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The importance of routines: some conceptual reflections

The importance of routines: some conceptual reflections. Alan Warde, School of Social Sciences, University of Manchester ‘Modelling Routine’s, workshop at Manchester Metropolitan University 25 November 2014. On routines. Sociological analysis and the consumer Theories of practice

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The importance of routines: some conceptual reflections

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  1. The importance of routines: some conceptual reflections Alan Warde, School of Social Sciences, University of Manchester ‘Modelling Routine’s, workshop at Manchester Metropolitan University 25 November 2014

  2. On routines • Sociological analysis and the consumer • Theories of practice • Sociology and timing • Habit and routine • Temporal and procedural routines

  3. 1) Choice and the sociologist’s burden • ‘Economics is all about how people make choices, Sociology is all about how they don’t have any choices to make’ (attributed to Duesenberry) • The puzzle of variety: • An average life has 100,000 eating events • An average British supermarket sells 27,000 items • So why are people not unpredictable, eccentric, confused, dumbstruck, undecided, anxious, overwhelmed by choice? • Where do patterns come from?

  4. Models of the individual • 1) The rational consumer = a sovereign individual, choosing intentionally and rationally in the light of utility or self interest (from Economics) • 2) The expressive consumer = pursuer of self-identity, expressive lifestyle (from the cultural turn) • Bauman, Beck and Giddens: individualisation and the inevitability of making choices and their impact on identity. • The end of class or the loss of the emergent level in social scientific analysis; after macro-sociology • ‘the’ consumer – of agency and voluntarism • A dominant model – choices and decisions of individuals with substantial control over their personal destinies.

  5. Explaining consumption: critique of the sovereign consumer • Consumption is more than purchase • Decisions are not personal • Choices are not independent of one another • Items are acquired and used repetitiously • Role of deliberation easily exaggerated • Warde A and Southerton D (eds.) (2012) Introduction, The Habits of Consumption, COLLeGIUM: Studies across Disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences, Volume 12, Helsinki: Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, 1-25.

  6. Contemporary Sociological Analysis • The search for social patterns and regularities • Activity + Situation + Position • Two challenges: • Against Methodological Individualism: interdependence and the predictability of the Other • Against Mind: mindlessness and cognitive science

  7. 2) The emphases of practice theory Habit and routine Doing (praxis) Practical consciousness Practical competence Embodiment Collectivity (other people) Flow/sequence Dispositions The material Performances Actions Thinking Discursive consciousness Reasoning Mentalism Individuality (ego) Unit acts Decisions The symbolic Acts

  8. Practices, habits and routines • Critique of ‘portfolio model’ suggests importance of habit and routine • Habit re-introduced to social scientific analysis • Routine as a minor relation? • Theories of practice emphasise both habit and routines

  9. 3) Sociology and Timing • Zerubavel (1981) • Meals as Zeitgeber • Grignon (1993) • Hagerstrand (and Pred 1986) • Time geography and daily paths • Giddens (1984) • Gershuny, MTUS and Time-use Surveys • Domestic divisions of labour • Eating patterns • From duration to sequence

  10. Zerubavel (1981) • 4 principles of temporal regularity: • Rigid sequential structures • Expected duration • Standardized temporal locations • Uniform rate of recurrence • Zerubavel, E. (1981). Hidden Rhythms: schedules and calendars in social life. Berkeley, University of California Press.

  11. Giddens (1979, 1984) • Routinisation and re-routinisation • Theory of practice • Central Problems of Social Theory (Polity, 1979) • The Constitution of Society (Polity, 1984)

  12. Gary Alan Fine (1995) • 5 dimensions • periodicity (rhythm of the activity) • tempo • timing (synchronization of activities) • duration • sequence (ordering of events) • Fine GA (1996) Kitchens: the culture of restaurant work, Berkeley: University of California Press, p.55

  13. Timing: propinquity, simultaneity, activity • Appointment diaries, time diaries, calendars, office hours, timetables, working hours, meal times … • Meal patterns • Commuting • Commuters’ habits: trains’ rigid routines = impersonal collective organisation of transport network and passenger-train relationships

  14. Variation in collective routines: timing of meals in UK and Spain UK Time Use Survey 2000 and Encuesta de Uso del Tiempo 2002 Source: Southerton D, Diaz Mendez C and Warde A, ‘Behaviour change and the temporal ordering of eating practices: a UK-Spain comparison’,International Journal of the Sociology of Agriculture and Food

  15. 4) Habit and routine • What is the difference between habit and routine? • Can we integrate the understanding of habit and routine? • Can there be routines without habits?

