Time, Consumption and Everyday Life Practice, Materiality and Culture

Again, this is not the case with fashion, even though the growth of fashion institutes which professionally create new designs in established markets makes this distinction less clear. But a new fashion does not radically have to change anything; ‘all’ the fashion designer has to do is to catch the right, fleeting, moment in order to introduce his or her own invention. They have to listen to the ‘Zeitgeist’ (Blumer 1969). Fads are, in this respect, more mysterious. What makes them so peculiar is the abruptness and totality of their transformation. New practices seem to appear from nothing and disappear again without any trace at all. It is hardly worthwhile to predict and plan them. Trend-setters are of little use in designing the next fad. All that the producer can do is to offer a large variety of items and hope that at least one of them becomes a success. As a consequence, in order to make ends meet or to make a profit, a firm operating in, for instance, book publishing or music producing has to cover the costs of eight or nine failures with the sales of one best-seller (Hirsch 1972).⁶

Producers and sellers, on the one hand, and customers, on the other hand, have their own principles and standards of quality to follow in making decisions, and these only overlap partially and temporarily (Gronow 2004). Therefore producers probe their way around, responding to the moves of their closest competitors or market leaders. Consumers choose from a bigger or smaller variety of alternatives offered on sale at any one time without any clear idea what would be most satisfying for them. In Schulze’s (1992: 442–444) analyses of the modern (mass) consumer society of inner experiences, both sides, producers and consumers, come to favour small gradual changes. Producers offer new ‘numbers’ of old series, consumers stick to the familiar and safe and prefer more of the same with minor variations, making ‘real’ innovations which would radically challenge existing social and cultural practices exceptional and rare. Our everyday observations would seem to confirm such a conclusion. When looking at the great number and variety of commodities in the supermarkets or in home electronics, one often gets an impression of eternal repetition of sameness. Compared to the numerous new everyday items of consumption advertised regularly, which seem to increase exponentially, the emergence of ‘real’ innovations is very rare. Despite all the efforts and money put into product development and innovation, inventions which create new markets and constituencies of customers as well as new social practices or ways of life cannot occur daily or weekly. On the contrary, new fashions abound in most areas of popular consumption. Fashion cycles get more intensive. But they do not, after all, change the world that much. Fads also come and go, initially making a real difference, but then vanishing without leaving any traces in our culture except, perhaps, in our collective memory.

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Notes

1. For a general history of fashion designs, see Steele (1997).

1. Cf. with the story of the, in many respects similar but somewhat later, commercial success of the Sony Walkman (Gay et al. 1997)

1. In their study on fads and fashions, Meyersohn and Katz (1957: 598) referred to urban bohemia as a cultural laboratory in which something new can be tried out. Similarly, fashion historians have paid attention to the various youth sub-cultures as creative milieus of experimenting with new designs and models. Schiffer’s (1993) restricted constituencies, with their true believers in their own ‘cultural imperative’, in the desirability and need of a certain product, can play a similar role. What unites the urban bohemians, youth sub-cultures and constituencies of technical inventions is that all kinds of new ideas and products can be tried out in them without great harm for or impact on society at large.

1. More recently, Best (2006) analysed fads in social institutions like management, education and medicine.

1. It is an interesting question, which I am not able to take up in this chapter in any great detail, where such product differentiation due to technical improvements should be placed. In the case of the colour TV, for instance, it would be difficult to claim that this was a real innovation compared to its black and white predecessor since it hardly created any radically different, new cultural habits or routines. But quite early on it created a new market of its own, distinct from the market of the old black and white TVs.

1. As some researchers claim, internet marketing has changed this old rule. With diminishing sales expenses and greater access, sales statistics have extended to include an increasing range of lesser-selling products (the so-called ‘long tail phenomenon; see Anderson 2006; Falk 2007).

References

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The Edge of Agency Routines, Habits and Volition Richard Wilk

Introduction

The community of dog walkers is rarefied and intangible. We do not know each other, but we meet and pass on sidewalks and in parks, our interactions focused on and mediated by our canine companions. We are generally dutiful, and though we are locked into the routines demanded by the needs of our pets, we are generally trying hard to enjoy the experience, even in the rain, late at night, and at times when we would rather be doing almost anything else. After all, we chose to have a dog in the first place … or did we? Archie the Dachshund was the answer to my daughter’s forceful demands for a puppy, which she of course promised to take care of herself. The routine demands of feeding, watering, cleaning up, training and walking were not as much fun in reality as they were in her 12-year-old imagination. This kind of thing means pets are often on a strange boundary between choice and duty, desire and compulsion, and as such they provide an avenue for thinking about the degree to which routines are the products of our own volition, or patterns forced upon us by circumstance and the power of others.

