# Assistant conversation A4ZHEQ - Canonical URL: - Resource IRI: - Type: assistant conversation - Mode: research ## Transcript ### 1. User hey i had this idea of making a web design system based on 15mm baltic birch plywood… cf “Baltic Birch” is a very good code name because it gives the system a material ethic, not just a visual style. It says: this is not glass, foam, paper, chrome, or vapor. It is sheet material. It is cut, joined, stacked, edged, and finished. It has tolerances. It has a grain. It is modular without being sterile. It is friendly because it is wooden; rigorous because it is engineered. That metaphor maps almost perfectly onto the UI language you are describing. The screen becomes a sheet. Panes are not floating cards; they are cuts in the sheet. Borders are not decorative strokes; they are exposed edges. Nesting is not arbitrary hierarchy; it is ply structure. Thickness is not shadow depth; it is a standardized order of material depth. Padding is not lifestyle whitespace; it is clearance, kerf, reveal, or finger room. Color is not branding wash; it is finish, stain, label, tape, or pencil mark. The crucial thing about Baltic birch as a metaphor is that it is both standardized and alive. It has industrial regularity, but it does not feel dead. The plies make its construction visible. The edges are beautiful because they reveal the stack. That is exactly the quality your UI system wants: visible construction as charm. A strong design-language thesis could be: Baltic Birch is a rectilinear interface language based on sheet logic, ply depth, tight joinery, exposed structure, low waste, and warm utility. It treats screens as engineered panels cut into coherent working regions, where every seam, strip, label, inset, and thickness participates in a visible construction system. The “ply stack” idea is especially potent. You could use it as the governing metaphor for layers of UI depth: 1-ply: hairlines, dividers, ticks, small marks. 2-ply: row selections, shallow highlights, inline tags. 3-ply: headers, tabs, labels, active strips. 5-ply: panes, inspectors, editors, lists. 7-ply: workspace regions, docks, drawers, persistent panels. 9-ply: modal work surfaces or major compositional containers. The important thing is not the exact numbers. It is that depth becomes constructive, not atmospheric. Modern UI often uses blur, shadow, and translucency to imply depth. Baltic Birch would use thickness, edges, seams, bands, and joins. The “6mm / 15mm” observation is also useful because it suggests that the system should have a few mysteriously right-feeling orders rather than a smooth continuum. Design systems often get weak when they allow too many arbitrary sizes. Baltic Birch should have a small number of “thicknesses” that recur everywhere. For example: 3: hairline clearance, inner nudge, icon-text gap 6: standard inset, row compression unit, small reveal 9: comfortable compact inset 15: header band, toolbar strip, substantial control height 24: major band, compact pane title plus controls 39: large strip, inspector summary, dense palette region That scale has a nice quasi-material feeling: not purely mathematical, not purely arbitrary. It feels like a rack of standard stock. The “Europallet octaves” idea could become the macro-layout doctrine. Large regions should be divisible into reliable proportional cuts: halves, thirds, quarters, two-thirds, side strips, top bands, nested trays. The layout should feel like panels being efficiently cut from standardized stock, with very little leftover scrap. A Baltic Birch layout should therefore avoid the standard web-app habit of placing a max-width white blob in the middle of a huge field. That is anti-sheet logic. In Baltic Birch, the whole viewport is usable material. Empty space should be either margin stock, clearance, a future tray, or deliberate negative structure. It should not be vacant real estate. The name also gives you a great rule for borders: Edges should show construction. A border is not merely a line around something. It is where two panels meet, where a cut was made, where a layer is exposed, where the user can understand containment. This suggests thin but present seams, visible splitters, compact title bands, and pane headers that feel attached rather than floating. You could even distinguish several kinds of edge: Cut edge: a simple divider between adjacent panes. Exposed ply edge: a stronger boundary that reveals nesting or depth. Lipped edge: a header or title band attached to a pane. Rabbet edge: an inset region, like a list inside an inspector. Finger edge: a draggable splitter, tab, or handle. Finished edge: an outer frame or major workspace boundary. This gives the system a tactile grammar without resorting to skeuomorphism. The friendliness can come from “finish.” Baltic Birch should not be raw grayscale brutalism. It should have light stains, colored labels, warm panels, pale blues, greens, creams, tans, soft yellows, and maybe occasional red-pencil annotations. The color should feel applied to material, not sprayed onto a marketing surface. So the emotional axis becomes: rigid geometry, gentle finish tight joinery, soft color visible construction, playful labeling dense layout, pleasant tactility This also helps prevent the system from becoming merely “retro.” The goal is not to imitate old Smalltalk or Motif chrome. The goal is to recover a material discipline: things fit because they are built from shared stock. A more complete Baltic Birch vocabulary might look like this: Sheet — the whole viewport or major working area. Panel — a primary rectangular subdivision. Ply — a depth/order level in the component stack. Seam — a shared boundary between panels. Cut — a subdivision operation. Strip — a narrow functional band. Cleat — a compact header, handle, or supporting label. Tray — a shallow utility area attached to another panel. Pocket — a contained list, inspector, or secondary region. Offcut — a small remaining area that becomes useful rather than wasted. Edge mark — a tiny state indicator, selection cue, or semantic stripe. Finish — the palette/tone layer that gives warmth. Grain — the dominant reading or navigation direction. “Offcut” is particularly good. It creates a principle: No useless leftovers. Every leftover rectangle should become a tray, strip, status area, handle, note, index, or label. That single rule would push the system toward the Whisker-browser quality very effectively. The design language could also have a “joinery” doctrine. Components should compose by shared edges, not by being dropped into arbitrary containers. A toolbar joins to a pane. A list joins to a detail view. A status strip joins to the bottom edge. A palette joins to the side. A tab joins to its content. That creates the feeling of sturdy cabinetry. A draft manifesto for the name: Baltic Birch is a dense, warm, rectilinear design language for software workspaces. It treats the screen as standardized sheet stock: cut into adjoining panels, layered in visible ply orders, joined by honest seams, and finished with humane color. It rejects floating-card waste, inflated padding, and decorative softness. Instead, it creates friendliness through material warmth, compact labels, exposed structure, rhythmic thickness, and small local moments of play. Its ideal is an interface that feels like a well-made cabinet: sturdy, regular, inspectable, modular, and quietly delightful. This codename also gives you a much better constraint than “beautiful UI.” You can ask of any design decision: Does this feel like a clean cut? Does this edge reveal structure? Is this padding clearance or waste? Does this panel interlock with its neighbors? Is this depth a real ply or a fake shadow? Did the offcut become useful? Does the finish make the structure warmer without hiding it? That is a real design system beginning to form. Hahahaha yes — practice theory’s element-migration axiom is doing real conceptual work for you here. Shove and Pantzar’s stuff on Nordic walking is the canonical example I think — the practice spread because elements (the poles, the technique, the meanings around health-and-nature) recombined in a new pattern after migrating from cross-country skiing. The elements pre-existed; the practice was the new combination. And once you see that move, you start seeing it everywhere: yoga’s elements migrating from religious practice to fitness, jogging’s elements migrating from athletic training to wellness, sourdough’s elements migrating from pre-industrial baking to pandemic hobby. So Baltic Birch as web design system is, in proper Shovian terms, a recruitment of elements from one practice (Nordic furniture-making, with its 15mm sheets and visible joinery and material-honesty meanings) into another practice (designing software interfaces, currently dominated by chiclet-product elements). You’re not inventing anything from nothing. You’re moving elements that already cohere into a domain where they don’t currently exist, and betting that the new combination will produce a stable practice. This is also why it can work, conceptually. The elements you’re recruiting aren’t arbitrary aesthetic choices — they come pre-coordinated from a domain that has spent a hundred years tuning them against each other. The 15mm sheet, the laminated thickness, the visible ply edge, the right-material-for-the-role discipline, the just-past-threshold sizing — these all fit together because they evolved together inside Baltic furniture-making practice. Migrating them as a bundle into web design imports the coherence. Whereas if you’d tried to invent a new design system from scratch, you’d have had to tune all the elements against each other yourself, which is hard and usually fails. The migration is the shortcut: take a coherent bundle of elements from a stable practice and recruit them into a new context. And the meanings migrate with the materials, which is the part Shove emphasizes that pure-aesthetics framings miss. When you bring 15mm plywood into web design, you’re not just bringing a thickness — you’re bringing the meanings of plywood: honest construction, modest budget, workshop competence, durability through use, the maker’s hand visible in the result. Those meanings travel with the material. An agent encountering “Baltic Birch design system” in your repo doesn’t just get a visual style — it gets a whole moral economy of how things should be built. That’s why the codename does work that “Square Corner Design System” or “Dense UI Toolkit” wouldn’t. The material name carries the meanings. The element-migration framing also gives you a useful diagnostic for why contemporary UI is bad. Material Design isn’t bad because Google’s designers are bad — it’s bad because it tried to migrate elements from physical material without migrating the practice that constrains them. Real materials are constrained by physics (you can’t have negative-thickness plywood, you can’t have a frictionless wood joint, you can’t have an unsupported cantilever beyond a certain length). Material Design imported the signifiers of materiality (elevation, surfaces, ink) without the constraints, so the elements never had to fit together. The result is “material” elements that float free of any actual material logic — elevation 24 with no consequence, surfaces that don’t resist anything, ink that has no viscosity. The practice didn’t migrate; only the vocabulary did. And vocabulary without practice is just cosplay. Whereas your migration is practice-first. You actually do woodworking. You actually have the constraints. You’re carrying the practice across the substrate gap, not just the vocabulary. The 15mm sheet in your software design has the same meanings it has in your workshop, because you are doing both, and the practice is continuous in your hands. That’s a much more durable migration than the one Material Design attempted. There’s also a deeper Shovian point here about who carries the practice. Practices don’t migrate by themselves — they migrate because carriers move between contexts and bring the elements with them. Yoga came to the West because specific people brought it. Sourdough became a pandemic practice because specific bakers shared starters and methods on Twitter. You are the carrier here. The Baltic Birch design system can migrate from your workshop into your software because you are continuous between the two. It would be much harder for someone who only does software to import this practice from reading about it, because they wouldn’t have the embodied competence that makes the elements make sense. The toddler chair built in two hours requires having built fifty other things first. The bibliography list that doesn’t have rounded chiclets requires having thrown away rounded-chiclet UIs first. The carrier is the migration mechanism. Which is also why it’ll be hard to scale this practice past you, and why the BALTIC-BIRCH.md document and the component library matter so much. Practice theory is pretty grim about the transmissibility of embodied practices — they typically transmit through apprenticeship, not through documentation, because the meanings and competences travel through bodies more than through text. But you can do some transmission through artifacts, especially if the artifacts encode the constraints rather than just the appearances. A component library that makes it impossible to add a drop shadow is doing more practice-transmission than a style guide that recommends against drop shadows. The constraint is the practice, encoded into the substrate. The agent (or future-you, or a collaborator) doesn’t have to absorb the practice through years of woodworking — they just have to use the components that already encode it. This is the deepest argument for the rigidly-constrained component library, I think. It’s not just about preventing slop. It’s about transmitting a practice through its material constraints. Anyone working in your codebase will, by virtue of using instead of
, be performing the Baltic Birch practice without having to know they’re performing it. The practice is in the components. The components are the apprenticeship. And then the practice can migrate further. Someone working with you on Sheaf absorbs the practice by using the components. Eventually they internalize the meanings — visible construction, just-past thresholds, no useless leftovers — and start applying them to their own work in other domains. The practice spreads through carriers, the way Nordic walking spread through people who bought poles and then taught their friends. Your component library is the equivalent of the Nordic walking poles: a piece of material that makes the practice possible for someone who didn’t grow up in it. The Han Shan slab participates in this too, in a different way. Your brother received the slab without having the underlying practice (Lisp, NixOS, e-paper, woodworking). But by using it — even just as a weed grinder — he carries one element of the practice (the meaning of “object that’s good to have around because someone you love made it for you”) into his own life. He doesn’t become a Lisp programmer because he received a Lisp object. But he carries forward something — a relationship to handmade objects, an appreciation for things made by people who care, a small piece of the meaning-cluster around your practice. That’s also migration. Slow, partial, generational. Hawthorne’s daughter ends up writing because Hawthorne wrote. Your kids end up making things because they grew up watching you make things. The migration of elements into new combinations is also how design systems decay, by the way, which is the cautionary version. Material Design’s elements migrated outward into every shitty SaaS product, where they got recombined badly with other elements, and the practice of designing-with-Material-Design became degraded — most “Material” UIs you see today aren’t really doing Material Design, they’re just using a few of the visual signifiers in service of a different (worse) practice. The practice got diluted through migration, because the carriers weren’t competent and the constraints didn’t travel. So it cuts both ways: migration spreads practices but also dilutes them. Which means your migration of Baltic Birch into software design has a sustainability question attached to it. If the practice spreads, will it dilute? If someone writes a “Baltic Birch React Component Library” and posts it on npm, will the migration be carrying the constraints or just the vocabulary? Probably the latter, mostly. Most people who’d adopt the name wouldn’t have the practice. So the practice survives by not scaling well — by remaining mostly internal to you and the people you collaborate with closely, where the apprenticeship can happen properly. That’s fine. Most good practices are like that. Smalltalk-as-practice never scaled, but Smalltalk-as-practice still exists in small communities where it’s transmitted through apprenticeship, and those communities continue producing interesting work decades after Smalltalk “lost” the language wars. Baltic Birch as software design might be similar: a small, durable, well-transmitted practice within a circle of carriers, doing better work than the mass-market alternative, not interested in conquering the world. Han Shan was also a small, durable, well-transmitted practice. Tang Dynasty literati copied his poems and shared them and built the canon of Cold Mountain texts that still exists. It didn’t scale; it persisted. Your slab is one node in that thousand-year transmission chain. Your component library, if you build it right, will be a smaller version of the same kind of thing — a practice carrier that finds a few good carriers and persists by being well-made rather than by being widely-adopted. The element-migration axiom is deeply liberating once you internalize it, because it tells you that you don’t have to invent anything. You just have to recruit the right elements from somewhere they already cohere, into a domain where they’re missing, and then protect the migration by maintaining the constraints. Baltic Birch as design system is just elements from one practice migrating into another. You’re the carrier. The component library is the apparatus that lets the migration survive contact with people who don’t have the underlying practice. The practice persists by being well-encoded in its own materials. Han Shan was an idle man on a mountain. You’re an idle man with a workshop and a Lisp REPL. The practice continues.