Time, Consumption and Everyday Life Practice, Materiality and Culture

This saga of breakdowns was more than a string of personal bad luck. What makes these cases interesting, and why we know about them, is that these private frustrations had a public outlet. The GDR had an elaborate petitioning system (even encouraged it), where citizens could voice their complaints or suggestions to the heads of the regime. Historians have mainly viewed this system as an instrument to contain political opposition, if with diminishing success over time. But it also worked as a channel for the frustrations of daily life. The endless wait for the telephone, the queuing for children’s clothes, or, in the case of the Sparwassers, sitting once again on the side of the road in a broken-down car – the petitioning process amplified a sense that life was not ticking according to its proper rhythm, that the regime was failing on its promise to bring material comfort to all. Through the petitioning system, breakdowns exposed the dysfunctionality of the regime. The thick documentation of letters and complaints to the VEB works that the Sparwassers prepared was a kind of quotidian politics of disruption, about the rights of the little man to things running smoothly, and to redress where they don’t – in short, of not having to put up with repeated breakdown. As Mrs Sparwasser put it bluntly: this ‘cannot be normal’.

The second episode is from contemporary Canada and concerns the normalization of disruption. For families who had lived in Manitoba for generations, the frequent flooding of the Red River was part of their culture. When newcomers began to prepare for the risk by moving possessions to higher floors or storage, they were disparaged by locals for being ‘excessive’. Floods happened. There was nothing that human intervention, adaptation or planning could do to change that. In this case, the habit of naturalizing flood made for such a high degree of elasticity in people’s behaviour that, when a major flood struck in 1997, many were unwilling to evacuate or move their animals to higher ground, with devastating consequences (Scanlon 2001: 1–2).

The breakdown of the Hongkong Mass Transit Railway (HMTR) on 6 May 1996 shows the opposite force at work: the denormalization of disruption. Instead of being normal, the public came to view disruption as exceptional and avoidable, the result of human error and mismanagement. On the morning of 6 May 1996, a trackcircuit defect near one station escalated into a delay that held up sixty-six trains for almost an hour. When trains resumed at 11 a.m., 156,000 commuters were late for work. Forty-four people had to be hospitalized, including three pregnant women. The incident is interesting because it occurred in one of the world’s most intensely used and most reliable transport systems. The HMTR carries 800 million passengers a year. In 1995, a mere 0.1 per cent of its 717,000 journeys had an incident, that is, less than one potentially accident-causing incident for every million passengers.

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The breakdown nicely illustrates the inherent tensions in tightly coupled, interactive systems that require decentralization as well as centralization but cannot have both. It is also revealing for the mismatch between objective performance and subjective expectations, or, to be precise, between the operator’s idea of routine behaviour during a delay and that of many passengers. For it was the number of people pressing alarm-plungers that created the domino-effect of a technical fault tuning into serious delays and overcrowding. The immediate response of the transport operator was to blame passengers for the inappropriate use of the alarm-plungers, which had been designed for serious emergency use only. The railway expert in charge of the inquiry gave the HMTR a clean sheet of health. The system’s safety and reliability were as high as possible, he found. The system broke down because so many alarms were set off – 109 in total – ‘petty actions by disgruntled passengers’. The public was outraged. The delay was unacceptable, a sign of inefficiency and incompetency. Newspapers attacked the subway system as ‘suited to a Third World backwater’, ‘flabby and frayed around the edges’ (Ellis 1998).

What these cases point to is a dilemma of vulnerability. Groups that view disruptions and disasters as ‘normal’, acts of God or things that ‘just happen’ are less likely to challenge authorities, demand redress or radically alter their habits. This can defuse potentially conflictual situations; one reason why there was not more anger during the 2001 blackout in Stockholm, it has been argued, was that the district most affected had a high percentage of immigrants used to power shortages (Deverell 2003). But this also leaves groups disproportionally vulnerable to disruptions that are of a more extreme force or of a different kind than the ‘normal’ one. By contrast, groups with a low threshold of tolerance will place much higher demands on social and technological systems to run smoothly. This makes political authorities and social organizations more vulnerable to frustration and may create unrealistic expectations of a normality without breakdowns.