Let me give another canine example of how complex the interplay between choice and compulsion can be. Taking Archie to the office with me every day turned out to be the solution to a problem of self-discipline. Once I sit down at my desk in the morning, the endless flow of short- and long-term tasks, the constant barrage of emails and phone calls, classes and appointments often consumes me to the extent that I grab a few bites at my desk at noontime so I can keep working through the day. Even going to the bathroom is an interruption of the flow. I know this is bad for me, physically and mentally – but I always have one more thing which needs to be done, and exercise, social time, breaks and stretching all keep slipping down the priority list. But a dog’s bladder knows nothing of the urgent survey from the Dean’s office and the stack of books which are overdue for review. When Archie has to go, I have to drop everything else and take him. And once outside, I get involved in the flow of the walk, the hunt for squirrels, meetings with other dogs and pleasant social time with other walkers. The dog’s demands have become, for me, a kind of liberation from self-imposed drudgery, a means of jarring me out of one flow and into another.

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This interplay between my own needs and those of the dog displays one of the most fundamental, yet also one of the most puzzling and poorly understood, paradoxes in the sociology of daily life: what is the relationship between choice and habit? Why do some routines give us a sense of freedom, and act as instruments of choice, while others seem to be so restrictive and keep us from making choices? Furthermore, why are some routines and habits voluntary and breakable, while others are compulsive and seem to drive us beyond our ability to control them?

This chapter is an exploration in the phenomenology of routines, with the goal of understanding better how daily life has come to feel for so many people like a heavy burden, a maze of relentless demands. Like O’Dell and Ehn & Löfgren in this volume, I am concerned with the subtle and often subjective differences between the routines which make life possible, and those which make living miserable. Is this a recent dilemma of the human condition, or is it something inherent in the way we perceive time and regulate our daily lives?

Routines and Modernity

Both Durkheim and Weber associated habitual and unthinking routinized behaviour with animals, and with primitive and traditional societies. Weber thought that uncivilized peoples had not yet developed the capacities for reflexive awareness and rationality characteristic of modern peoples. In this scheme it made perfect sense for anthropologists to focus their attention on ‘ritual’ as the major determining element of behaviour in pre-modern societies, since those peoples’ lives were supposedly ruled by timeless prescriptive rhythms rather than rationality. Utilitarianism and rational choice theory, on the other hand, elevated the act of decision making to the core of human nature, and focus attention on modern societies where this form of rationality is supposedly given free play.

This equation of habit and routine with the world of animals and primitive people, and of choice and decision making with modernity, has the unfortunate effect of setting time’s arrow on a course where the ‘inevitable’ future will see the complete elimination of ritual and habit, through the advancement of technology. Durkheim and Weber were reluctant modernists, but modernists nonetheless, and they were optimistic in their predictions about the growth in rational choice and transactional logic in social life. One of the great and enduring myths of modernization theory is that modernity ‘liberates’ humans from routine and enslavement to the forces of habit. The imagined future of modernization theory is life based entirely on improvisation, where every day is invented anew. This is a very odd utopia in many ways, for it is based on the assumption that people really do want to be liberated from ‘dull’ routine, that an endless flow of calculated choices is a way of life people would really want.

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This realization lies behind new theories of time which argue that modernity brings with it a lack of freedom and increased time pressures which may have the appearance of rationality, but which are detrimental to society and the individual (e.g. Ritzer 1993). In Rhythmanalysis Henri Lefebvre argues that much of modernity is composed of mindless rhythmic routine, of a kind of external training he calls ‘dressage’, for which he uses examples like monasteries, schools and the military, which instil habits as a form of discipline. ‘Liberty is born in a reserved space and time, sometimes wide, sometimes narrow; occasionally reduced by the results of dressage to an unoccupied lacuna’ (2004: 43). In this, Lefebvre follows Durkheim, agreeing that liberty is found in a lack of routine; his quarrel is that modernity has not reduced the place for it in society. Instead the state and its institutions have stepped in to force us into a mindless pace of routine which occupies our daily lives and limits the space of freedom, turning the practice of autonomy into the evasion of routine, rather than self-discovery or exploration.

For Lefebvre and many others, the profusion of goods and advertising, as well as the sheer profusion of goods in consumer culture, are key elements in limiting freedom and creating the dull routine which characterizes modernity. In a similar turn, Simmel and Veblen long ago predicted that the rational thrust of modernity would get diverted into a forest of emotions and social games built around fashion and consumption. A host of other social critics, from Stuart Ewen (1976) to Benjamin Barber (2008), have elaborated on the critique that modern people have become slaves to their own shopping and spending, a kind of ‘second serfdom’ of luxury rather than agrarian squalor.

The growing literature on ‘time drought’ and the increasing pace of modernity raises the question of whether it is the density of events and crowding of experience into limited time which restricts freedom in modern times, or if instead it is the habitual and repetitious rhythm, the crushing boredom of routine which gives people the experience of time shortage. In other words, are we suffering from too much choice, or too little choice? Or is it possible that we could be suffering from both at the same time? This certainly would help explain Jalas’s insightful comment that something about the pace and tempo of contemporary life allows boredom and busyness to coexist (2006: 42).