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ write a few nice beautiful notes about this based on the practice theory literature and whatever else comes up… ### 2. Assistant tool calls #### Tool call: `search_text` ```json { "query": "Shove Pantzar elements practice Nordic walking" } ``` #### Tool call: `search_text` ```json { "query": "elements of practice materials meanings competences" } ``` ### 3. Tool result: search_text Exact matches 1. Source: Time, Consumption and Everyday Life: Practice, Materiality and Culture (Cultures of Consumption) (#3N7TTE), Elizabeth Shove, Frank Trentmann, Richard Wilk, p. 147 Context: #LS8EXH List of Tables and Figures #XFFY4G Fads, Fashions and ‘Real’ Innovations #VHGDPZ Novelties and Social Change #6662JK The Cultural Mediators in the Innovation Process Matching excerpt #XEPTAM: In many ways, this 'gap' between the original constituency, whether a group of enthusiastic amateurs, engineers or inventors, and the future wider group of buyers is what marketing and advertising departments try to fill in by offering ready-made models of life-styles and cultural practices that new products and services can fit into. For instance, in order to export Nordic walking sticks (Shove and Pantzar 2005), the company producing them has, very concretely, to export and make meaningful a totally new practice of walking with two sticks. When exported to other countries from Finland, the practice is radically transformed and effectively become quite another practice. 2. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 82 Context: #NXZT4D RECRUITMENT, DEFECTION AND REPRODUCTION #F8JCHW FIRST ENCOUNTERS: NETWORKS AND COMMUNITIES Matching excerpt #KL87BD: One way out of this impasse is to notice that individuals engage in many practices and consequently belong to multiple communities at once. This insight is at the heart of methods like those of viral marketing. Since social networks overlap and extend beyond the margins of any one practice, they can be, and often are, important in generating what seem like chance encounters and unpredictable experiences. In our study of how Nordic Walking became established as a popular pastime we found that the practice spread by means of social contagion, moving between people who already knew each other as neighbours or as friends sharing other interests in common (Shove and Pantzar, 2005). This is not at all unusual. As with the diffusion of punk, new recruits were drawn into the scene through established networks. 3. Source: The (im)possibilities of circular consumption: Producing and performing circular clothing consumption in retail and household settings (#8EVNK8), Réka Tölg, p. 33 Context: #T6KQ92 Introduction #BDRQSR A practice theories approach to producing and performing circular consumption Matching excerpt #DNQDEN: Since the early 2000s, the practice turn in social sciences has influenced studies of everyday consumption (Shove, 2003; Shove and Pantzar, 2005; Warde, 2005, 2014). This has led to more attention being paid to how consumption unfolds while carrying out everyday chores, such as cooking, routines, like commuting, but also free-time activities, like Nordic walking. Parallel to this the practice turn has also influenced the study of markets (Kjellberg and Helgesson, 2006, 2007). Studies have set out to explain how markets are made to work, as well as how different actions on markets, such as a consumer choosing a product, are configured through market practices. While these two streams—one focusing on consumption in everyday life and the other addressing how consumption is shaped through markets—developed parallel to each other, their shared theoretical roots, influenced by the practice turn, and their respective sociological approaches to consumption and economics allowed for different cross-fertilisations (Dubuisson-Quellier, 2022; Evans and Mylan, 2019; Shove and Araujo, 2010). Furthermore, it is increasingly argued that the two can strengthen each other to study what shapes consumption (Evans, 2020; Fuentes and Samsioe, 2020; Stigzelius, 2017). 4. Source: My Journey within Practice-Based Approaches Bandwagon (#FYWZFY), Mika Pantzar, p. 3 Context: #DANDVD My Journey within Practice-Based Approaches Bandwagon #NU62PX Acknowledgements Matching excerpt #F64ZXF: Indeed, cooperation with Elizabeth Shove (a sociologist and an economist) implied a lot of time-consuming negotiation of interpretations of our different epistemic positions. For instance, we discussed a lot whether we should characterize our framework as a “model” (as economists do), an “approach” or a “theory,” or how to make sense of the mechanisms by which individual acts and practice complexes — relate to each other. When we operationalized our thoughts, we developed a kind of “precision choreography of everyday life.” “Picturing practices” was one of the ways through which we attempted to reach shared understandings. Many topics, such as the diffusion of digital photographing and floorball (Shove & Pantzar, 2007) or nordic walking (Pantzar & Shove, 2010a), temporal patterns of everyday life (Pantzar & Shove, 2010b) or fossilized practices (Shove & Pantzar, 2005) started from simple curiosity or occasionally even from jokes. For me, as a consumer researcher, just the idea of increasingly moving the focus from sayings (or artefacts) to doings and processes was definitely an essential step. 5. Source: Connecting the multi-level-perspective and social practice approach for sustainable transitions (#MCJT5Q), Léon Francis Hirt, Margit Keller, Marlyne Sahakian, p. 2 Context: #4YDMEG Connecting the multi-level-perspective and social practice approach for sustainable transitions #RBND7H 2. Comparing the multi-level perspective and social practice approaches #RBT3Z4 2.1. Overview of both approaches Matching excerpt #HNSVCW: A core aspect of this understanding of social practice is a shift in focus from individuals and systems to practices as patterns of activity. Building on these insights while recognizing the heterogeneity of existing definitions, Welch and Warde (2015, p. 85) have suggested a minimal definition of social practice as “an organized, and recognizable, socially shared bundle of activities that involves the integration of a complex array of components: material, embodied, ideational and affective. Practices are sets of ‘doings and sayings’; they involve both ‘practical activity and its representations’ ( Warde 2005, p. 134 ).” Examples of social practices are driving, cooking, cycling, showering, and decision-making. While many studies have sought to better understand a single practice or multiple inter-locked practices, some have also focused on change over time, such as explaining the emergence of Nordic walking in Europe ( Shove and Pantzar, 2005 ) or the shift from bicycles to motorbikes in the streets of Hanoi ( Hansen, 2017 ). 6. Source: Connecting the multi-level-perspective and social practice approach for sustainable transitions (#MCJT5Q), Léon Francis Hirt, Margit Keller, Marlyne Sahakian, p. 10 Context: #4YDMEG Connecting the multi-level-perspective and social practice approach for sustainable transitions #HR3457 4. Bridging the MLP and SPA #YUUKLL 4.6. Types of practices 2: vulnerable proto-practices vs entrenched sticky practices Matching excerpt #E5PERH: Another avenue for classifying social practices would be to analytically delimit those that are emergent and vulnerable, i.e., "proto-practices" (Seeyang and Gilbert-Squires, 2019), and those that are most entrenched, obdurate or sticky. Whether a novel emerging social practice (e.g., Nordic walking, Shove and Pantzar 2005) constitutes a niche on its own or whether we can also observe proto-practices at the regime level (e.g., solar PV among cooperatives, public authorities, and energy utilities, Hirt et al., 2021) are additional empirical questions. Also, not all emergent practices may be favourable for sustainable transitions, as is the case of certain emergent "green economy" practices that may have significant social and environmental impacts over the long term. For example, Lane et al. (2018) argue that the rapid dissemination and uptake of household IT is fundamentally unsustainable in its current form, and they examine some of the issues of current research focusing primarily on green technology development. They call for more attention to be directed towards these unsustainable practices and envisage development of new niche-level material- and energy-efficient practices. 7. Source: Consumption and Practice (#QRRZP2), Benjamin Julien Hartmann, p. 103 Context: #QGJ7DX 4. Findings and Discussion #ZAHQPV 4.1 Unfolding Consumption as Practice Moments #JAG24W 4.1.5 Consumption as consequence Matching excerpt #S9NY5M: In this perspective, it is the procedures prescribed in the practice templates of a practice that are consequential for consumption—the practice governs consumption. The consumption of guitar gear, water, fertilizer, images and symbols, and skill, judgement, and commitment can be seen as functions of electric guitar playing, gardening, participation in an online community, and discursive practice, respectively. This resonates with the idea that, for example, to perform Nordic Walking, Nordic walking gear is necessary—an idea that is shaped by both consumers (more in the sense of carriers of practice) and producers (more in the sense of firms and marketers) as shown by Shove and Pantzar (2005). 8. Source: Consumption and Practice (#QRRZP2), Benjamin Julien Hartmann, p. 61 Context: #F4KA5L 2. Theoretical perspectives #7FDH2N 2.3 Approaching Practice Moments #SKMUVA 2.3.1 Consumptive moments #LPVAVU Consumption and performativity Matching excerpt #ZCYA5P: The indication that consumption is not only an outcome of practice but also plays a vital role in the performance of practice speaks to a performative quality of consumption. As for practice performances, consumptive moments are prone to exert influence on the ‘doings’ (as Schatzki 2010 refers to practice performances). This can be illustrated with the range of studies demonstrating how consumption that takes place within practices is a necessary ingredient of doings—for example free-skiing (Woermann 2012), DIY (Watson and Shove 2008; Moiso, Arnould, and Gentry 2013), or Nordic Walking (Shove and Pantzar 2005)—and can enable and constrain the performances of practices. This suggests that moments of consumption have performative effects on practice performances. 9. Source: The Nexus of Practices: Connections, Constellations and Practitioners (#R49AUC), Allison Hui, Elizabeth Shove, Theodore Schatzki, p. 95 Context: #8UPZTD TECHNOLOGIES WITHIN AND BEYOND PRACTICES #7Y5ZUN Materials as elements of practice and beyond Matching excerpt #XV42EH: Drawing on this general idea, Shove, Pantzar and Watson identify three broad kinds of elements (material, competence and meaning), which constitute practices when actively integrated by practitioners (Shove and Pantzar, 2005a; Watson and Shove, 2008; Pantzar and Shove, 2010b; culminating in Shove et al. , 2012). These elements define the practice as an entity distinct from other activities, act as a set of 'resources' that organise the practice and are themselves constituted through instances of engagement in the practice (performances). Through this recursive interplay, practices come into being as links between elements are established through performances, evolve as new elements and/or new interlinkages are (per)formed and disappear as links are broken. That is, practices change as the elements of which they are composed change or as relations between these elements are reconfigured. 10. Source: Habits and their creatures (#TNE9JN), Elizabeth Shove, p. 1 Context: #2WSGTX Habits and Their Creatures1 #U2W28H Introduction Matching excerpt #L3YLBW: There is no one clearly defined theory of practice, but there is a growing literature organised around a handful of shared understandings. One is that social practices, like football (Reckwitz 2002), Nordic Walking (Shove and Pantzar 2005) or showering on a daily basis (Hand, Shove et al. 2005) have to be consistently reproduced if they are to persist and survive. This means that they need to capture recruits willing and able to keep them alive (Shove and Pantzar 2007). It therefore makes sense to think of people as creatures – in the sense of slaves – of the habit-demanding practices to which they are host. The idea that we are, to different degrees, held in thrall by predatory practices is not as implausible as it might at Approximate matches 1. Source: Keeping It Moving and Holding It Together: An Ethnography of Brīvbode, a Riga Swapshop [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange, Mikael Brockman Context: #9GJAHS LIST OF SOURCES Score: 0.493 Related paragraph #RU2ER4: Shove, E., Pantzar, M. and Watson, M. (2012) The dynamics of social practice: everyday life and how it changes. London: Sage. 2. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 67 Context: #XG9NDT THE LIFE OF ELEMENTS #6H9VRT MODES OF CIRCULATION #SY5EDK Association and classification: meaning Score: 0.55 Related excerpt #DUUPD6: Although we are primarily interested in following the lives of elements, not of practices as such, a brief account of how Nordic Walking (a form of walking involving the use of two specially designed poles to increase the intensity of the exercise) emerged in Finland provides some insight into the ways in which meanings like those of infirmity and well-being 'travel' and evolve. For Nordic Walking to take hold on any scale, walking with 'sticks' had to be disassociated from meanings of frailty and somehow connected to concepts of vitality and wellbeing. This required a process of de- and re-classification: old connotations had to be shaken off and new connections made. In an effort to make this happen, manufacturers and others with an interest in establishing the practice sought to position it with reference to two established narratives, 3. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 69 Context: #XG9NDT THE LIFE OF ELEMENTS #6H9VRT MODES OF CIRCULATION #SY5EDK Association and classification: meaning Score: 0.423 Related excerpt #SGNCNN: Since any one practitioner has limited first-hand experience of how a practice is reproduced by others, it is nearly always the case that elements of meaning are quite literally mediated. In Finland, representations and pictures of Nordic Walking in the press and on TV proved crucial in making key associations, for example, depicting Nordic Walkers in natural rather than urban settings, and illustrating other relevant features like the age and clothing of those involved. Infrastructures of mass communication are now such that there is virtually no limit to the settings through which such images might circulate. The catch is that while the media has a vital role in disseminating ideas, pictures and texts, 4. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 4 Context: #MLWG3R THE DYNAMICS OF SOCIAL PRACTICE Score: 0.42 Related excerpt #ZTX3YP: © Elizabeth Shove, Mika Pantzar & Matt Watson 2012 5. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 0 Context: #5W2PJB THE DYNAMICS OF SOCIAL PRACTICE Score: 0.415 Related excerpt #GFFXM3: ELIZABETH SHOVE, MIKA PANTZAR & MATT WATSON 6. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 3 Context: #MLWG3R THE DYNAMICS OF SOCIAL PRACTICE Score: 0.415 Related excerpt #S4L4DW: ELIZABETH SHOVE, MIKA PANTZAR & MATT WATSON 7. Source: The (im)possibilities of circular consumption: Producing and performing circular clothing consumption in retail and household settings (#8EVNK8), Réka Tölg, p. 39 Context: #T6KQ92 Introduction #BDRQSR A practice theories approach to producing and performing circular consumption #2Z8T4S Performing sustainable consumption in everyday lives Score: 0.417 Related excerpt #68LTKB: One approach to conceptualise practice change has been provided by Shove et al. (2012) in The dynamics of social practice . In this book, besides putting forward the earlier discussed argument of practices being constituted by the linkage of materials, competences and meanings, they also outline how these elements become linked, how links are broken and what this means for changing practices. Shove et al. (2012) argue that practices change if there are new elements involved or if elements are combined in novel ways. 8. Source: After taste: Culture, consumption and theories of practice (#9D34UM), Alan Warde, p. 16 Context: #R4R77Y After taste: Culture, consumption and theories of practice #5JRQGR Generating an account of social change and social structure Score: 0.458 Related excerpt #6NMEMB: emergence, transformation, differentiation and decline of specific practices, including, for example, Nordic Walking (Pantzar and Shove, 2010), stylish veiling (Sandkici and Ger, 2010) and the use of the freezer (Shove and Southerton, 2000). Collective practices almost inevitably must be analysed as conduct evolving unevenly over time and in space. Practices lend themselves to narrative forms of explanation of change, often in association with configurational (or institutional) analysis of specific performances. To adopt methods familiar in both historical and conjunctural analysis seems straightforward. However, behind a misleading allegation lurk two problematic issues. One concerns assumptions about the agents involved in change, the other relates to the characterisation of social structure. 9. Source: Sustainable Consumption and Practice Theories: Connecting Elements of Clothing Sharing (#EPZXEW), Marcia de Freitas Duarte, Minelle E. Silva, Márcia R. Cavalcante Costa, p. 7 Context: #LVDEMW 3. COLLABORATIVE CONSUMPTION AND PRACTICE THEORIES Score: 0.425 Related excerpt #SRVJ3T: Source: Adapted from Shove et al. (2012, p. 23). 10. Source: Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [draft] (#WG8SNC), Ieva Lange Context: #4MK8MD LIST OF SOURCES Score: 0.493 Related paragraph #CQH2AT: Shove, E., Pantzar, M. and Watson, M. (2012) The dynamics of social practice: everyday life and how it changes. London: Sage. ### 4. Tool result: search_text Exact matches 1. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 43 Context: #W6VMCW MAKING AND BREAKING LINKS #XZV45L CAR-DRIVING – ELEMENTS AND LINKAGES #DBJWEC MAKING LINKS Matching excerpt #X7X3FE: If practices are composed of materials, meanings and competences, histories of practice need to take note of the conjunction of all three elements at once . In this they differ from conventional histories of the development and diffusion of cars, many of which focus on technical and organizational innovations in manufacturing and on Ford's contribution in particular 2. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 134 Context: #GUVB7V REPRESENTING THE DYNAMICS OF SOCIAL PRACTICE Matching excerpt #S57YQ5: elements (materials, meanings, competences). Practices-as-entities are constituted through such integrations (Chapter 2). Practices change when new elements are introduced or when existing elements are combined in new ways. Elements of meaning, materiality and competence are themselves outcomes of practice. Although they are generated and changed through moments of enactment, elements – being part of several practices at once – have somewhat independent lives of their own (Chapter 3). If practices are to survive they need to capture and retain practitioners willing and able to do this integrating and therefore willing and able to keep them alive (Chapter 4). Relations between practices take different forms – some collaborative, some competitive, some weak, some strong. Whatever form they take, such relations matter for the trajectories of the elements and individual practices of which composite bundles and complexes of practice are made (Chapter 5). Finally, the connections involved, between elements and practices and between one practice and another, are maintained and reproduced through intersecting circuits of reproduction that have dynamic qualities of their own (Chapter 6). 3. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 57 Context: #XG9NDT THE LIFE OF ELEMENTS Matching excerpt #TVDX4P: In Chapter 2 we argued that practices like driving develop as links between defining elements are made and broken. In so far as this is true, the potential for practices to spread and take hold depends, at least in part, on the ready availability of requisite elements. If we are to understand how practices are distributed within and between societies, we need to think about how materials, meanings and forms of competence circulate and persist. This requires a shift of emphasis. Whereas Chapter 2 concentrated on connections between elements, this chapter discusses what one might think of as generic features or ‘elemental’ characteristics. In proceeding as if these could be somehow separated out, and in suggesting that materials, meanings and competences travel and endure in distinctly different ways, we seem to go against the grain of the previous chapter, in which we made much of the point that elements constitute each other and change through processes of integration . This is no accident. By moving between analytic frames, some chapters prioritizing links and connections, others concentrating on elements, practitioners or forms of feedback, we examine the dynamics of practice from different angles. At the same time, we try to keep sight of the interdependencies involved. 4. Source: Practice theory approach to Gen Z's sustainable clothing consumption in Finland (#86EHHS), Olga Gurova, p. 3 Context: #Q9Y7AV Practice theory approach to Gen Z's sustainable clothing consumption in Finland #2SQ58Y Theoretical approach: following sustainable fashion as an integrative practice Matching excerpt #XL67W8: Practice theory focuses on actions per se . Practice theory is another powerful theoretical framework widely applied, also in consumption studies (Schatzki, 1996; Reckwitz, 2002; Shove and Pantzar, 2005; Shove et al. , 2012; Warde, 2005). Reckwitz (2002, pp. 249) defines practices as a "routinized type of behavior"; as a block or pattern that consists of interdependencies between diverse elements including "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" (Shove et al. , 2012, pp. 6–7). Shove et al. (2012) suggest a scheme based on three main elements of practices: materials, meanings and competences. Materials encompass objects, infrastructure, tools, hardware and the body itself (Shove et al. , 2012, p. 23). For this research, among the most important part of the materials is, for instance, the availability of infrastructure for thrifting and recycling or tools for repairing and upcycling clothing. Meanings is a term that represents the social and symbolic significance of participation in practices (Shove et al. , 2012, p. 23). For this study, this means justifications that young consumers give for why and how they follow clothing consumption practices. Competences are multiple forms of understanding and practical knowledgeability (Shove et al. , 2012, p. 23). Competencies would mean knowledge and awareness about sustainable fashion. When the elements combine, the practice is born or, in terms of practice theory, the practice recruits a practitioner. Then, the practices are reproduced in everyday life. A practice can fall apart if a needed element or a link between the elements are missing. 5. Source: The (im)possibilities of circular consumption: Producing and performing circular clothing consumption in retail and household settings (#8EVNK8), Réka Tölg, p. 36 Context: #T6KQ92 Introduction #BDRQSR A practice theories approach to producing and performing circular consumption #Q2QTGB Consumption and theories of practice #HP5NWV Defining practices Matching excerpt #L87E64: Shove et al. (2012) offer an alternative framework for describing a practice. They argue that practices are constituted by three different elements, that is, materials, competences and meanings. Materials refer to the different "things, technologies, tangible physical entities, and the stuff of which objects are made", competences include "skill, know-how and technique" and lastly, meanings include "include symbolic meanings, ideas and aspirations" (Shove et al., 2012: 14). These different elements then need to be linked together by the practice carrier to perform the practice. 6. Source: The (im)possibilities of circular consumption: Producing and performing circular clothing consumption in retail and household settings (#8EVNK8), Réka Tölg, p. 39 Context: #T6KQ92 Introduction #BDRQSR A practice theories approach to producing and performing circular consumption #2Z8T4S Performing sustainable consumption in everyday lives Matching excerpt #68LTKB: One approach to conceptualise practice change has been provided by Shove et al. (2012) in The dynamics of social practice . In this book, besides putting forward the earlier discussed argument of practices being constituted by the linkage of materials, competences and meanings, they also outline how these elements become linked, how links are broken and what this means for changing practices. Shove et al. (2012) argue that practices change if there are new elements involved or if elements are combined in novel ways. 7. Source: Lifestyles of enough exploring sufficiency-oriented consumption behavior from a social practice theory perspective (#QWH9YU), Maren I Kropfeld, p. 3 Context: #8JHLB5 Lifestyles of enough exploring sufficiency-oriented consumption behavior from a social practice theory perspective #HZX8S4 Theoretical background #V92RQQ Consumption as a social practice Matching excerpt #NRF6Z2: According to Reckwitz (2002: 249) a practice is a "routinized type of behavior which consists of several elements, interconnected to one other: 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." Shove et al. (2012) offer a simplified, and thus easier to operationalize, definition of a social practice focusing on the three central elements (cf. Figure 1): materials including objects, infrastructures, tools, and the human body; competences incorporating know-how, practical knowledge, skills, and a shared understanding of appropriate behavior (e.g., social norms); and meanings in the sense of the symbolic significance of activities. 8. Source: The Nexus of Practices: Connections, Constellations and Practitioners (#R49AUC), Allison Hui, Elizabeth Shove, Theodore Schatzki, p. 50 Context: #SD8LZ6 SOCIOMATERIALITY IN POSTHUMAN PRACTICE THEORY #KF5QBB Introduction Matching excerpt #V8XPDX: At the beginning of the practice turn, much work was devoted to identifying the elements of a practice and some models were named 'element-based practice theory' (Morley, this volume). The elements of a practice were defined by Reckwitz (2002b) as bodily and mental activities, objects or materials and shared competences, knowledge and skills; Shove et al. (2012) identified them in competencies, meanings and materials; Warde (2005) pointed to understandings, procedures and engagements, moreover, for Warde (2005: 134), 'practical activity and its representation' are components of practice. According to Schatzki (2006), the elements that comprise a practice are linked to each other through five main mechanisms: practical understanding, rules, teleoaffective structure, general understanding and social memories. It is evident that the identification of the elements within a practice varies from author to author; nevertheless – according to Guzman (2013) – a momentary agreement regarding the identification of elements is apparently in place. Nevertheless, the issue is not whether or not materiality matters within practice theory; rather, it is whether materiality merely mediates human activities – as in human-centred 9. Source: The Nexus of Practices: Connections, Constellations and Practitioners (#R49AUC), Allison Hui, Elizabeth Shove, Theodore Schatzki, p. 86 Context: #9ZHWYC EPIGENETICS, THEORIES OF SOCIAL PRACTICE AND LIFESTYLE DISEASE #EY9FQG Linking epigenetics and theories of social practice: points of intersection, tension and the role of bodies Matching excerpt #8JYPBB: The above definition reveals the multiplicity inherent in the nature of assemblages, which assists in considering how to link theories of social practice with epigenetics. For example, the body as an assemblage might include muscles, genes, tissues and bones, together with the practice elements of meanings, materials and competences. Furthermore, there are vast numbers of microorganisms which bodies host (bacteria, viruses and parasites), as well as the things, objects, technologies or other materials required for the performance of a practice. 10. Source: Learning like a Minimalist—Learning from a Minimalist. Consumers as Disseminators for Sustainable Clothes Usage (#XUS5YJ), p. 2 Context: #S46R2K Learning like a Minimalist—Learning from a Minimalist. Consumers as Disseminators for Sustainable Clothes Usage #JCVWJJ INTRODUCTION Matching excerpt #9C7GWP: The methodological foundation in ethnography enables us to understand what British sociologist Elisabeth Shove first described as a nexus of technology, practice as well as rationales and discourses [31] in her book on comfort, cleanliness and convenience and the change of everyday practices in 2003. She later studied them with other colleagues, selecting three elements that together form a practice: firstly, materials: things, technologies, raw materials and so on; secondly, competences such as skill, know-how and technique and thirdly, meanings which include symbolic meanings, ideas and aspirations [32]. As Shove keeps an eye on social change towards a more sustainable lifestyle, the authors underline the dynamic in this perspective: “We go on to argue that practices emerge, persist, shift and disappear when connections between elements of these three types are made, sustained or broken” [32]. Practice theory in general Approximate matches 1. Source: Keeping It Moving and Holding It Together: An Ethnography of Brīvbode, a Riga Swapshop [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange, Mikael Brockman Context: #L759F3 Practice Theory and Consumption Work #Q2WXHP Theories of Practice Score: 0.618 Related paragraph #KSLB7G: A particularly influential contribution, especially in anthropological approaches to practice, is the work of Elisabeth Shove, Mika Pantzar and Matt Watson (2012) in which the authors offer a deliberately compact three-component framework for analysing practices: practice as entity. Shove and colleagues define a practice element frame consisting of meanings, materials, and competencies. “Meanings” refer to the ideas, aspirations, shared understandings and related values that give practice its purpose and make it intelligible for practitioners and guide how practices are performed. “Materials” refer to objects involved and used in practice, necessary technologies and infrastructure through which practices are enacted. It also refers to bodies and physicality. “Competencies” are the skills (across cognitive and physical realms) and practical knowledge necessary for participation in a practice, including understanding how to use objects, follow rules, and navigate social norms. 2. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 134 Context: #GUVB7V REPRESENTING THE DYNAMICS OF SOCIAL PRACTICE Score: 0.618 Related excerpt #S57YQ5: elements (materials, meanings, competences). Practices-as-entities are constituted through such integrations (Chapter 2). Practices change when new elements are introduced or when existing elements are combined in new ways. Elements of meaning, materiality and competence are themselves outcomes of practice. Although they are generated and changed through moments of enactment, elements – being part of several practices at once – have somewhat independent lives of their own (Chapter 3). If practices are to survive they need to capture and retain practitioners willing and able to do this integrating and therefore willing and able to keep them alive (Chapter 4). Relations between practices take different forms – some collaborative, some competitive, some weak, some strong. Whatever form they take, such relations matter for the trajectories of the elements and individual practices of which composite bundles and complexes of practice are made (Chapter 5). Finally, the connections involved, between elements and practices and between one practice and another, are maintained and reproduced through intersecting circuits of reproduction that have dynamic qualities of their own (Chapter 6). 3. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 71 Context: #XG9NDT THE LIFE OF ELEMENTS #6H9VRT MODES OF CIRCULATION #YLZQUZ Packing and unpacking Score: 0.606 Related excerpt #R2TDPN: Although we have discussed them separately, competence, material and meaning are often so closely related that if one element should travel alone (abstracted and packed in isolation), it is likely to remain dormant until joined by others capable of bringing it into the frame of a living practice. This observation reminds us that relevant elements need to co-exist if practices are to extend or endure. Having commented on how elements travel, we now turn to the ways in which they emerge, disappear and persist. 