Time, Consumption and Everyday Life Practice, Materiality and Culture

Introduction

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Everyday Practice and the Production and Consumption of Time Elizabeth Shove

Everybody’s in so much of a rush nowadays, now everybody’s trying to make money, trying to get to places, they’ve got to get here, they’ve got to get there, they’ve got to do their shopping – this, that and the other, I think there’s a lot more pressure, you haven’t got the time to do as much as what you want in a day nowadays.

Hedges 2001, part 4: 14

a sense of social time is made and re-made according to social practices.

May and Thrift 2001: 5

Introduction

In this chapter the simple observation that things like sleeping, eating, working and playing all take time provides the starting point for a progressively more complicated discussion of how the micro and macro temporalities of daily life might be represented and conceptualized. In what follows I consider two broad approaches. The first relatively familiar view is that time is a scarce resource which practices consume. The second is that ‘it is the rhythm of social life which is at the basis of the category of time’ (Durkheim 1976: 440). In other words, temporal arrangements arise from the effective reproduction of everyday life, or, to put it more strongly, practices make time.

I suggest that these two orientations, one emphasizing the consumption, the other the production of time, justify and are sustained by different lines of inquiry and methods of research. In reviewing these approaches my aim is to identify promising but as yet under-developed ways of analysing the interweaving of personal and collective logistics. Rather than studying the temporal ‘properties’ of a single practice, or the life and times of a single practitioner, my aim is to explore the temporal implications of contemporary complexes of social practice. In the process, new questions arise: for example, what does the appropriate or competent reproduction of everyday practice (i.e. the sets of practices that make up everyday life) demand in terms of minutes, timing, sequence, coordination and career? How do temporal profiles of this kind emerge? How do they fit together and with what consequence now and for the future? In the last part of the chapter I speculate about how the practice-time characteristics of society might be described and represented. While there are points of connection between Lefebvre’s work on ‘rhythmanalysis (Lefebvre 2004: 73–74) and the project of capturing the temporal qualities of always-changing, always-intersecting practices, this chapter plays down readymade distinctions between natural/cyclical and social/linear time and concentrates instead on patterns of temporality as they emerge from the dynamic coordination of complex systems of practice.

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The argument developed here builds upon an understanding of practice as a ‘type of behaving and understanding that appears at different locales and at different points of time and is carried out by different body/minds’ (Reckwitz 2002: 250). As Schatzki puts it, a practice is ‘a temporally unfolding and spatially dispersed nexus of doings and sayings’ (1996: 89). In this sense, practices exist as provisional but recognizable entities composed of also recognizable conventions, images and meanings; materials and forms of competence. At the same time, if they are to exist at all, practices require active reproduction and performance. In other words, people have to do them. More than that, it is through these doings that the contours of individual practices are defined, reproduced and constituted. Since people engage in many practices (during a day, a year or a lifetime), any discussion of the temporal texture of daily life has to take account of how practices intersect in time and in space. There are various ways in which one might approach this topic.

First, and as indicated above, many would agree that uses of time (as well as of energy, water, money, material goods and environmental resources) represent the detectable remains or traces of practice. By following these variously visible trails one can learn, in aggregate and occasionally in detail, about who does what, and about when and how this varies. Although good for retrospectively revealing trends and patterns, exercises of this kind are of limited value in understanding exactly how some practices emerge and others disappear. Since people have to make or find time in which to do – i.e. to perform – practices, it is reasonable to suppose that if new practices are to take hold, time has to be made for them at the expense of others which are no longer performed, or not performed as frequently as before. This reasoning points to a zero-sum model of daily life in which practices compete with each other for necessary temporal, as well as material and cognitive, resources. From this point of view, time-use data also tell us something about the relative successes of rival practices.

Ironically, those who follow the temporal traces of practice are obliged to gloss over the fragile nature of the always provisional entities they track and play down the endless processes of recruitment and learning that are inevitably involved. By contrast, those who concentrate on the details of doing make much of the point that experiences accumulate and identities evolve in ways that are collectively important not only for the careers and trajectories of the individuals involved, but also for the practices they carry and of which they are a part (Becker 1963; Jalas 2006). For example, Sudnow’s (1978) study of becoming a jazz pianist demonstrates that as the novice’s career develops, new possibilities and performances come within his or her reach. At the same time, the enterprise of jazz piano playing – the detail of what it involves and what there is to learn – depends upon and is defined and collectively reproduced by the variously experienced cohorts of those who do it. This work suggests that time-critical concepts like those of an unfolding career are made by dynamic, mutually constitutive relations between practice and practitioner.

