Explaining Showering: A Discussion of the Material, Conventional, and Temporal Dimensions of Practice

Abstract

This article considers the increasing popularity of showering in the UK. We use this case as a means of exploring some of the dimensions and dynamics of everyday practice. Drawing upon a range of documentary evidence, we begin by sketching three possible explanations for the current constitution of showering as a private, increasingly resource-intensive routine. We begin by reviewing the changing infrastructural, technological, rhetorical and moral positioning of showering. We then consider how the multiple and contingent constituents of showering are arranged and re-arranged in and through the practice itself. In taking this approach, we address a number of more abstract questions about the relation between practices, technologies and infrastructures and about what these relationships mean for the fixity and fluidity of ordinary routines and for associated patterns of consumption. The result is a method that allows us to analyse the ways in which material cultures and conventions are reproduced and transformed. This has practical implications for those seeking to contain the environmental consequences of resource-intensive practices.

Developing Novel Approaches to Tracking Domestic Water Demand Under Uncertainty—A Reflection on the “Up Scaling” of Social Science Approaches in the United Kingdom

“…From a social science perspective, a core problematic of understanding water demand is the difficulty of making visible the inconspicuous, taken for granted water consumption and waste water production embedded in the use of infrastructures and technologies in the modern home, and the connections of this demand to current and shifting urban infrastructure (Kaika and Swyngedouw 2000;Sofoulis 2005;Allon and Sofoulis 2006;Shove 2003;Hand et al 2005;Kaika 2004;Geels 2005). This inconspicuous consumption becomes particularly concerning for a sector seeking to anticipate the challenges of climatic change in combination with other population, cultural and technological changes.…”

“…Historians and social/cultural theory shows us how demand has formed, emerged, and come into being through a complex process of public health agendas, changing agendas around consumer rights, emerging infrastructures of water provision and waste. These approaches argue how these public infrastructures are linked to the development of internal space in homes, a process which enabled an emerging set of routines, technologies and habits around personal and family care (bathing, showering, cooking) Taylor 2007, 2006;Shove 2003;Hand et al 2005). Household demand cannot be seen as simply located within an individual or household, as it is emergent from multiple human-natural-technological relations.…”

Paradoxes of design: energy and water consumption and the aestheticization of Norwegian bathrooms 1990–2008

“…The bathroom has become a showroom that refl ects the identity of its owner, and this makes sense only if the room is visible to visitors (Quitzau and Røpke, 2008). The bathroom as a place for aestheticized consumption also causes increased levels of energy consumption (Gram-Hanssen, 2007;Hand et al, 2004). These studies presuppose a correlation between escalation of consumption and aestheticization.…”

“…On the other hand the focus on showers nevertheless provides comparatively quick comfort and cleanliness while using less water and energy than bathtubs, a fact that may explain its persistent appeal (Hand et al, 2004).…”

“In the morning I just need a long, hot shower:” a sociological exploration of energy sensibilities in Norwegian bathrooms

“…Based on this definition, research on the energy dimensions of daily activities has explored showering (Hand et al 2005), hygiene, laundering, and air conditioning (Shove, 2003), freezers (Hand & Shove, 2007), mobility (Shove, 2002), and heating (Kuijer & DeJong, 2011), among others. These contributions all describe practices in their genesis, evolution, and diffusion.…”