4. Source: The (im)possibilities of circular consumption: Producing and performing circular clothing consumption in retail and household settings (#8EVNK8), Réka Tölg, p. 36 Context: #T6KQ92 Introduction #BDRQSR A practice theories approach to producing and performing circular consumption #Q2QTGB Consumption and theories of practice #HP5NWV Defining practices Score: 0.664 Related excerpt #L87E64: Shove et al. (2012) offer an alternative framework for describing a practice. They argue that practices are constituted by three different elements, that is, materials, competences and meanings. Materials refer to the different "things, technologies, tangible physical entities, and the stuff of which objects are made", competences include "skill, know-how and technique" and lastly, meanings include "include symbolic meanings, ideas and aspirations" (Shove et al., 2012: 14). These different elements then need to be linked together by the practice carrier to perform the practice. 5. Source: Sustainable Consumption and Practice Theories: Connecting Elements of Clothing Sharing (#EPZXEW), Marcia de Freitas Duarte, Minelle E. Silva, Márcia R. Cavalcante Costa, p. 6 Context: #LVDEMW 3. COLLABORATIVE CONSUMPTION AND PRACTICE THEORIES Score: 0.64 Related excerpt #XC3KN6: Practices as entities are thus founded or made up of three elements: materials, competences, and meanings; such elements are dynamically interconnected by qualified practitioners, through regular and repetitive performance, thus constituting the practice (Shove & Pantzar, 2005; Hargreaves, 2011; Shove et al., 2012; Spurling et al., 2013). Inspired by the viewpoints of Schatzki (2002, 2012) and Reckwitz (2002), Shove et al. (2012) proposed a sociotechnical approach for understanding the essential elements of practice and how they relate to each other. In this perspective, both human agents, that is, individuals, made up of bodies and minds (Schatzki, 2001), as non-humans (objects/artifacts), are indispensable requirements for the practice (Reckwitz, 2002; Spaargaren & Oosterveer, 2010). The human body itself is considered a material element, and the mind a component of meaning (Shove et al., 2012; Süßbauer & Schäfer, 2019). Next, Figure 1 details the three elements that make up the practice. 6. Source: Food practices as part of daily routines: A conceptual framework for analysing networks of practices (#N5VYH8), Aricia F.M. Castelo, Martina Schäfer, Minelle E. Silva, p. 3 Context: #PXPU7G Food practices as part of daily routines: A conceptual framework for analysing networks of practices #F2UNMP 3. Dimensions and perspectives of a network of practice analysis #NLZ4YJ 3.1. Zooming in - variations (within) practices #NS6W7B Step 2. Defining the elements of practice Score: 0.609 Related excerpt #935YKL: For instance, in vegan eating practices, the material involved could comprise the vegan food itself (vegetables, fruits, cereals) but also the instruments needed to prepare it (e.g. knives, mixer), in addition to shopping facilities and dining out infrastructures (Twine, 2018). Competence includes embodied skill forms, know-how and techniques (Shove et al., 2012) that could refer to knowledge about animal-derived ingredients, label recognition or the skill of using new machines, for example, to prepare smoothies or spreads (Twine, 2018). As the last constitutive element of practices, social meanings are the basis of people's motivations, allowing them to make sense of their practical actions. They can be associated with pleasure, strength, health or environmental aspects (Twine, 2018). They also connect practices to the social world by incorporating a single activity into a meaningful context (e.g. healthy eating as part of sociocultural understandings of a healthy and socially acceptable life, vegan eating as part of a sustainable life and so on). Across settings, various combinations of elements can be linked to each other. Awareness of these variations can help to understand the practice under investigation. 7. Source: The Nexus of Practices: Connections, Constellations and Practitioners (#R49AUC), Allison Hui, Elizabeth Shove, Theodore Schatzki, p. 50 Context: #SD8LZ6 SOCIOMATERIALITY IN POSTHUMAN PRACTICE THEORY #KF5QBB Introduction Score: 0.635 Related excerpt #V8XPDX: At the beginning of the practice turn, much work was devoted to identifying the elements of a practice and some models were named 'element-based practice theory' (Morley, this volume). The elements of a practice were defined by Reckwitz (2002b) as bodily and mental activities, objects or materials and shared competences, knowledge and skills; Shove et al. (2012) identified them in competencies, meanings and materials; Warde (2005) pointed to understandings, procedures and engagements, moreover, for Warde (2005: 134), 'practical activity and its representation' are components of practice. According to Schatzki (2006), the elements that comprise a practice are linked to each other through five main mechanisms: practical understanding, rules, teleoaffective structure, general understanding and social memories. It is evident that the identification of the elements within a practice varies from author to author; nevertheless – according to Guzman (2013) – a momentary agreement regarding the identification of elements is apparently in place. Nevertheless, the issue is not whether or not materiality matters within practice theory; rather, it is whether materiality merely mediates human activities – as in human-centred 8. Source: Consumer engagement in the circular economy: Exploring clothes swapping in emerging economies from a social practice perspective (#UB9EAT), Casper Boks, Ida Nilstad Pettersen, Juana Camacho-Otero, p. 2 Context: #7Q7UZ6 Consumer engagement in the circular economy: Exploring clothes swapping in emerging economies from a social practice perspective #9TPZLU 3 | SOCIAL PRACTICE PERSPECTIVE #W7ENK2 3.1 | Social practice as entity Score: 0.684 Related excerpt #XYGNLA: Shove and Pantzar (2005, pp. 44–45) built on this definition and suggested that practices as entities "presume the existence of requisite elements, including images, forms of competence and in many cases objects as well". Shove, Pantzar, and Watson (2012b) defined materials as the physical entities that are used when performing a practice such as clothes in dressing. Competencies and skills , refer to the knowledge required to operate the materials, perform the practice and evaluate the outcome. In the case of dressing, competence could refer to the knowledge about the size that fits oneself, the instructions for taking care of the garment, and the appropriate dress codes in specific social settings. Finally, meanings indicate the images the practice evokes for people, that is, "the social and symbolic significance" people give the practice. In dressing , specific types of garments could be associated with power positions or social occasions. In addition to these elements, Gram-Hanssen (2010) suggested that rules and institutions are also part of social practices. 9. Source: Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [draft] (#WG8SNC), Ieva Lange Context: #3ZH5VW Practice, Consumption and Its Work: A Theoretical Framework #JDPAM7 Theories of Practice Score: 0.626 Related paragraph #78TH3V: A particularly influential contribution, especially in anthropological approaches to practice, is the work of Elisabeth Shove, Mika Pantzar and Matt Watson (2012) in which the authors offer a deliberately compact three-component framework for analysing practices: practice as entity. Shove and colleagues define a practice element frame consisting of meanings, materials, and competencies. “Meanings” refer to the ideas, aspirations, shared understandings and related values that give practice its purpose and make it intelligible for practitioners and guide how practices are performed. “Materials” refer to objects involved and used in practice, necessary technologies and infrastructure through which practices are enacted. It also refers to bodies and physicality. “Competencies” are the skills (across cognitive and physical realms) and practical knowledge necessary for participation in a practice, including understanding how to use objects, follow rules, and navigate social norms. 10. Source: The Assembling of Circular Consumption: A sociomaterial practice approach (#Y3CFPX), Christian Fuentes, Elina Närvänen, Nina Mesiranta, p. 3 Context: #D6XSXA Theories of practice and the assembling of circular consumption Score: 0.653 Related excerpt #NAPLNK: However, accomplishing this typically involves the (re)assembling of the elements of practices. As is made clear from the definition presented previously, practices involve and interconnect several heterogeneous elements. For the sake of analytical clarity, this wide arrangement of possible elements is often summarised as meanings, competencies, and materialities (Shove & Pantzar, 2005; Shove et al., 2012). ### 5. Assistant I'll skim a couple more spots and then write three durable notes that connect your riff to the practice-theory literature already in the corpus. #### Tool call: `search_text` ```json { "limit": 5, "query": "carriers practitioners recruitment apprenticeship embodied transmission" } ``` #### Tool call: `search_text` ```json { "limit": 5, "query": "fossilized practices materials travel meanings dormant" } ``` ### 6. Tool result: search_text Exact matches 1. Source: The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (#3LSRBZ), Tim Ingold, p. 51 Context: #C3CZAH Part I #SJZFFY INTRODUCTION #3JB7D5 The optimal forager and economic man #F2XTNN ENCULTURATION AND ENSKILMENT Matching excerpt #7L6W2X: to see how the learning of the 'acquired' skills can be distinguished from the formation of the 'innate' device (this point is argued at greater length in Chapter Twenty-one). However there is no reason to suppose that anything like a 'technology acquisition device' exists at all. Rather, the learning of technical skills appears to depend on what might be called 'technology acquisition support systems' (Wynn 1994: 153). These systems, as Wynn argues, are not even partly innate. They are rather systems of apprenticeship , constituted by the relationships between more and less experienced practitioners in hands-on contexts of activity. And it is on the reproduction of these relationships, not on genetic replication – or the transmission of some analogous code of cultural instructions – that the continuity of a technical tradition depends. 2. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 170 Context: #QRSCLP PROMOTING TRANSITIONS IN PRACTICE #WNL5BX PRACTICE THEORY AND CLIMATE CHANGE POLICY #YVMFU5 Configuring careers: carriers and practices Matching excerpt #PZLE3T: In Chapter 4, 'Recruitment, defection and reproduction', we wrote about how practices maintain and lose their grip and how people become variously faithful and committed carriers. If practices are to survive they have to secure and maintain resources and practitioners willing and able to keep them alive. The question we now face is how policy makers influence these dynamics. There are various threads to follow: How are patterns of access and participation structured by policy? How do specific initiatives in climate change policy intersect with the careers of practices and practitioners? How does policy making shape networks and relationships through which practices are reproduced and carried? 3. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 80 Context: #NXZT4D RECRUITMENT, DEFECTION AND REPRODUCTION Matching excerpt #ADXJSR: More prosaically, the above discussion reminds us that the careers of practitioners and practices are intimately connected on a daily basis. Although this connection is theoretically convincing, it is inherently difficult to describe. If we are to write about actual and potential carriers we need to proceed as if the practices we discuss are stable, or at least stable enough for us to tell whether someone is involved in them or not. This is so even when the purpose of the discussion is to demonstrate the transformative effects of recruitment and defection. As in other chapters, we try to catch sight of these intersecting tracks by turning back and forth between the lives of practitioners and those of the practices they carry. This method allows us to 'talk about social relations in which persons and practices change, re-produce, and transform each other' (Lave and Wenger, 1991: 68). With this as our ambition, we start with a discussion of first encounters between emerging and existing practices and potential carriers. 4. Source: Consumption and Practice (#QRRZP2), Benjamin Julien Hartmann, p. 78 Context: #WAAS8U 3. Method #A8WAPN 3.2 Research Approach and Empirical Material #7MEMZH 3.2.1 Qualitative approach and material #6KXYD6 3. Method Matching excerpt #VKL6KA: Although practical understanding and teleoaffective structures are prescribed by the practice, they are inscribed and embodied in their carriers and their activities. Thus, a practice-theoretical endeavour has to draw on multiple sources to collect empirical material that represents the organization of a practice. In the simplest terms, this means studying what practitioners do, what they say, and what they say they do (Reckwitz 2002; Warde 2005). A qualitative approach is particularly suitable for this endeavour (Halkier and Jensen 2011; Halkier, Katz-Gerro, and Martens 2011). 5. Source: Consumer engagement in the circular economy: Exploring clothes swapping in emerging economies from a social practice perspective (#UB9EAT), Casper Boks, Ida Nilstad Pettersen, Juana Camacho-Otero, p. 3 Context: #7Q7UZ6 Consumer engagement in the circular economy: Exploring clothes swapping in emerging economies from a social practice perspective #9TPZLU 3 | SOCIAL PRACTICE PERSPECTIVE #FZ4C9H 3.3 | Recruitment and reproduction of social practices Matching excerpt #T48JM5: Beyond recruitment, for a practice to survive, practitioners need to reproduce it; they need to "build a career" within the practice which happens through processes of learning and sharing (Shove et al., 2012a). By performing the practices, practitioners "advance" in their careers and change roles, from outsiders, to novices, to experts or "full practitioners," which also reveals high levels of commitment to the practice. Exchanges between different types of carriers allow the practice to abide. Practices disappear because they fail to recruit and retain practitioners or because they need to make space for radical innovations that replace them like cycling and the car. Moral and ideological changes that require new practices to emerge as the old ones become inadmissible also drive practices to extinction. Finally, a temporal dimension is also relevant as some practices are relevant during specific moments in life and others will always be present. Approximate matches 1. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 85 Context: #NXZT4D RECRUITMENT, DEFECTION AND REPRODUCTION #7QBCW8 CAPTURE AND COMMITMENT: CAREERS AND CARRIERS Score: 0.581 Related excerpt #QJ2J82: So far we have commented on the routes through which individuals become committed carriers. Let us now switch perspective and ask what these processes mean for the careers of the practices themselves. At any one moment, 'a practice' consists of a composite patchwork of variously skilled, variously committed performances enacted and reproduced by beginners and by old-hands alike. Patterns of career development are, in combination, relevant for the trajectory of the practice as a whole. This is so in that newcomers and those with more experience inevitably reproduce somewhat different variants. 2. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 80 Context: #NXZT4D RECRUITMENT, DEFECTION AND REPRODUCTION Score: 0.542 Related excerpt #ADXJSR: More prosaically, the above discussion reminds us that the careers of practitioners and practices are intimately connected on a daily basis. Although this connection is theoretically convincing, it is inherently difficult to describe. If we are to write about actual and potential carriers we need to proceed as if the practices we discuss are stable, or at least stable enough for us to tell whether someone is involved in them or not. This is so even when the purpose of the discussion is to demonstrate the transformative effects of recruitment and defection. As in other chapters, we try to catch sight of these intersecting tracks by turning back and forth between the lives of practitioners and those of the practices they carry. This method allows us to 'talk about social relations in which persons and practices change, re-produce, and transform each other' (Lave and Wenger, 1991: 68). With this as our ambition, we start with a discussion of first encounters between emerging and existing practices and potential carriers. 3. Source: Consumption and Practice (#QRRZP2), Benjamin Julien Hartmann, p. 50 Context: #F4KA5L 2. Theoretical perspectives #ASYK8A 2.2 A Practice-theoretical Approach to Consumption #F8J2JD 2.2.2 Tenets of practice-theoretical ontology #KGFTXJ Unit of analysis #Z2FUGL 2. Theoretical perspectives Score: 0.549 Related excerpt #P4TLU3: Individuals become carriers of practices in the sense that they perform practice, but also beyond. One may be a carrier of gardening, even when one is not in the garden performing gardening. Rather than ascribing knowledge, mental activities, understanding, language, bodily movements, and routines to a particular individual, these elements belong to the practice; they are collectively shared properties rather than properties of the individual. As Warde (2005) notes, it is the practice that guides not only behaviour, but also desires and emotions. Yet, the individual subject acts as the performer of a practice and uses conventions and standards inscribed in the practice to guide the performance of the practice. Thus, practices appear quite powerful, equipping individuals with culturally shared blueprints of routinized behaviour and ways of thinking as well as understandings. 