  16. Habit: a confusing, contested but critical concept • ‘the term “habit” generally denominates a more or less self-actuating disposition or tendency to engage in a previously adopted or acquired form of action’ Camic (1986: 1044) • Repeat performances • Limited reflection and deliberation • Learned, practiced and readily available: self-actuating • = repetition, lack of deliberation, automaticity • Camic C (1986) ‘The matter of Habit’, American Journal of Sociology, 91(5) 1039-87

  17. However, social sciences all hate habit • Intimation of behaviourism • Habits remind them of animals • Yet, habituation offers a plausible avenue to account for routine and repetitive, automatic, contingently coordinated, relatively mindless, largely unplanned conduct.

  18. Ehn and Lofgren (2009) • Routines: 3) Constraining straitkjacket or supportive corset 2) Mechanical reflex or symbolically elaborated ritual 1) Collective pattern or personal pattern • Ehn B and Lofgren O (2009) ‘Routines – made and unmade’, in Shove E, Trentmann F and Wilk R (eds.) Time Consumption and Everyday Life: practice, materiality and culture, London Berg, 99-114.

  19. Thinking differently: appropriation and habituation • Critical accounts (Philosophy, Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Psychology, Cultural Sociology and Theories of Practice) pose strong objections to the Portfolio Model of the actor and the importance of capturing better the less agentic, semi-conscious, non-rational, un-calculating dimensions of action. • Three approaches to habituation: • 3.1 Mindlessness: Thaler and Sunstein, Nudge • 3.2 Environmental conditioning: Swidler, Noe • 3.3 Practical skills and habitus: Bourdieu

  20. Habit in ecological context • ‘insofar as we are skilful and expert, we are not deliberate in what we do. Our skill enables us to respond appropriately to the world and in an automatic way. If we were to deliberate, we would interrupt the flow and undermine the conditions of our own expertise. We would choke. An appreciation of habit and practical skill in our intellectual life reveals that intellectualism is a misguided conception even of our intellectual capacities. Habit and skills, however, are world-involving. Just as my habitual route to work is shaped in part by the landscape in which I find myself, so in general our habits are made possible by the world’s being as it is (even if it is also true that our action shapes the world in turn).’ (Noe, 2009: 127) • Alva Noe (2009) Out of Our Heads: why you are not your brain, and other lessons from the biology of consciousness, New York: Hill and Wang

  21. Habitus: Bourdieu and practice theory • ‘The conditionings associated with a particular class of conditions of existence produce habitus, systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them. Objectively “regulated” and “regular” without being in any way the product of obedience to rules, they can be collectively orchestrated without being the product of the organizing action of a conductor.’ (1990: 53) • model of non-deliberative, yet still purposive, action. • regularities a predicate of social groups as well as individuals. • entailment, social and practical; emergent properties of repetition go beyond the mere sum of the already performed acts. • Bourdieu, P. (1990 [1980]) The Logic of Practice, Cambridge: Polity.

  22. 5) Temporal and procedural elements Southerton 2013 • Action: disposition, procedure, sequence • Temporality: duration, slots, rhythms • Southerton, D. 2013. Habits, routines and temporalities of consumption: from individual behaviours to the reproduction of everyday practices, Time & Society, 22(3): 335–55

  23. Habit rescues routine? • The strictly temporal aspects of routine have been successfully handled by breaking down the concept of routine into some of its component parts – eg Fine; periodicity, timing and sequence give a suitable framework for capturing the trajectory of repetition. These tools are not so good for handling the procedural sense of routine. That is more closely tied to the nature of the activity which is routinised. Ie some of the temporal aspects (like meal times) don’t say much about the component activity – it is the event or the occasion that is fitted into a schedule in a regular manner. Ehn and Lofgren example of new couples finding the other’s morning routines distasteful is not (or not entirely) a matter of their timing or sequencing, but some of the things that they do in order to get from bed to bus. That needs to be captured by theories of practice. I think that Southerton’s disposition, procedure, sequence trio probably does that rather well. Procedures are activity specific (though dispositions are not); and putting procedures into a sequence (in response to a situation) is the essence of a fluid performance.

  24. Routine elaborated? • Personal and social • Temporal and procedural • Entails sequence • Routinisation and re-routinisation (Giddens, 1984) • Social order as intersecting routines

  25. Social organization as coordinated routines • Routines are associated with practices (activity) – doing something • Routines central, and raise question of their mutual coordination • Family meal as an emblematic case • Lack of longitudinal data on eating to capture personal routines • Value of sequence analysis • Anticipating the routines of others?

  26. The importance of habit • Environment and intermediaries matter • Blurring of the mind - body boundary • Embodied processes • Adaptation to complex environments • Distracted activity • Habits underlie routine sequences?

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