as an entry into important unresolved issues about the direction of global change and the texture of consumer culture. The authors of these chapters undercut and challenge the easy dichotomies which link time to crisis or utopian movements by looking in more detail into the complex temporal organization of everyday life. Fast and slow turn out to be inadequate ways to describe past, present and future (Mintz 2006).

One reason for the cacophony of voices and feelings about the pace of life is that time itself is a complex subject that touches on everyday experience in many different ways. Time is about coordination and rhythm, but it also involves material, emotional, moral and political dimensions. Time is punctuated by extraordinary events like birth and death, but it is also organized through a range of ordinary routines, like sleeping, eating or watching the evening news. Though the passage of time is an experience shared by all, it has never been the exclusive property or singular focus of any one discipline in the humanities or social sciences. Writing on the topic is scattered across history, anthropology, philosophy, geography and sociology, as well as physics, literature and theology. Few scholars focus their entire career on the study of time and temporality in social life; it is usually a topic secondary to something else.

1

Eviatar Zerubavel’s pioneering work shows how temporal cycles – the night shift, the academic year, the internship – overlap, as well as the way these periodic and episodic cycles order and are organized by practices of nursing, educating, getting better and falling ill (Zerubavel 1979, 1981, 1985). Norbert Elias (1969 [1939]) offered a longer term perspective – following ‘civilizing’ forms of ordering time and showing how they take hold at a societal level: permitting otherwise impossible forms of work, communication and traffic coordination, interchange and exchange. James Carey’s work is especially important in showing how the regulation, synchronization and standardization of time was an essential tool used by the state and corporate capitalism to extend their material and cultural control over national landscapes and daily life (1989). For E.P. Thompson (1967) and Tamara Hareven (1982), a more general control of temporality was used by the modern state and industry to regulate the lives of citizens. Controlling the pace of time was the foundation of the Fordist revolution and later movements towards scientific ‘efficiency’ in Taylorism (Kanigel 1999).

In geography, Allen Pred has sought to conceptualize the relation between individual life courses (paths) as characterized and punctuated by collective goals (projects). When applied in a working environment, this analysis helps to show how the temporalities of personal career development and the typically longer term persistence and transformation of institutional and organizational forms overlap, intersect and constitute each other. Using a geological metaphor, recent historians have tried to reveal the shifting layers of time that became sedimented in the formations of modern history (Koselleck 2000; cf. Corfield 2007).

Anthropologists like Alfred Gell (1992) have further questioned the universality of the perception of time, trying to go beyond simple dichotomies of east and west, or modern and primitive, to reveal and number different dimensions of time perception and classification. Other anthropologists like Johannes Fabian (1983) argue that time is the basis for all academic depictions of cultural difference, turning ‘the other into ‘the primitive’, as in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, where the journey upstream becomes a chronological unravelling into the depths of time (also Wilk 1994).

Instead of integrating these different dimensions and approaches, each academic tradition has cut its own path using its own tools. While drawing on these diverse theoretical resources, the studies in this book build a raft of common ground through their continuing focus on empirical studies of daily life. They bridge disciplinary boundaries by drawing inspiration from multiple sources: from the fields of material culture and consumption, from science and technology studies, and from social theories of practice. Rather than viewing time in terms of minutes, hours or years and instead of treating it as a resource that can be stored, released and used up like a rechargeable battery, the contributions to this book emphasize the creative production, reproduction and consumption of multiple temporalities. In this book, the study of time becomes a way to transcend disciplines and methodological traditions.

2 • Elizabeth Shove, Frank Trentmann and Richard Wilk