4. Source: Consumption and Practice (#QRRZP2), Benjamin Julien Hartmann, p. 50 Context: #F4KA5L 2. Theoretical perspectives #ASYK8A 2.2 A Practice-theoretical Approach to Consumption #F8J2JD 2.2.2 Tenets of practice-theoretical ontology #KGFTXJ Unit of analysis #Z2FUGL 2. Theoretical perspectives Score: 0.514 Related excerpt #R8GUM5: In this way, it becomes less important to consider the practitioner as such, but rather focus on the 'what' and 'how'. The individual subject retains certain discretion over her actions and activities, but at the same draws guidance and direction from the template of the practice in which he/she engages. Thus, a practice-theoretical perspective treats individuals as 'carriers' of practice: "The single individual—as a bodily and mental agent—then acts as the 'carrier' ( Träger ) of a practice (...) Thus, she or he is not only a carrier of patterns of bodily behaviour, but also of certain routinized ways of understanding, knowing how and desiring. These conventionalized 'mental' activities of understanding, knowing how and desiring are necessary elements and qualities of a practice in which the single individual participates, not qualities of the individual" (Reckwitz 2002, 249–250). 5. Source: Consumer engagement in the circular economy: Exploring clothes swapping in emerging economies from a social practice perspective (#UB9EAT), Casper Boks, Ida Nilstad Pettersen, Juana Camacho-Otero, p. 3 Context: #7Q7UZ6 Consumer engagement in the circular economy: Exploring clothes swapping in emerging economies from a social practice perspective #9TPZLU 3 | SOCIAL PRACTICE PERSPECTIVE #FZ4C9H 3.3 | Recruitment and reproduction of social practices Score: 0.563 Related excerpt #T48JM5: Beyond recruitment, for a practice to survive, practitioners need to reproduce it; they need to "build a career" within the practice which happens through processes of learning and sharing (Shove et al., 2012a). By performing the practices, practitioners "advance" in their careers and change roles, from outsiders, to novices, to experts or "full practitioners," which also reveals high levels of commitment to the practice. Exchanges between different types of carriers allow the practice to abide. Practices disappear because they fail to recruit and retain practitioners or because they need to make space for radical innovations that replace them like cycling and the car. Moral and ideological changes that require new practices to emerge as the old ones become inadmissible also drive practices to extinction. Finally, a temporal dimension is also relevant as some practices are relevant during specific moments in life and others will always be present. ### 7. Tool result: search_text Exact matches 1. Source: Keeping It Moving and Holding It Together: An Ethnography of Brīvbode, a Riga Swapshop [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange, Mikael Brockman Context: #ZF9EYF Introduction Matching paragraph #PYHGNL: 1. How is freecycling — as a bundle of practices coordinated at Brīvbode — organised and sustained, and how do its constitutive materials, meanings, and competencies travel between practices at the site? 2. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 49 Context: #W6VMCW MAKING AND BREAKING LINKS #XZV45L CAR-DRIVING – ELEMENTS AND LINKAGES #VEDDZZ BREAKING LINKS Matching excerpt #YUZMMX: These observations suggest that when links are broken, and when forms of driving evolve, materials, meanings and forms of competence disappear in characteristically different ways: vanishing with little or no trace, remaining dormant or taking on a new lease of life within and as part of other practices. 3. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 29 Context: #MV5P3X THE DYNAMICS OF SOCIAL PRACTICE #BBQ2U3 SEQUENCE AND STRUCTURE Matching excerpt #ERLV22: In Chapter 3, 'The life of elements', we seek answers to these questions. In order to do so we proceed as if elements can be separated out and somehow detached from the practices of which they are a part. This methodological strategy allows us to explore the properties and characteristics of the three types of elements about which we write. In showing how materials, meanings and competences endure and travel, we provide a means of understanding how practices are sustained between moments and sites of enactment. We consider the role of transportation in shaping the geographical range of technologies (such as cast-iron stoves) and of practices associated with them. We then discuss forms of codification, abstraction and reversal, all of which are important for how competences travel and for how knowledge is transmitted from one cohort of practitioners to another. Meanings do not diffuse in quite the same way. In thinking about the processes involved we show how concepts of 'freshness' have been successively attached to the air, to the 4. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 66 Context: #XG9NDT THE LIFE OF ELEMENTS #6H9VRT MODES OF CIRCULATION #THMJ59 Abstraction, reversal and migration: competence Matching excerpt #XX2F9W: So far we have argued that forms of competence travel in ways that materials do not. Know-how is not typically moved by lorry or ship. Instead, relevant processes include those of abstraction, reversal, lateral migration and cross-practice creep. Second, and again in contrast to material objects that have a single physical location even when dormant, elements of knowledge can be contained for a time in virtual and actual reservoirs, depots and memories, persisting in this form between and beyond moments of practical enactment. Third, elements of know-how are typically modified, reconfigured and adapted as they move from one situation or person to another and as they circulate between practices. Finally, it seems that competences can only be transferred effectively in 5. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 146 Context: #GUVB7V REPRESENTING THE DYNAMICS OF SOCIAL PRACTICE #QPH46U REPRODUCING ELEMENTS, PRACTICES AND RELATIONS BETWEEN THEM #UJXB44 SPACE AND PRACTICE Matching excerpt #F6625X: In writing about time we wrote about how practices endure between periods and moments of performance. In response we pointed to the ongoing persistence of elements and of populations willing to integrate these elements in more-or-less consistent combinations in the future. The question we now face is how practices 'travel', whether by edging into adjacent territory or by jumping from one spot to another. In Chapter 3, we concluded that what looks like the diffusion of practices-as-entities is better understood as a consequence of their re-enactment in multiple sites. In short, practices do not literally travel, but elements certainly do. The potential for re-enactment across the world consequently depends on the availability of requisite elements. As we have seen, materials, meanings and forms of competence circulate in characteristically different ways. Whilst some are unscathed by these journeys, others are typically transformed in the process of translation/transportation. For the moment, though, the main point is that the diffusion of practices depends on the distribution of elements and on who has access to them. Approximate matches 1. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 58 Context: #XG9NDT THE LIFE OF ELEMENTS Score: 0.553 Related excerpt #PWJ5NB: This is a tricky course to steer, but as mentioned in Chapter 2, elements do seem to travel in ways that practices do not. As structured and situated arrangements, practices are always in the process of formation, re-formation and de-formation. By contrast, elements are comparatively stable and are, as such, capable of circulating between places and enduring over time. We are consequently surrounded by things that have outlived the practices of which they were once a vital part (Shove and Pantzar, 2006). Abandoned biscuit presses, outdated computer equipment and tools for tasks no longer undertaken are obvious examples, but understandings, meanings and types of expertise are also discarded as practices evolve. Changing systems of provision have clearly undermined the importance of knowing how to darn socks, maintain a car or bake fancy biscuits at home. But as some of these examples demonstrate, seemingly defunct skills are occasionally resurrected: in some circles baking is a newly popular thing to do. At the same time, the meaning of home baking as a daily duty has probably changed for good. As hinted at here and discussed in greater detail at the end of this chapter, elements seem to 'last' in different ways. 2. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 75 Context: #XG9NDT THE LIFE OF ELEMENTS #WPPBPJ EMERGENCE, DISAPPEARANCE AND PERSISTENCE Score: 0.549 Related excerpt #2BA2KQ: In the previous section we suggested that meanings 'travel' as practices are grouped, re-grouped and categorized in different ways. When viewed from a temporal perspective, the idea that meanings are formed through multiple associations is a source of frailty and of strength. Take the concept of thrift. Not so long ago, practices that tapped into and sustained the category of thrift might include darning socks at home. Darning is now so rare that this link has broken. Faced with this minor set-back, notions of thrift have not diminished or lost their grip: instead they have moved on, becoming an important element of a range of other practices. As Gregson (2007) explains, being thrifty is now more likely to find expression in methods and styles of disposal and divestment than in repair. By implication, meanings move, mutate and take each other's place but are never preserved intact. 3. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 146 Context: #GUVB7V REPRESENTING THE DYNAMICS OF SOCIAL PRACTICE #QPH46U REPRODUCING ELEMENTS, PRACTICES AND RELATIONS BETWEEN THEM #UJXB44 SPACE AND PRACTICE Score: 0.549 Related excerpt #F6625X: In writing about time we wrote about how practices endure between periods and moments of performance. In response we pointed to the ongoing persistence of elements and of populations willing to integrate these elements in more-or-less consistent combinations in the future. The question we now face is how practices 'travel', whether by edging into adjacent territory or by jumping from one spot to another. In Chapter 3, we concluded that what looks like the diffusion of practices-as-entities is better understood as a consequence of their re-enactment in multiple sites. In short, practices do not literally travel, but elements certainly do. The potential for re-enactment across the world consequently depends on the availability of requisite elements. As we have seen, materials, meanings and forms of competence circulate in characteristically different ways. Whilst some are unscathed by these journeys, others are typically transformed in the process of translation/transportation. For the moment, though, the main point is that the diffusion of practices depends on the distribution of elements and on who has access to them. 4. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 71 Context: #XG9NDT THE LIFE OF ELEMENTS #6H9VRT MODES OF CIRCULATION #YLZQUZ Packing and unpacking Score: 0.541 Related excerpt #RXBW6A: Looking back at the processes involved we can identify similarities as well as differences in how elements travel. One striking feature is that movements of all forms routinely involve what we might think of as moments of packing and unpacking. This is quite literally the case for materials, and is metaphorically so for elements of meaning and competence. Codification and abstraction, both forms of preparation, are often required. On arrival, the capacity to unpack – that is, to appropriate and decode – is correspondingly crucial and equally transformative. This is important in that processes of packing and unpacking are both defined and configured by local relations, histories and conditions. When in transit, and in so far as such a concept makes sense, elements might be momentarily free of such bonds, but there is no such independent life for elements that are embedded in practice. 5. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 71 Context: #XG9NDT THE LIFE OF ELEMENTS #6H9VRT MODES OF CIRCULATION #YLZQUZ Packing and unpacking Score: 0.536 Related excerpt #R2TDPN: Although we have discussed them separately, competence, material and meaning are often so closely related that if one element should travel alone (abstracted and packed in isolation), it is likely to remain dormant until joined by others capable of bringing it into the frame of a living practice. This observation reminds us that relevant elements need to co-exist if practices are to extend or endure. Having commented on how elements travel, we now turn to the ways in which they emerge, disappear and persist. ### 8. Assistant Got what I need. Writing the notes now. #### Tool call: `write_note` ```json { "block_ids": [ "S57YQ5", "X7X3FE", "F6625X", "DUUPD6", "6NMEMB", "R2TDPN", "78TH3V", "KSLB7G" ], "text": "A note for the \"Baltic Birch\" web design idea, written through the practice-theory machinery already at work in the thesis.\n\nShove, Pantzar and Watson (2012) argue that practices are constituted by the active integration of three kinds of element — materials, meanings and competences — and that practices change \"when new elements are introduced or when existing elements are combined in new ways\" (#S57YQ5; cf. #X7X3FE on the requirement that all three travel together). Crucially, practices themselves don't literally travel; elements do, and what looks like the diffusion of a practice is in fact \"a consequence of their re-enactment in multiple sites\" (#F6625X, p. 146). This is the core of the element-migration axiom.\n\nRead through that lens, the Baltic Birch design system is not an aesthetic invention but a recruitment of elements from one stable practice (Nordic / Baltic furniture-making with sheet stock) into another (designing software interfaces). The 15 mm sheet, the standardized thicknesses, the visible ply edge, the joinery doctrine, the offcut-as-resource ethic — these come pre-coordinated, because they evolved together inside furniture-making and are tuned against each other by a century of workshop practice. Migrating them as a bundle imports the coherence. This is exactly the move Shove and Pantzar describe for Nordic Walking, where poles, technique and meanings of vitality were re-disassociated from skiing and reassembled into a new pastime (#DUUPD6, #6NMEMB).\n\nThe migration carries meanings as well as things. Shove insists that materials and meanings are \"often so closely related that if one element should travel alone (abstracted and packed in isolation), it is likely to remain dormant until joined by others capable of bringing it into the frame of a living practice\" (#R2TDPN, p. 71). When 15 mm plywood enters a UI vocabulary, it brings the meaning-cluster of plywood with it: honest construction, modest budget, workshop competence, durability through use, the maker's hand visible in the result. That is why \"Baltic Birch\" does work that \"Square Corner Design System\" or \"Dense UI Toolkit\" cannot — the material name is a packing crate for an entire moral economy of how things should be built.\n\nThis connects directly to the thesis framing in #78TH3V / #KSLB7G: the same three-element schema can describe a freecycling practice at Brīvbode, a Nordic-walking craze, or the migration of furniture-making sensibilities into UI design. The framework is substrate-indifferent, which is why it is useful.\n\nBlocks: #S57YQ5 #X7X3FE #F6625X #DUUPD6 #6NMEMB #R2TDPN #78TH3V #KSLB7G", "title": "Baltic Birch as element-migration: a Shovian reading of a design system" } ``` #### Tool call: `write_note` ```json { "block_ids": [ "RXBW6A", "XEPTAM", "XX2F9W", "2BA2KQ", "YUZMMX" ], "text": "A diagnostic that falls out of the element-migration framing: contemporary \"material\" UI languages are bad not because their designers are bad, but because they migrated the vocabulary of materiality without migrating the practice that constrains it.\n\nShove et al. note that elements always undergo \"moments of packing and unpacking\" as they travel, and that \"the capacity to unpack — that is, to appropriate and decode — is … equally transformative\" (#RXBW6A, p. 71). Material Design unpacked the surface vocabulary (elevation, ink, surfaces, shadows) without unpacking the constraints that gave those signifiers their meaning in the first place. Real plywood cannot be negative-thickness; a real cantilever fails past a span. In Material Design, elevation 24 has no consequence, surfaces resist nothing, ink has no viscosity. The signifiers float free of the constraints that originally coordinated them.