No abstract

The idea that artifacts are acquired and used in the course of accomplishing social practices has important implications for theories of consumption and innovation. From this point of view, it is not enough to show that goods are symbolically and materially positioned, mediated and filtered through existing cultures and conventions. Twisting the problem around, the further challenge is to explain how practices change and with what consequence for the forms of consumption they entail. In this article, we suggest that new practices like Nordic walking, a form of ‘speed walking’ with two sticks, arise through the active and ongoing integration of images, artifacts and forms of competence, a process in which both consumers and producers are involved. While it makes sense to see Nordic walking as a situated social practice, such a view makes it difficult to explain its growing popularity in countries as varied as Japan, Norway and the USA. In addressing this issue, we conclude that practices and associated cultures of consumption are always ‘homegrown’. Necessary and sometimes novel ingredients (including images and artifacts) may circulate widely, but they are always pieced together in a manner that is informed by previous and related practice. What looks like the diffusion of Nordic walking is therefore better understood as its successive, but necessarily localized, (re)invention. In developing this argument, we explore some of the consequences of conceptualizing consumption and consumer culture as the outcome of meaningful social practice.

No abstract

Abstract:The claim that social practices have a relatively durable existence in space and time, and that their persistence depends upon their recurrent reproduction through necessarily localised performances is theoretically plausible, but what of the detail? How do the careers of practices and those who "carry" them actually intersect? In this paper we have two related ambitions. One is to show how selected practices are concurrently shaped by the ebb and flow of recruits and defectors and by what it is that cohorts of practitioners actually do. The second is to learn more about the relation between recruitment and reproduction by comparing the ways in which these processes play out in different situations. In taking these two ambitions forward through a discussion of digital and film photography and of floorball (a team game in which players use plastic sticks to hit a small ball into a goal) we explore ways of concretely examining processes that are implied in Giddens' theory of structuration (1984) and in Bourdieu's concept of habitus (1984). This exercise generates insights into the internal dynamics of practice and the methodological challenges of pinning them down.