This cannot be the whole story, for it runs completely contrary to a well-developed and widespread popular perception that wealth and the choices of consumer culture in the marketplace are enjoyable, liberating and allow the full development of the human capacity for autonomous as well as social pleasure (see Maslow 1943, one of the most often-cited papers in social science). Certeau (1984) makes a strong argument for the way modern people make material culture choices in creative ways which undercut the efforts of advertisers and marketers to impose uniform categories. And the sociology of life-styles, sub-cultures and fashion communities is based on the idea that consumption enables people to craft new ways of life, forming cultures of choice around alternative life-styles (e.g. Featherstone 1991).

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So, on one hand, we have a utilitarian narrative in which modernity liberates us from the drudgery of repetitive routines, and allows the free play of choice and rationality. On the other hand there is a romantic narrative which tells us just the opposite, that once we were free to live in nature, but that industrial society has trapped us into an ever-increasing pace of forced routine, that industrial lives are built around the careful choreography of simultaneous rhythms which exhaust and drain us.

One way theorists have tried to reconcile these conflicting stories is to posit two kinds of time, what Lefebvre (2004) calls the ‘homogenous mechanical time’ of industry and the ‘rhythmic cycles’ of nature and the cosmos. This is, of course, an echo of many other dichotomies of linear vs cyclic time, diachrony vs synchrony, structure vs history, hot vs cold, which try to express some fundamental difference between modern and pre-modern experiences of time, an enterprise which Gell convincingly argues is fundamentally flawed and doomed to failure (1992: 28–29). There are many more kinds and dimensions of time than can be captured by a single dichotomy or evolutionary generality.

Framing the question of routines and freedom in this way clearly is insufficient – the discourse of modernity with its associated dichotomies and oppositions pulls the argument towards extremes. How can we more productively think about alternatives to the dichotomy of freedom and bondage, the repetition of ritual and the open possibilities of improvisation? How could we effectively re-map the space of action without the extreme ideal types of free will and determinism?

Defining the Problem

Daily life would be extremely difficult if we did not have habits and routines. This becomes most clear when we move house, go through a disaster or undergo a life transition, and our routines and habits are disrupted. Suddenly we have to become mindful of little things, think through details which we normally take for granted, and which have become deeply embedded and encoded in our built environment and possessions. Bathing and brushing one’s teeth, getting dressed in the morning, preparing a quick meal, all require conscious thought and coordination. This shows us how normal life is an intricate synchronized dance, and how complex it is to maintain our bodies, our intimate self, our families and social relationships, homes, pets, vehicles, finances, communications and health.

Even small disruptions can show us how important routines are in allowing everyday life to proceed. We spend hours trying to find our keys, wallets, simple things which should be in their normal places. For some people, the whole day can be spoiled by the lack of a single item in the habitual breakfast. In old age, as memory fails, the bodily habits ingrained in the geography of a familiar home may be the only thing which makes an autonomous daily life possible.

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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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Some of these questions shade into the issue of addiction, which has a psychological and physiological dimension, and when we come to aversions and physical emotions like disgust a dividing line between the biological and cultural is almost purposefully obscured. In general, I would argue that any strict division between thoughtful conscious decision making and unconscious habitual behaviour is a sociological and historical artefact which has no particular relevance to understanding the reality of everyday life. As Halkier says, ‘a sharp distinction between reflexive and routinized consumption practices is impossible to sustain in empirical analysis’ (2001: 27). Real life occupies the space between thought and habit, in a more complex and textured, perhaps layered, wrapped or enfolded space area of partial consciousness. While Halkier conceptualizes this as an ‘overlap’ or as ‘contingency’, below I propose that this terrain is more complex and intricate, and we still need to explore it fully.

Subjective Experience – What Do Routines and Habits Feel Like?

The pace of a habit seems to carry me along, like a jostling crowd. I can see where I am going, but I cannot stop. There is a compulsion behind me, pushing. It is like gravity, easy to fall down the well, just following the stream, as if you are running in a set of grooves worn in the pavement through years of traffic.

I can push back. But it is like swimming upstream and sometimes it is exhausting. If I keep pressing against the habit, though, eventually the resistance starts to diminish. But some habits lie in wait, even after they appear to be broken. You think you have left them behind, but then you find yourself falling back into a familiar habit in a moment of stress, while your attention is somewhere else. Your body is performing the routine again before you know it, following an unwanted path without you, like riding a bicycle into an abyss.

I tried brushing my teeth holding the brush in my left hand instead of my right. The new action does not feel right the first few times. It has a nagging feeling, like a tooth with a chip in it, you cannot stop running your tongue over that spot. You have to keep doing it, until eventually the feeling of wrongness slowly fades away. It is more like you just forget to feel the wrongness one day – you are distracted by something else and your attention does not return. The next thing you know you are doing it without thinking about it. You forget to worry, and go on without thinking.

Getting a new habit going is climbing uphill at first, but you hope eventually you will get somewhere where you can relax and coast. It is like an investment in the future. The hard work you are doing in the present is a big distraction, but maybe once you get going it can become automatic and you won’t have to think about it anymore. Your body will take over, and your mind can move on to other things.

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