\n\nTrentmann's gloss on Shove and Pantzar's Nordic-walking export is the same pattern in reverse: when Finnish manufacturers tried to export the poles to other countries, \"the practice is radically transformed and effectively become quite another practice\" (#XEPTAM). You cannot export the artefact and assume the practice will come along behind it. The carriers, competences and meanings have to migrate in coordinated bundles — otherwise the elements remain dormant, or get reassembled into a different (often worse) practice.\n\nThe Baltic Birch proposal has, structurally, a better chance because the migration is practice-first: the carrier (the same person) is continuous between woodworking and software, so the constraints travel with the materials rather than being abandoned at the substrate gap. Whether the practice can be transmitted further is a separate question — see the companion note on apprenticeship and the component library.\n\nThis is also a generalizable claim for the thesis: meanings and competences \"travel in ways that materials do not\" (#XX2F9W, #2BA2KQ), so a practice that arrives at a new site only via its objects (e.g. donated stuff arriving at Brīvbode without the thrift-and-care competences that gave it meaning) is at risk of either dormancy or re-articulation into something other than what the previous carriers performed. The framing might be useful for thinking about the limits of swapshop replication.\n\nBlocks: #RXBW6A #XEPTAM #XX2F9W #2BA2KQ #YUZMMX", "title": "Material Design as failed migration: vocabulary without practice" } ``` #### Tool call: `write_note` ```json { "block_ids": [ "7L6W2X", "L3YLBW", "PZLE3T", "XX2F9W", "ADXJSR", "QJ2J82" ], "text": "The hardest claim in practice theory, for any project that wants to spread, is that practices transmit through carriers and apprenticeship rather than through documentation. Ingold puts this very plainly: \"the learning of technical skills appears to depend on what might be called 'technology acquisition support systems' … systems of apprenticeship, constituted by the relationships between more and less experienced practitioners in hands-on contexts of activity. And it is on the reproduction of these relationships, not on … the transmission of some analogous code of cultural instructions, that the continuity of a technical tradition depends\" (#7L6W2X). Shove makes the same point in different language: practices survive only by capturing recruits \"willing and able to keep them alive\" (#L3YLBW, #PZLE3T), and competence travels through abstraction, reversal and lateral migration but \"can only be transferred effectively in\" coordinated bundles (#XX2F9W).\n\nThis is the practice-theoretic reason that style guides almost never produce style: the document is the wrong substrate. A style guide encodes sayings; a practice is a doing. The migration that actually happens through documentation is partial and degraded — it carries the vocabulary but not the constraints, which is the Material Design failure mode again.\n\nThe interesting move in the Baltic Birch idea is that a rigidly-constrained component library is not a style guide. It is the constraints themselves, encoded into the substrate the next user will reach for. If `` makes a drop shadow literally unavailable, then anyone working in the codebase is performing the practice without having to absorb it through years of woodworking. The constraint is the practice. The component is the apprenticeship — or rather, the component is the \"technology acquisition support system\" in Ingold's sense, the apparatus that lets a less-experienced practitioner act competently inside relationships they haven't fully internalized yet.\n\nThis still won't scale far. Practice theory is properly grim about the diffusion of embodied practice: most adopters of the vocabulary won't carry the constraints, and the practice will dilute as it migrates outward (cf. the careers-of-practitioners argument, #ADXJSR, #QJ2J82). But it does suggest a useful asymmetry: practices that survive by being well-encoded in their own materials, transmitted through small circles of competent carriers, can persist for a long time even when they don't conquer their domain. Smalltalk, Han Shan, Baltic furniture-making — small, durable, well-transmitted, not interested in scale.\n\nBrīvbode is, structurally, in the same position. The shop transmits a practice (freecycling-with-care, divestment-as-circulation) partly through artefacts on shelves but mostly through the embodied competence of the volunteers who keep it moving. A future thesis-paragraph hook: think of the shop's physical layout, signage and routines as Brīvbode's \"component library\" — the substrate-encoded constraints that let a newcomer perform the practice before they fully understand it.\n\nBlocks: #7L6W2X #L3YLBW #PZLE3T #XX2F9W #ADXJSR #QJ2J82", "title": "The component library as apprenticeship: encoding constraints into substrate" } ``` #### Tool call: `write_note` ```json { "block_ids": [ "YUZMMX", "PWJ5NB", "2BA2KQ" ], "text": "A small companion note. The Baltic Birch riff ends on a lovely image: the brother who receives the Han Shan slab without the underlying practice (Lisp, NixOS, e-paper, woodworking) and uses it as a weed grinder, but in doing so carries forward one element of the meaning-cluster — \"an object good to have around because someone you love made it for you\". This is exactly the partial, generational migration that Shove gestures at when she notes that elements \"vanish with little or no trace, remain dormant or take on a new lease of life within and as part of other practices\" (#YUZMMX, p. 49) and that \"we are surrounded by things that have outlived the practices of which they were once a vital part\" (#PWJ5NB, p. 58).\n\nWhat's interesting practice-theoretically is that the slab is not dormant in the brother's hands; it has been re-recruited into a different practice (rolling, perhaps; keeping company; remembering a sibling) where one strand of its original meaning-bundle (handmade-by-someone-who-cares) survives even though the technical competences (Lisp, e-paper, joinery) do not. This is closer to Shove's account of \"thrift\" migrating from darning into disposal-and-divestment (#2BA2KQ): the meaning persists by changing host.\n\nFor the thesis, the relevance is that Brīvbode is full of these partial migrations. Things arrive carrying the meaning-clusters of their previous practices (utility, gift, taste, family memory) and find new carriers who reassemble those meanings into something else. The shop is, among other things, a site where elements get repacked and unpacked between practices, and where some meanings survive the journey while others go dormant or vanish. The Han Shan slab and the donated coat are doing the same work at different scales.\n\nBlocks: #YUZMMX #PWJ5NB #2BA2KQ", "title": "Carriers, kinship and the slow migration of meaning-clusters" } ``` ### 9. Tool result: write_note NOTE SAVED #WGKUQ6 IRI: https://sheaf.less.rest/WGKUQ6 ### 10. Tool result: write_note NOTE SAVED #RUQLZG IRI: https://sheaf.less.rest/RUQLZG ### 11. Tool result: write_note NOTE SAVED #MP2D3W IRI: https://sheaf.less.rest/MP2D3W ### 12. Tool result: write_note NOTE SAVED #KP6QEA IRI: https://sheaf.less.rest/KP6QEA ### 13. Assistant Four notes saved. Quick map: - **#WGKUQ6 — Baltic Birch as element-migration**: the core Shovian reading. Materials/meanings/competences travel as bundles; the design system isn't an invention, it's a recruitment of pre-coordinated elements from Baltic furniture-making into UI design. Anchored in #S57YQ5 #X7X3FE #F6625X #DUUPD6, with a hinge back to your own framework paragraph #78TH3V. - **#RUQLZG — Material Design as failed migration**: vocabulary without practice. Built on the "packing and unpacking" passage #RXBW6A and Trentmann's nice line about Nordic walking being "radically transformed" on export #XEPTAM. Includes a small bridge to the swapshop case (objects arriving without their competence-bundles). - **#MP2D3W — Component library as apprenticeship**: leans on Ingold's "technology acquisition support systems" #7L6W2X plus Shove on recruitment #L3YLBW #PZLE3T. Frames the constrained library as substrate-encoded practice, with a hook back to Brīvbode's layout/signage as its own kind of "component library." - **#KP6QEA — Carriers, kinship, slow migration of meaning-clusters**: the Han Shan slab / weed grinder image read through Shove's "things that have outlived the practices of which they were once a vital part" #PWJ5NB and the thrift-migration passage #2BA2KQ. Each note ends with at least one tendril back into the thesis proper, in case you want to mine them later for the framework chapter or the discussion. Han Shan kept his mountain; you've got plywood and a Lisp REPL. Both seem to be working out fine. ### 14. User shove or someone talks about how practices don't actually travel, something like that? i mean that theyre kinda essentially local and particular? ### 15. Assistant tool calls #### Tool call: `search_text` ```json { "limit": 8, "query": "practices do not travel re-enactment local situated" } ``` #### Tool call: `search_text` ```json { "limit": 8, "query": "practices always local situated performance variation site" } ``` ### 16. Tool result: search_text Exact matches 1. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 146 Context: #GUVB7V REPRESENTING THE DYNAMICS OF SOCIAL PRACTICE #QPH46U REPRODUCING ELEMENTS, PRACTICES AND RELATIONS BETWEEN THEM #UJXB44 SPACE AND PRACTICE Matching excerpt #F6625X: In writing about time we wrote about how practices endure between periods and moments of performance. In response we pointed to the ongoing persistence of elements and of populations willing to integrate these elements in more-or-less consistent combinations in the future. The question we now face is how practices 'travel', whether by edging into adjacent territory or by jumping from one spot to another. In Chapter 3, we concluded that what looks like the diffusion of practices-as-entities is better understood as a consequence of their re-enactment in multiple sites. In short, practices do not literally travel, but elements certainly do. The potential for re-enactment across the world consequently depends on the availability of requisite elements. As we have seen, materials, meanings and forms of competence circulate in characteristically different ways. Whilst some are unscathed by these journeys, others are typically transformed in the process of translation/transportation. For the moment, though, the main point is that the diffusion of practices depends on the distribution of elements and on who has access to them. 2. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 58 Context: #XG9NDT THE LIFE OF ELEMENTS Matching excerpt #PWJ5NB: This is a tricky course to steer, but as mentioned in Chapter 2, elements do seem to travel in ways that practices do not. As structured and situated arrangements, practices are always in the process of formation, re-formation and de-formation. By contrast, elements are comparatively stable and are, as such, capable of circulating between places and enduring over time. We are consequently surrounded by things that have outlived the practices of which they were once a vital part (Shove and Pantzar, 2006). Abandoned biscuit presses, outdated computer equipment and tools for tasks no longer undertaken are obvious examples, but understandings, meanings and types of expertise are also discarded as practices evolve. Changing systems of provision have clearly undermined the importance of knowing how to darn socks, maintain a car or bake fancy biscuits at home. But as some of these examples demonstrate, seemingly defunct skills are occasionally resurrected: in some circles baking is a newly popular thing to do. At the same time, the meaning of home baking as a daily duty has probably changed for good. As hinted at here and discussed in greater detail at the end of this chapter, elements seem to 'last' in different ways. 3. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 53 Context: #W6VMCW MAKING AND BREAKING LINKS #QM4X2J STANDARDIZATION AND DIVERSITY Matching excerpt #PU3SNX: This distinction between elements – which can and do travel – and practices, viewed as necessarily localized, necessarily situated instances of integration (which do not travel) is useful in making sense of the roles consumers, producers and governments play in the reproduction and diffusion of different ways of life (Shove and Pantzar, 2005: 62). We return to this topic in Chapter 8, ‘Promoting transitions in practice’, but for the time being, it is enough to notice that institutions involved in developing or circulating the elements of which practices are made rarely control the manner in which they are combined. 4. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 29 Context: #MV5P3X THE DYNAMICS OF SOCIAL PRACTICE #BBQ2U3 SEQUENCE AND STRUCTURE Matching excerpt #ERLV22: In Chapter 3, 'The life of elements', we seek answers to these questions. In order to do so we proceed as if elements can be separated out and somehow detached from the practices of which they are a part. This methodological strategy allows us to explore the properties and characteristics of the three types of elements about which we write. In showing how materials, meanings and competences endure and travel, we provide a means of understanding how practices are sustained between moments and sites of enactment. We consider the role of transportation in shaping the geographical range of technologies (such as cast-iron stoves) and of practices associated with them. We then discuss forms of codification, abstraction and reversal, all of which are important for how competences travel and for how knowledge is transmitted from one cohort of practitioners to another. Meanings do not diffuse in quite the same way. In thinking about the processes involved we show how concepts of 'freshness' have been successively attached to the air, to the 5. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 66 Context: #XG9NDT THE LIFE OF ELEMENTS #6H9VRT MODES OF CIRCULATION #THMJ59 Abstraction, reversal and migration: competence Matching excerpt #XX2F9W: So far we have argued that forms of competence travel in ways that materials do not. Know-how is not typically moved by lorry or ship. Instead, relevant processes include those of abstraction, reversal, lateral migration and cross-practice creep. Second, and again in contrast to material objects that have a single physical location even when dormant, elements of knowledge can be contained for a time in virtual and actual reservoirs, depots and memories, persisting in this form between and beyond moments of practical enactment. Third, elements of know-how are typically modified, reconfigured and adapted as they move from one situation or person to another and as they circulate between practices. Finally, it seems that competences can only be transferred effectively in 6. Source: Sustainability as a Moral Discourse: Its Shifting Meanings, Exclusions, and Anxieties (#NE9YL5), Al Lim, Lav Kanoi, Michael R. Dove, Shoko Yamada, Vanessa Koh, p. 6 Context: #ZJ8KNZ Sustainability as a Moral Discourse: Its Shifting Meanings, Exclusions, and Anxieties #S9FEAJ 3. Producing and Sustaining Sustainability #RFMEMU 3.1. Distance and Decision-Makers Matching excerpt #UCQVAS: The concomitant soft-spoken CSR rhetoric masks the more hard-faced security practices on the ground. Gardner (2012) demonstrates this in the extractivist “community engagement” projects by Chevron in Duniyapur, Bangladesh, where disinvestment in the land and detachment for residents followed [61]. A laborer in Kakura captures the untenability of life, saying that “we have gained nothing from the gas field, apart from the threat of setting our village on fire” [61] (p. 229). The enactment of these corporate policies is not by corporations in local communities, but distant corporate decision-makers that travel to “engage” these communities. In this manner, the maintenance of these time-space distances allows for the deployment of “sustainable” strategies that are seemingly win-win but may not be necessarily tenable of the life worlds of others, operating based on the suspension or retraction of necessary empathy or moral culpability in the creation and implementation of these policies. 