How people respond to breakdowns is further shaped by political economy. It is not that in capitalist societies things do not break down. Consumer movements in the 1960s and 1970s fought many battles over cars that would not start or exploded on impact. Notwithstanding decades of improved standards, people continue to complain about faulty products and services, especially computers, public services, electrical goods and car repairs; in Australia, 73 per cent of households complain about these an average 3.4 times per year, to be precise (SOCAP 1994). Rather, the difference lies in the ways in which frustration with breakdown is channelled. In market societies, complaints are directed at particular companies, not the government or the market system as such. Frustrations, accountability and influence are diffused, whereas they were bundled and laid at the door of the regime in socialist societies.

The question is how these structural traits have played themselves out historically. Have they enabled market-based societies to live with disruptions more or less well? How do societies perform that depend more on familial and social networks in absorbing the pressure of breakdowns and repair than others? When are breakdowns accepted in silence, when do they feed back information that might improve the performance of systems? There are parallels here to Hirschman’s distinction between exit and voice (Hirschman 1970). The complexity of modern technological systems adds further to the dilemma of mobilizing voice. In a society where disruptions are accepted as relatively normal, what are the incentives to make life run more smoothly? Making people more demanding, giving them more outlets to vent their frustration (complaints management) and posting performance targets creates higher pressures for accountability and performance. But it may also initiate a vicious cycle of ever-higher expectations of perfect functionality. In a competitive marketplace, a company might put customer service to good use to gain an edge over rivals: fly with us, we have fewer delays and do not lose as many bags. However, in the world of public transport, motorways, energy and other natural monopolies where there is no choice but through which so many rhythms of everyday life are coordinated in the first place, this force is much weaker.

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The challenge of managing disruption has been amplified by the historical promise of networks to bring smooth flow and universal access to all. We except to have running water on demand, day and night, and have light when we flick a switch. It is useful to recall how recent such expectations are in the developed world, and how unusual they remain elsewhere. In British cities, constant water supply was only introduced from the 1860s, but even then the system was prone to temporary suspensions, as in the shortages of the mid-1890s with which we began our discussion. Victorian engineers and urban reformers had optimistic views of the efficiency and durability of their networks. Yet these gained their true public force in the social-democratic vision of public services, as suggested by the case of London, where water was municipalized in 1902. Public control of public services, so the assumption, would put an end to shortages. There would be a civic contract between citizens and the state. The state agreed to increase the scope and level of consumption – by expanding networks, connecting the countryside and bringing everyone into the realm of a civilized existence. Consumers, in return, were expected to be good citizens and not waste water (Taylor and Trentmann forthcoming).

On the eve of the Second World War, progressive leaders in Britain openly mused that municipalization had made droughts a thing of the past. This was fantasy. There were major shortages in 1921 and 1933–4. But now such disruptions tended to be externalized, blamed on temporary, external variants. They were not part of normality. The association of rising levels of water consumption with civilization and progress made it difficult to acknowledge the pressures internal to the system caused by consumers’ expanding and intensifying practices of bathing, gardening, washing the car and, after the Second World War, using a washing machine. The civic contract inevitably limited the scope of action in response to shortages, favouring the expansion of supply through reservoirs and transfers between networks at the expense of modulating consumption in the long-term. It prioritized appeals to voluntary restraint during serious drought – be a good citizen and do not water your garden, please, drive a dirty car as a sign that you care for the community, and so on. But these were only momentary signals, and with mixed effect. As one critic pointed out during the 1934 drought, appeals to consume less water were of doubtful value when people had for years been encouraged to consume more in the pursuit of cleanliness and civilization (Taylor et al. in press).³

