Social practices in a café: community through consumption?

Abstract

Abstract. The transformations of economic structures as well as of transportation and communication means have altered neighborhood-based interaction in the last decades. Therefore most urban studies argue that local neighborhoods have lost their function as places of sociability and solidarity. But if one looks at the more semipublic local contact sites and therein on a more "superficial" and fluid interactional level, interactions and ties among local residents do not seem to decrease in the same way as close and intimate ties have exceeded the neighborhood boundaries. This article thus examines the neighborhood-based interactions in one example of an important neighborhood space -a café -that demands different kinds of commitments.Practice theories thereby provide a particularly advantageous set of approaches to examine these rather spontaneous and loose micro-interactions. This is why this article ethnographically analyzes a café, as one of the important social neighborhood spaces. The article elaborates on Theodore Schatzki's (2010) and Elizabeth Shove's (2012) idea of practices as linked entities of material, competence, and meanings, coupled with Erving Goffman's conceptualization of public behavior (1959, 1963) regarding why local businesses represent locational material neighborhood settings for local micro-interactions (as social practices). Furthermore, the article addresses how these interactional practices lead to a sense of belonging and community for their carriers.

Communicative Constructions and the Refiguration of Spaces

“…More recently, Theodore Schatzki (2001Schatzki ( , 2010 and Andreas have argued for a praxeological turn in the social sciences. Following Schatzki, practice can be understood as combining four dimensions -practical understanding, rules, teleoaffective structures, and general understandingwhich enable the knowledgeable but often routinized performance of a practice (Schatzki 2001;Steigemann 2017Steigemann , 2019. In a similar vein, Reckwitz defines practices as a routinized type of behaviour which consists of several elements, interconnected to one another: Forms of bodily activities, forms of mental activities, "things" and their use, a background knowledge in the form of understanding, know-how, states of emotion and motivational knowledge.…”

“…This involvement of materials and their embeddedness in concrete spaces and contexts add a first spatial layer to social practices. Schatzki's (2003) definition of practice also acknowledges spatial context; in particular, his more recent "site ontology" more explicitly includes the spatiotemporal setting of practices, addressing material and immaterial entities and their relation to each other, which then constitute the practices' respective meanings, orders, and arrangements (Everts, Lahr-Kurten, and Watson 2011, 324;Steigemann 2017). He claims that the best way to approach the nature of social life and the character of its transformation "is to tie social life to something called 'the site of the social' ".…”

“…Refugee accommodations explored in this article can thus be understood as comprising material and immaterial aspects of the social, which are in constant flux -temporally and spatially unfolding sites, according to the respective "timespaces" and enmeshed practices (Schatzki 2003, 226). From this derives a rather dynamic, activity-orientated understanding of space and place, existing only within and through activities, while the activities themselves also only occur within these arrangements (Everts et al 2011, 327;Steigemann 2017Steigemann , 2019.…”

“…Often, a variety of practices coexist, each of which forms interdependent relations between the hardware of dwelling (cutlery or tools, beds, tables, etc. ), distributions of competence (between humans and nonhumans), the emergence of home as a project, and, with them, new patterns of interactions and emotional attachments (Shove et al 2007a(Shove et al , 2007bSteigemann 2017).…”

The Unexplored Socio-Cultural Benefits of Coffee Plants: Implications for the Sustainable Management of Ethiopia’s Coffee Forests

“…The coffee and its ceremony then serve as the platform for social interaction, which then facilitates dialogue and problem solving. There are emerging studies on social interactions in coffee shops in the developed world, too [31][32][33]. The studies all point to coffee increasing social interactions.…”