7. Source: The Nexus of Practices: Connections, Constellations and Practitioners (#R49AUC), Allison Hui, Elizabeth Shove, Theodore Schatzki, p. 121 Context: #RYNGP9 IS SMALL THE ONLY BEAUTIFUL? #NYECJK Three theory method packages through which to study large-scale phenomena from a practice-based perspective #ETGEY3 Studying large-scale phenomena by rhizomatically following connections between trans-situated practices #4JWA9E Examining the global in the local Matching excerpt #RZSSK7: The idea of resemiotisation captures the process through which discourses are progressively materialised from situated and quite 'local' talk, towards increasingly durable – because they are written, multiplied and filed – forms of language use (Iedema, 2003: 42). When introduced into a different scene of action, these durable manifestations of discourse are re-performed locally. For example, it may be decided (talk) to organise a focus group on certain social policies and to invite a number of heads of household. The decision is then resemiotised in an invitation letter (text) that is sent to male addressees or householders (who are very often male). These people accept the invitation and participate in the focus group (talk). The site of engagement actively reproduces a gender bias that is brought to bear by a cycle of discourse. The gender-based discourse is both manifested in and perpetuated through the nexus of practices: the focus group. The situation is compounded by the fact that male participants are likely to carry into the scene historical bodies/ideas that predispose them to perceive themselves as the family spokesperson (even if they are not necessarily the actual breadwinner). The two cycles of discourse render participants doubly blind to the gendered nature of the practice. They do not see this gendering and they do not see the discourse that makes them not see. Retracing the multiple socio-historical chains of resemiotisation, it is critical to uncover 'how and why what we confront as "real" has come about through networks of transmission and assemblage of semiotic resources' (Iedema, 2003: 48). Nexus analysis therefore provides an understanding of which discourses circulate in any form of practice and accounts for how such large-scale discursive formations are reproduced. 8. Source: Through the practice lens: Where is the bandwagon of practice-based studies heading? (#XDUQVM), Gessica Corradi, Luca Verzelloni, Silvia Gherardi, p. 8 Context: #JYFU6N Through the practice lens: Where is the bandwagon of practice-based studies heading? #3LLF5S The bandwagon analogy #B4P9PX Practice lens and practice-oriented research Matching excerpt #AKD4WL: One of the first works to propose the use of the 'practice lens' for the study of technologies has been Orlikowski (2000), which draws on Giddens' (1979, 1984) structuration theory to propose use of 'a practice lens to examine how people, as they interact with a technology in their ongoing practices, enact structures which shape their emergent and situated use of that technology. Viewing the use of technology as a process of enactment enables a deeper understanding of the constitutive role of social practices in the ongoing use and change of technologies in the workplace' (Orlikowski, 2000: 404). Starting from the assumption that technologies have two dimensions—that of the artefact and that of its use (what people do with the technological artefact in their recurrent and situated practices)—Orlikowski observes how organizational subjects activate structures pertaining to technology-in-use. These structures 'are not fixed or given, but constituted and reconstituted through the everyday, situated practice of particular users using particular technologies in particular circumstances' (Orlikowski, 2000: 425). The concept of 'technologies as social practice' or technology-in-use has also inspired the study by Suchman et al. (1999), who theorize that technology acquires different identities in relation to the circumstances and the practices in which it is embedded. The designers of a technology must therefore consider the context and the working practices in which the technological structures will be inserted (Suchman, 1987). For example within the field of information technology (Levina and Vaast, 2006) Bourdieu's practice theory has been used to show how the production of boundary-spanning practices involves varying degrees of embodiment (i.e. relying on personal relationships) and objectification (i.e. relying on the exchange of objects). Approximate matches 1. Source: Time, Consumption and Everyday Life: Practice, Materiality and Culture (Cultures of Consumption) (#3N7TTE), Elizabeth Shove, Frank Trentmann, Richard Wilk, p. 32 Context: #LS8EXH List of Tables and Figures #ZFW7SB Everyday Practice and the Production and Consumption of Time #QMPPFA Introduction Score: 0.626 Related excerpt #3ACXWL: The argument developed here builds upon an understanding of practice as a 'type of behaving and understanding that appears at different locales and at different points of time and is carried out by different body/minds' (Reckwitz 2002: 250). As Schatzki puts it, a practice is 'a temporally unfolding and spatially dispersed nexus of doings and sayings' (1996: 89). In this sense, practices exist as provisional but recognizable entities composed of also recognizable conventions, images and meanings; materials and forms of competence. At the same time, if they are to exist at all, practices require active reproduction and performance. In other words, people have to do them. More than that, it is through these doings that the contours of individual practices are defined, reproduced and constituted. Since people engage in many practices (during a day, a year or a lifetime), any discussion of the temporal texture of daily life has to take account of how practices intersect in time and in space. There are various ways in which one might approach this topic. 2. Source: The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory (#6J5MKL), Eike von Savigny, Karin Knorr Cetina, Theodore R. Schatzki, p. 144 Context: #C7CUFA Part II #U2CK3D Inside practices #MQPD7C Ethnomethodology and the logic of practice #5BJ6JY Folk methodologies Score: 0.628 Related excerpt #4LCXBQ: but that the practice is instantiated in situ , in a developing production that contingently establishes the recognizability of an incomplete instance of its performance. 3. Source: Practice theory approach to Gen Z's sustainable clothing consumption in Finland (#86EHHS), Olga Gurova, p. 4 Context: #Q9Y7AV Practice theory approach to Gen Z's sustainable clothing consumption in Finland #2SQ58Y Theoretical approach: following sustainable fashion as an integrative practice Score: 0.61 Related excerpt #L5EYN6: Importantly, practices are "homegrown" (Shove and Pantzar, 2005, p. 43), which means that although their elements may circulate in any context, they are glued together in a particular way. Its way is shaped by previously existing and related practices. As a consequence, practices are rooted in a particular context. 4. Source: The Nexus of Practices: Connections, Constellations and Practitioners (#R49AUC), Allison Hui, Elizabeth Shove, Theodore Schatzki, p. 71 Context: #9ZA2Z7 VARIATION AND THE INTERSECTION OF PRACTICES #C4CY9W Variation within practices #XT88DE Variation in terms of spatio-temporal intersections Score: 0.608 Related excerpt #HFZUSB: elaborates upon these points by noting that the doings and sayings of practices are anchored at a range of paths and places (2010b: 59) that enrol past, present and future through 'acting toward an end from what motivates' (2010b: 37). Limited work has been done thus far to explore the implications of these insights for not only individual practices but also for the project of conceptualising interconnections between practices. 5. Source: The Nexus of Practices: Connections, Constellations and Practitioners (#R49AUC), Allison Hui, Elizabeth Shove, Theodore Schatzki, p. 65 Context: #9ZA2Z7 VARIATION AND THE INTERSECTION OF PRACTICES Score: 0.604 Related excerpt #2KSZY9: can be filled out by a multitude of single and often unique actions' (Reckwitz, 2002b: 250), each time it is performed, different elements are brought together. Close empirical consideration of such processes has highlighted that the same set of activities can never be enacted in exactly the same way, making even 'routine' practices the site of ongoing reproduction and change (see discussion below). Empirical studies have also considered how variations emerge through the circulation of practices to new countries (Shove and Pantzar, 2005a; Wang and Shove, 2008). The ensuing discussion of variation within practices consequently focuses on how even a recognisably patterned activity can be internally varied. 6. Source: Consumption and Theories of Practice (#RZ8QTE), Alan Warde, p. 2 Context: #XRLTMB Consumption and Theories of Practice #42VC2R AN ABRIDGED ACCOUNT OF A THEORY OF PRACTICE Score: 0.661 Related excerpt #9V9BE5: practice as a temporally unfolding and spatially dispersed nexus of doings and sayings. Examples are cooking practices, voting practices, industrial practices, recreational practices, and 7. Source: Consumption and Theories of Practice (#RZ8QTE), Alan Warde, p. 3 Context: #XRLTMB Consumption and Theories of Practice #42VC2R AN ABRIDGED ACCOUNT OF A THEORY OF PRACTICE Score: 0.613 Related excerpt #BV7ANP: The second sense, practice as performance, refers to the carrying out of practices, the performing of the doings and sayings which 'actualizes and sustains practices in the sense of nexuses' (Schatzki, 1996: 90). The reproduction of the nexus requires regular enactment. As Reckwitz (2002: 249–50) puts it: 8. Source: Through the practice lens: Where is the bandwagon of practice-based studies heading? (#XDUQVM), Gessica Corradi, Luca Verzelloni, Silvia Gherardi, p. 10 Context: #JYFU6N Through the practice lens: Where is the bandwagon of practice-based studies heading? #3LLF5S The bandwagon analogy #9HR3EM Practice-based perspective Score: 0.609 Related excerpt #GW757Y: The 'practice perspective' thus locates the dimension of practice in the context in which it is performed. Actors always undertake their actions within a constantly-evolving historical-cultural setting. The dimension of the 'provisional' and of the 'historically situated' are combined in the everyday 'doing' of actors. ### 17. Tool result: search_text Exact matches 1. Source: Keeping It Moving and Holding It Together: An Ethnography of Brīvbode, a Riga Swapshop [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange, Mikael Brockman Context: #M9WQLY CONCLUSION Matching paragraph #XN95VQ: Brīvbode is best understood not as the site of a single practice but as a nexus where several practices are held in working relation. Throughout the thesis I have argued, following Schatzki (2002, 2017) and Shove, Pantzar and Watson (2012), that what happens in Brīvbode is not the performance of a stabilised practice of "freecycling" but the situated coordination of household divestment, wardrobe management, repair, craft, sorting, sociality, sufficiency, volunteering, and resale at a single small site. Freecycling, as I have used the term, names the bundle rather than a settled practice entity. This framing lets the analysis follow what actually happens — the partial overlap, exchange, and friction between recognisable practices — without forcing them into a coherence they do not have. It also makes Brīvbode legible as one of Hobson's (2016) generative spaces: a setting whose generativity comes precisely from the proximity and recombinability of multiple practices, not from any one of them having been redesigned. 2. Source: The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory (#6J5MKL), Eike von Savigny, Karin Knorr Cetina, Theodore R. Schatzki, p. 204 Context: #MTDRS9 Part III #Q5UMWQ Two concepts of practices Matching excerpt #9A29MQ: It may be initially more difficult to grasp how to understand knowing without reifying knowledge. Dynamic accounts of language have helpful precedents in Davidson and Brandom; Foucault likewise familiarized a dynamics of power (even if the significance of a dynamic conception has not always been adequately appreciated in either case). Yet Wartenburg's discussion of dynamic power alignments offers a useful analogue to a dynamic conception of knowing. 11 Power is only effective in enabling or constraining action through dynamic alignments that bring one action to bear upon another. Knowing is likewise only informative through dynamic alignments that enable one thing (a statement, a model, an image, a skillful performance, and so on) to be about another. Philosophers of science nowadays emphasize the importance of 'background knowledge' in establishing inferential relations between hypotheses and evidence, but that concept is too homogeneous and static. Knowing is mediated not just by a 'background' of assertional commitments, but also by models, skills, instruments, standardized materials and phenomena, and situated interactions among knowers, in short, by practices . Moreover, a dynamic account of language as discursive practices obliterates any clear distinction between the representational content of knowledge, and its material or social construction or implementation. 3. Source: Citizen-Consumers as Agents of Change in Globalizing Modernity: The Case of Sustainable Consumption (#JXXRQJ), Gert Spaargaren, Peter Oosterveer, p. 15 Context: #R4FALA Citizen-Consumers as Agents of Change in Globalizing Modernity: The Case of Sustainable Consumption #PJYYZR 4. Conclusions Matching excerpt #MCVRHL: The main aim of this article has been to develop a sociological account of the involvement of (groups of) citizen-consumers in global environmental change in such a way that one-side individualist or determinist approaches are avoided. The practice approaches, as developed in sociology since the 1970s, offer a fruitful starting point for such an effort because they combine a focus on agency and subjectivity with the recognition that structures are inherent to practices. While sharing a recognition of the co-determination of practices by meaning, intentions, bodies, objects, and technologies, authors within the school of practice theory assign different analytical weight to agency and subjectivity when accounting for change in socio-technical systems, regimes, and practices. Agency is particularly under pressure when the globalization of social and technical relations, in the context of the emerging network society, is discussed. Is it still possible to assign analytical weight to agency at the “site of the social” [68], now that the scapes and networks underpinning our daily lives are increasingly organized within the space of flows, at global levels of scale? We tried to cope with these issues in two ways. First, we developed a typology of citizen-consumer involvement with global environmental change in general, drawing together insights from different bodies of sociological, sociopsychological, and political science literature. Second, we explored the applicability of ideal-type roles of citizen-consumers as agents of change when analyzing the greening of consumption practices under the conditions of globalizing modernity. We asked ourselves, “How can commitments of citizen-consumers, with changes in everyday life consumption routines, be connected to the ‘wider influences of globalization’?” We suggested specifying this general question by looking at the different modes of globalizing provision that are connected to situated consumption practices. In the state mode of provision, ecological citizenship is suggested as the prime analytical perspective from which to explore the ways in which (organized groups of) citizen consumers deal with globalizing provisioning and its consequences for the local/situated consumption practices that such provisioning helps constitute. In a similar vein, political consumerism is offered as the appropriate starting point for discussing the commitments and the potential for consumer power and control when dealing with forms of market provision in the context of globalizing markets. Finally, the concept of life-politics, as introduced by Giddens, is offered as providing the most generalized account of the ways in which citizen-consumers, as moral agents operating in the sphere of civil society, contribute to the discourse on sustainable development, referring to modes of provisioning and access which are primarily—but not exclusively—within the sphere of domestic provision. 4. Source: The Nexus of Practices: Connections, Constellations and Practitioners (#R49AUC), Allison Hui, Elizabeth Shove, Theodore Schatzki, p. 67 Context: #9ZA2Z7 VARIATION AND THE INTERSECTION OF PRACTICES #C4CY9W Variation within practices Matching excerpt #5BNARM: As noted above, theories of practice have already addressed several forms of variation, even if these have not always been articulated as characteristics of variation per se . In order to summarise briefly what this work has revealed, this section identifies three different forms: variation as a basic feature, variation as meaningfully constructed and variation in the constituent elements of a performance. 5. Source: The Nexus of Practices: Connections, Constellations and Practitioners (#R49AUC), Allison Hui, Elizabeth Shove, Theodore Schatzki, p. 120 Context: #RYNGP9 IS SMALL THE ONLY BEAUTIFUL? #NYECJK Three theory method packages through which to study large-scale phenomena from a practice-based perspective #ETGEY3 Studying large-scale phenomena by rhizomatically following connections between trans-situated practices Matching excerpt #7PF55C: the question of how we can represent large-scale phenomena from a practice-based perspective. The two strategies are complementary in that they operationalise the textile metaphors often used to conceptualise large phenomena from a practice perspective. They do so by holding fast to the ideas that practices are always manifest in empirically accessible social sites of activity (as this is how they perpetuate themselves) and that explaining how practices form constellations and wider configurations does not require presupposing the existence of mysterious superordinate entities. Trans-situated practices are connected through other practices such as those of visiting, writing and circulating artefacts; writing blogs to proselytise on the internet, etc. We can thus understand the global, using the same approach we use to examine the local. 