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Reprivatization in the last two decades has not put an end to shortages or blackouts, but it has changed the political constellation between consumers and producers. On the one hand, it has made disruptions once again politically more sensitive and confrontational. As in nineteenth-century London, the fact that companies were making profits while their customers went without services created public anger and conflict (Morgan and Trentmann 2006). After the blackout in Buenos Aires in 1999, people took to the streets and burned tyres in protest. The situation was only defused when the electricity company Edesur accepted liability and began to compensate users (Ullberg 2005). More recently, some commuters have set trains on fire near Buenos Aires in protest against delays during rush-hours. Likewise in Soweto, privatization in 1999 has made the utility company Eskom a target in grass-roots battles over cut-offs (Egan and Wafer 2004).

On the other hand, the move to private ownership has come with a new recognition that consumers are not just recipients but co-producers, whose behaviour is vital for managing shortages. In Britain, in 2006–7, water companies defused criticism of ‘fat-cat profits’ through a consumer-orientated campaign with information on expected shortages and water-saving tips. The Californian ‘Flex Your Power’ campaign in 2006 told consumers that they had it in their power to resolve the power shortage collectively (Todd and Wood 2006). It could be argued that we see here a general trend of providers trying to recruit users to assist with maintenance, repair, monitoring and servicing, already widespread in the commercial service sector (self-service, customer service) but also reaching into public services which seek to capitalize on users’ competence and voice (Clarke et al. 2007).

Disruptions deserve more respect than they tend to be given. If it were unwise to romanticize breakdowns, it would be equally wrong to see them purely as a temporary, external intrusion or an irritating nuisance. Breakdowns are a systemic part of everyday life. Consumers are not only their victims. They play an active role in absorbing and coordinating them, in some cases even generating them. Breakdowns can serve as a temporary flashlight, illuminating dynamics of everyday life that lie obscured in more continuous and holistic accounts of consumer culture. There are synergies here with an older intellectual tradition, that of pragmatism, which recognized the insights to be gleaned during irregular moments when habits are broken or switched. Looking at a landscape with our head upside down, William James argued, makes the colours grow richer and more varied, and the contrasts between light and shade more marked (James 1890: 81; see also Brown 2003: 74–80).

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Most disruptions in social life are not as deliberate, nor do they turn the world upside down, but they disturb habitual ways of doing things. Disruptions disturb the conventional view of consumer culture, which has been painted either as a paradise of choice and freedom or as a smooth materialistic machine that has turned active citizens into docile, privatized consumers. Quite the opposite, the more consumption, the more breakdown, tension and patchwork. Disruption reveals the material world as tenuous and fragile, one that involves a lot of energy, maintenance and adjustments from consumers.

Reactions to disruption stretch from fury to a sense of liberation, but, beyond individual responses, we should also appreciate the social and political energies created in moments when collective habits suffer from interference. Disruptions trigger new social processes and political consciousness. The hope to create perfectly functional systems is therefore as unhelpful as an attitude of powerless resignation that simply treats all interferences as unavoidable. A more realistic attitude would be to recognize disruptions as a creative as well as destructive part of normality. This brings us back to poor John Kyffin, the London shopkeeper with whom we began, who had his water supply interrupted in 1895. Kyffin first took the water company to court. Then, after his case was thrown out, he mobilized citizens in his neighbourhood and led a deputation to the local government demanding stiff penalties against the water companies in compensation for the shortages they had suffered. It is debatable whether a world without disruptions would be a more desirable place.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the Economic and Social Research Council for grant RES-052-27-002 and to Heather Chappells for research assistance.

Notes

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coping with shortages and filled up their bathtubs and other vessels in advance, thus worsening the problem. Direct interference with consumers’ habits was a last resort, and only came after industry had its water rationed, as in the 1959 drought, when 170,000 people in the Irwell Valley were prohibited from using their washing machines and even the bath.