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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.¹ 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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Micro-metering of every tap and water outlet in the home (undertaken as part of the Anglian Golden 100 Survey) produces data showing how water-consuming habits vary over the year and how – and to what extent – household routines differ. For example, Figure 1.1 represents the water used in a two-person household known as T10149. The lines on the graph show that members of T10149 have both baths and showers, they make much use of the kitchen sink and their outdoor water consumption peaks in August. We don’t know exactly what the outside tap is used for, how long these particular water-consuming practices take or why there is a sudden dip in July: did it rain, were the occupants on holiday? Whatever the explanation, time allocated to outside-tap-using-practices in the summer is spent doing something else in winter.

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Should evidence like this exist for a large population and over a significant number of years, it would undoubtedly reveal changing habits on a massive scale. For example, the arrival of daily showering as opposed to weekly bathing would show up as traces both of time and of water consumption, with people now devoting more minutes and litres to ‘personal hygiene’ than before, and with these minutes now being spread more evenly across the week. Sure enough, data on each ‘microcomponent’ of water use, gathered by Anglian Water since 1992, reveal increases in the proportions of water used for showering and a parallel decrease in bathing.

None of this is especially surprising, but these examples are useful in highlighting relevant differences between complex systems of practice and consumption in this case of energy, water and time. While the demand for energy and water increases and decreases over the year and during the day depending upon the resource intensity of what people do, this is not so of time. Strategies of multi-tasking arguably allow individuals to increase the intensity of time use and so extend the envelope of the day (a Yahoo–OMD study [2006] identified a 43-hour day made possible by multitasking), but a great many practices are mutually exclusive: doing them simply precludes doing something else at the same time.

It is because of this quality that data showing how the twenty-four hours of the day are on average allocated to specific activities (Figures 1.2 and 1.3) reveal interesting differences in the profile of what Finnish and French people do when, and in the homogeneity of the sample.

These graphs demonstrate that French respondents spent more time eating and that on a number of counts lunchtime is more pronounced than in Finland, a country in which food consumption is fairly evenly distributed across the day. They also illustrate the extent of collective variation, for example, in the duration of the normal working day, the spread of morning and evening rush hours and the level of societal synchronicity. I shall return to this issue of inter-personal scheduling, but for the moment it is enough to recognize that going to sleep and waking up are effectively collective processes – even for those who do them alone (Lefebvre 2004: 75).

Figures 1.2 and 1.3 are snapshots of a particular year (2000), so although they depict differences and similarities, they tell us little about how such arrangements come to be as they are. Providing it has been collected consistently over a number of years, time-use data can reveal changes in the profile of what people do. Based on a comparison of time-use studies from the Netherlands, Norway, France, UK and USA, Southerton et al. (2007) suggest that, contrary to popular opinion, reading practices are not converging, nor are rates of participation declining dramatically in the face of other competing activities. While this research gives a sense of the ebb and flow of specific ways of spending time, and hence the relative vitality of different practices, it does not show how discrete rivalries develop,² for example between print-based reading, TV viewing or reading on the internet.

Everyday Practice

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If time is one amongst other resources that practices need to survive, it is important to think about how they capture and secure necessary minutes or hours of attention given the very many other things that people might do in a day. How do new practices enter the frame and how are others squeezed out or reconfigured?

Practices as Competitors: For Time and Other Resources

When focusing on relatively bounded populations, like those who enjoy winter sports, it may be possible to demonstrate the impact of new practices on those which are already established. For instance, snowboarding appears to have stolen energy and enthusiasm from people who previously concentrated on skiing (Franke and Shah 2003). More generally, it seems that the arrival of TV viewing challenged other forms of leisure. Newspaper articles reporting on a BBC daily life study conducted in 1952 refer to a running contest between gardening and TV watching: according to the Daily Sketch, 14 April 1952, ‘Many people will watch television this afternoon and evening instead of going out. There will be few gardeners among them however. A BBC inquiry into the changes TV makes in family life reveals that it is seldom allowed to come between a man and his flowerbeds’ (cited in Griffiths and Holden 2004). Gardening remains extremely popular in Britain today, but audience figures suggest that TV viewing has gained ground since 1952 and that flowerbeds have lost some of the prime time commitment they once commanded.

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Elizabeth Shove

While some innovations add to the pressures of daily life (e.g. new practices have to be fitted into an already crowded schedule), others, like so-called ‘labour-saving technologies’, promise to release time for competing pursuits. Whether they have this effect or not (Cowan 1983; Hand and Shove 2007; Shove and Southerton 2000), the key point, at least in the context of the present discussion, is that such devices acquire value in relation to and as part of a struggle between competing practices. The nature of this struggle is coloured by the fact that concepts of effective accomplishment translate into seemingly necessary minutes of participation and powerful injunctions of timing. Although not undertaken with a discussion of time in mind, Kaufmann’s (1998) study of ‘Dirty Linen’ points to two time-critical aspects of the practice wars of daily life, these being an understanding of appropriate performance and a related sense of compulsion.

Everyday Practice

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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’.³ 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.

Taking 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.

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Elizabeth Shove