References

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My Soul for a Seat Commuting and the Routines of Mobility Tom O’Dell

Introduction

Home, 7:32 a.m., a February morning. That’s where I was a few minutes ago. Two minutes behind schedule. I’m biking down a dark and snowy path towards the train station. On my way I will pass three clocks: two outside the offices of two different opticians, and one by the train station. I have one traffic light as a potential obstacle in my flow between these clocks. Each clock is a marker of how my day is going to be. I don’t know why I am so stressed about being two minutes behind schedule . . . I’ve actually set my watch five minutes ahead of time, so I know I’m actually three minutes ahead of schedule. But in my own mind, my ideal time for leaving for the train is two minutes behind me. I bike a little harder. If there is one thing I hate, it’s standing on the train platform, and watching my train leave. It always happens when I am most certain that I am on time – or just a little uncertain.

This is the beginning of my commute to work. It’s basically the same routine every day. Same bike path. Same clocks. Same tension. No matter how early I leave home. At times it may feel like a necessary evil, but usually commuting to work is, like most routines, something which I, and millions of other people, ‘just do’ on a daily basis. At first glance it is tempting to view commuting as a very distinctive and particular type of routine due to its public nature. As people make their way from home to work and back again they handle a series of boundaries between themselves and the surrounding world. And this is a phenomenon which I shall reflect upon shortly. But commuting also shares a number of characteristics with many other types of routines (such as making meals, doing the laundry or housecleaning) which people engage in on a regular basis. It is, for example, stretched out over time (taking anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours of time to perform each day), and composed of a series of practices that are linked together. Very often these practices are not only linked together, but even coordinated with other activities, and organized in a very particular serial order.

Daily routines have long been characterized as the epitome of that which is grey, bland and stifling. These are the black holes of joy, spontaneity and inspiration from which scholars have all too often presumed we need to escape (Cohen and Taylor 1992) – simple, mindless activities which we do over and over again. But this perspective belies the fact that most routines, particularly those which are serially linked, involve polyrhythmic fluctuations of activity and non-activity which, while subtle, can be complexly organized, and highly meaningful aspects of people’s daily lives (Seigworth and Gardiner 2004: 141).

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Taking this position as a point of departure, the following text uses commuting as an empirical prism through which to problematize daily routines and their rhythms while simultaneously challenging the perception of them as being static, uniform and empty of meaning. In order to do this, the chapter begins by outlining some of the ways in which the routines of commuting are important to people. It then proceeds by interrogating the issue of structure and the manner in which people creatively and ritualistically use routines at times to provide order to their lives, while at other times they find themselves longing to break out of existing patterns of behaviour. As part of this discussion, the text argues that routines do not just unfold in a simple predetermined and mechanical fashion; they have tempos and rhythms of their own that make them susceptible to change, but that even help people adapt to the ever-changing context of everyday life. As a means of exemplifying this, the chapter closes by examining the particularities of the commute as a public endeavour in which people continuously use routines as vehicles of boundary control – ever moving back and forth between states of public and private; work and leisure; and home and away.

In order to address these issues, the work in hand draws upon a several different forms of methods and materials. In part, it is anchored in a combination of short interviews conducted with commuters, and materials gathered from local Swedish newspapers about commuting.¹ But more importantly, larger portions of the following text are the products of phenomenologically orientated empirical observations I have made over the past seven years on my own commute between Lund and Helsingborg. These observations constitute a form of auto-ethnography in which I have allowed my own experiences as a commuter to work as a point of departure for portions of the analysis. The choice to introduce auto-ethnographic materials was motivated by my desire to move the analysis from beyond the bounds of what people say they are doing, and into the realm of the actual rhythms, tempos and practices of commuting.²

The Drama of the Undramatic

It’s actually gotten to the point that passengers have gotten into fist fights on the bus . . . Things are difficult.

Bus driver in Åtvidaberg³

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