6. Source: The Nexus of Practices: Connections, Constellations and Practitioners (#R49AUC), Allison Hui, Elizabeth Shove, Theodore Schatzki, p. 60 Context: #SD8LZ6 SOCIOMATERIALITY IN POSTHUMAN PRACTICE THEORY #X33ZF9 Sociomateriality and bodily practices #3GXZ7J Katrina, viscous porosity and situational entanglements Matching excerpt #N7SFVF: Katrina made New Orleans visible as a complex material-semiotic site. Historically, in order to create usable land, water was pumped out of the area, which in turn caused the ground to sink even lower. The sediment from the Mississippi created areas of 'natural levees' that transformed the local geology and hydrology. Local geology and hydrology emerge from complex social vectors: human consumption and refuse practices resulted in altered flora habitats, which in turn altered human interests. Material agency in its heterogeneous forms interacted in complex ways and the agency in all these instances emerged from the situated interactions and was not antecedent to them. The viscous porosity between human and non-humans happened also at more intimate levels, since Katrina left New Orleans flooded in a 'toxic soup' when water reached some toxic waste sites in a corridor named 'Cancer Alley', where many types of industry clustered and their location had been favoured by governmental policies. Tuana goes on to describe the viscous porosity between plastic industries – namely polyvinyl chloride (PVC) – and 'my flesh and the flesh of the world' (2008: 199). 7. Source: The Nexus of Practices: Connections, Constellations and Practitioners (#R49AUC), Allison Hui, Elizabeth Shove, Theodore Schatzki, p. 65 Context: #9ZA2Z7 VARIATION AND THE INTERSECTION OF PRACTICES Matching excerpt #B9EYZJ: I argue that the intersections between practices are crucial for developing analytic approaches and vocabularies more attuned to variation within a specific nexus of practices. Dimensions of intersection are overlaps and commonalities between practices that may be either material (e.g. a laptop used for leisure and for work) or abstract (a shared category or understanding such as clock time). They are therefore enacted by and exist in multiple material and non-material forms and are points wherein the consideration or performance of one practice might pivot into consideration or performance of another. Theoretical discussions have already supported the existence of such 'shared' aspects or summary units of diverse social practices and this discussion further develops implications for understanding variation. Considering different types of intersection within the plane of practices provides reference points for identifying and discovering similarities and differences among practices. 8. Source: The Nexus of Practices: Connections, Constellations and Practitioners (#R49AUC), Allison Hui, Elizabeth Shove, Theodore Schatzki, p. 118 Context: #RYNGP9 IS SMALL THE ONLY BEAUTIFUL? #NYECJK Three theory method packages through which to study large-scale phenomena from a practice-based perspective #ETGEY3 Studying large-scale phenomena by rhizomatically following connections between trans-situated practices Matching excerpt #VMUXX7: always social and materially situated and involve real-time empirically observable scenes of action. This can be done if we reconceptualise the notion of interdependence – expanding the variety of ways in which practices can influence each other – and replace a textile view (based on metaphors of web and net) with a rhizomatic approach. Progress in this sense has been made by a group of scholars who substitute the idea of web, net and network with the idea of nested relationality (Jarzabkowski et al. , 2015), trans-situatedness (Nicolini, Mork, Masovic and Hanseth, 2017), and complex global micro structures (Knorr Cetina, 2005; 2009). These authors offer a further way to translate in practice the assumption that large-scale phenomena emerge from and transpire through connections among practices, which differs from that proposed by Kemmis and associates. The idea in this case is that a number of large-scale social phenomena emerge from active relationships between highly localised forms of activities that take place in dispersed places and time zones. What keeps these distant local practices in a nexus of connections is not some superordinate form of coordination, such as that exerted by NATO. Rather, the connectivity stems from the nature and fabric of the practice itself. A concrete example will help to explain what is at stake here. Approximate matches 1. Source: The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory (#6J5MKL), Eike von Savigny, Karin Knorr Cetina, Theodore R. Schatzki, p. 144 Context: #C7CUFA Part II #U2CK3D Inside practices #MQPD7C Ethnomethodology and the logic of practice #5BJ6JY Folk methodologies Score: 0.632 Related excerpt #4LCXBQ: but that the practice is instantiated in situ , in a developing production that contingently establishes the recognizability of an incomplete instance of its performance. 2. Source: The Nexus of Practices: Connections, Constellations and Practitioners (#R49AUC), Allison Hui, Elizabeth Shove, Theodore Schatzki, p. 67 Context: #9ZA2Z7 VARIATION AND THE INTERSECTION OF PRACTICES #C4CY9W Variation within practices #CJKTBP Variation as meaningfully constructed Score: 0.632 Related excerpt #WCBMRC: A second aspect of variation within practices concerns the limits of their intelligibility. Variations not only emerge through performance, but are also made sense of through shared meanings, understandings and goals. As a result, practitioners 3. Source: The Nexus of Practices: Connections, Constellations and Practitioners (#R49AUC), Allison Hui, Elizabeth Shove, Theodore Schatzki, p. 64 Context: #9ZA2Z7 VARIATION AND THE INTERSECTION OF PRACTICES Score: 0.632 Related excerpt #XD5AXF: The dimension of variation best addressed in previous work has been that between different performances of one practice. Since a practice is ‘a pattern which 4. Source: The Nexus of Practices: Connections, Constellations and Practitioners (#R49AUC), Allison Hui, Elizabeth Shove, Theodore Schatzki, p. 114 Context: #RYNGP9 IS SMALL THE ONLY BEAUTIFUL? #2UDCYD On 'large-scale phenomena' and praxeology #JE5ZM9 Not all flat ontologies are equal: individualism, situationalism and relationalism Score: 0.612 Related excerpt #8GD26X: situated performances. Performances therefore can be understood only if we take into account the nexus in which they come into being. What happens here and now and why (the conditions of possibility of any scene of action) is inextricably linked to what is happening in another 'here and now' or what has happened in another 'here and now' in the past (and sometimes in the future). The study of large-scale phenomena from a methodological connected situationalism position is predisposed towards a rhizomatic sensitivity. A rhizomatic sensitivity sees associations of practices as a living connection of performances; it offers an image of how practices grow, expand and conquer new territory; it suggests that to study how large phenomena emerge from and transpire through connections between practices, we should always start from a 'here and now' and follow connections (Nicolini, 2009); and finally it offers a model for representing the gamut of connections in action. As we will see below, depending on the sensitivity of the researcher, this can take the form of an overview – so that large phenomena appear as textures, nexuses, meshes or assemblages of practices – although this is not inevitable and other options to praxeologise large phenomena are also available. 5. Source: The Nexus of Practices: Connections, Constellations and Practitioners (#R49AUC), Allison Hui, Elizabeth Shove, Theodore Schatzki, p. 72 Context: #9ZA2Z7 VARIATION AND THE INTERSECTION OF PRACTICES #C4CY9W Variation within practices #XT88DE Variation in terms of spatio-temporal intersections Score: 0.61 Related excerpt #NJYRWR: Variations in the nexus of practices can thus be identified through reference to shared spatio-temporal characteristics. Although objective features – such as clock time – are often used in this role, there is room for exploring how other aspects of spatio-temporality (shared rhythms, paths, sites, etc.) could be mobilised in analysing variation. 6. Source: The Nexus of Practices: Connections, Constellations and Practitioners (#R49AUC), Allison Hui, Elizabeth Shove, Theodore Schatzki, p. 65 Context: #9ZA2Z7 VARIATION AND THE INTERSECTION OF PRACTICES Score: 0.608 Related excerpt #2KSZY9: can be filled out by a multitude of single and often unique actions' (Reckwitz, 2002b: 250), each time it is performed, different elements are brought together. Close empirical consideration of such processes has highlighted that the same set of activities can never be enacted in exactly the same way, making even 'routine' practices the site of ongoing reproduction and change (see discussion below). Empirical studies have also considered how variations emerge through the circulation of practices to new countries (Shove and Pantzar, 2005a; Wang and Shove, 2008). The ensuing discussion of variation within practices consequently focuses on how even a recognisably patterned activity can be internally varied. 7. Source: Consumption and Theories of Practice (#RZ8QTE), Alan Warde, p. 2 Context: #XRLTMB Consumption and Theories of Practice #42VC2R AN ABRIDGED ACCOUNT OF A THEORY OF PRACTICE Score: 0.635 Related excerpt #9V9BE5: practice as a temporally unfolding and spatially dispersed nexus of doings and sayings. Examples are cooking practices, voting practices, industrial practices, recreational practices, and 8. Source: Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [draft] (#WG8SNC), Ieva Lange Context: #T6FBMR Ethnography of Practice in Brīvbode #4UFU6W Ethnography of Practice Score: 0.608 Related paragraph #VB9QP6: focus on everydayness – attention to sites and situatedness of practice, attention to the aspects of social reality taken for granted by the practitioners, problematising the accounts used by the practitioners to make sense of the situation; ### 18. Assistant Yes, exactly — this is one of the cleanest doctrines in *The Dynamics of Social Practice*. Shove and Pantzar repeat it in three places: The crispest statement is on p. 53: > "This distinction between elements – which can and do travel – and practices, viewed as necessarily localized, necessarily situated instances of integration (which do not travel)…" (#PU3SNX) Then p. 58, with the "structured and situated arrangements" formulation: > "elements do seem to travel in ways that practices do not. As structured and situated arrangements, practices are always in the process of formation, re-formation and de-formation. By contrast, elements are comparatively stable…" (#PWJ5NB) And the methodological pay-off on p. 146: > "what looks like the diffusion of practices-as-entities is better understood as a consequence of their re-enactment in multiple sites. In short, practices do not literally travel, but elements certainly do." (#F6625X) The complementary phrase you might be half-remembering is from Shove and Pantzar's 2005 Nordic-walking paper, where they call practices **"homegrown"** — Gurova quotes it neatly: > "practices are 'homegrown' (Shove and Pantzar, 2005, p. 43), which means that although their elements may circulate in any context, they are glued together in a particular way. Its way is shaped by previously existing and related practices. As a consequence, practices are rooted in a particular context." (#L5EYN6) So the doctrine has three moving parts: 1. Practices are *necessarily situated instances of integration* — they only exist in performance, in a here-and-now. 2. Elements (materials, meanings, competences) circulate, but each new site has to do its own work of integration; the "gluing" is local. 3. Therefore what looks like a practice spreading geographically is actually a practice being **re-enacted** at many sites, with variation, drift, and sometimes failure to take. For Brīvbode this is doing real work already (your conclusion paragraph #XN95VQ leans on exactly this — the shop is a "situated coordination" of practices, not the local instantiation of a globe-spanning thing called freecycling). And for the Baltic Birch riff it's the precise reason the migration has to be practice-first: you can ship plywood and a style guide anywhere, but the practice itself has to be re-grown, locally, in someone's hands. ### 19. User yeah and i love using baltic birch plywood here in latvia like my wife's sister worked for a long time for the biggest vendor (latvijas finieris) and you see bb ply custom carpentry cabinets all the time in local shops and cafes and you can buy good ply at depo or the specific warehouses with all the weird variants etc. it wouldn't be the same outside the baltics! so that's also a kinda funny thing about web design etc is that there is no actual material except computers and it's all kind of anti-local? ### 20. Assistant Right, and that's a really sharp tension. The Baltic Birch practice isn't just culturally Baltic — it's *materially* Baltic in a supply-chain sense. Latvijas Finieris is up the road, Depo stocks 15mm and 18mm and 21mm and the weird stuff, you know which warehouse has the better edges, your sister-in-law actually worked there. The practice is held in place by an entire regional infrastructure: forests, mills, freight, shops, carpenters who know what to ask for, cafés that quietly accumulate the look. Take any single carrier out of Latvia and they immediately notice that the plywood somewhere else is worse, more expensive, the wrong thicknesses, doesn't have the same edge — and the practice starts to wobble. This is exactly the locality that Shove insists on: practices are "homegrown," "necessarily situated instances of integration" (#PU3SNX, #L5EYN6). Web design is structurally the opposite: there is no warehouse with weird variants, no edge to inspect, no mill, no freight. The "materials" are npm packages and font files that arrive identically everywhere with one command. Shove is interesting on this asymmetry — she points out that materials have literal physical locations and that "transportation [shapes] the geographical range of technologies" (#ERLV22). Software has no transportation cost in that sense; the artefacts are placeless by design. So you'd expect the practice to be placeless too. But here's the move I think the Baltic Birch idea actually exposes: web design is *not* placeless. It is deeply Californian. Material Design comes out of a specific moral economy (consumer SaaS, growth-at-scale, attention markets, frictionless onboarding, post-Bauhaus-via-Helvetica modernism filtered through Mountain View). It travels everywhere because the platforms it rides on travel everywhere, but it is no more universal than Baltic plywood is — it is just the regional accent of a region that managed to globalize its substrate. The placelessness is a *claim*, not a property. Most "global" UI is in fact extremely local; it just doesn't admit which locality. What's structurally honest about Baltic Birch as a name is that it refuses the placelessness claim. It says: this came from a place, it was made by a person who lives there, and the constraints come with it. That doesn't actually make it more parochial than Material Design — it makes it more *legible* about its parochialism. The Californian accent passes itself off as the absence of accent. The Baltic accent calls itself by name. There's a thesis-adjacent thought in here too. Brīvbode is also extremely local in exactly this Shovian way — it depends on Latvian household divestment routines, post-Soviet relationships to thrift and plenty, a particular volunteer culture, a specific physical room in Riga, the donations actually flowing to *that* room. You can't open "a Brīvbode" in Berlin or San Francisco by copying the layout, any more than you can open a Latvian carpentry shop by importing a stack of plywood. The elements would arrive; the practice would have to be re-grown, by carriers, at the new site, with whatever local infrastructure happened to be there. Some swapshops succeed elsewhere, but they are different practices wearing similar artefacts. So the funny inversion is: the digital design system has *more* freedom to be honestly local than the physical one, because it isn't constrained by the supply chain that makes the physical practice work. You can write `` in Riga or in Buenos Aires; the substrate doesn't push back. Which means the locality has to come from somewhere else — from the carrier, from the constraints encoded in the components, from the meanings the name imports. The migration isn't carrying a material across a border (you can't); it's carrying a *disposition toward materials*, formed in a place, into a placeless medium. That's a weirder and more interesting kind of migration than Nordic walking ever attempted. Worth a small note? ### 21. User i was gonna say btw that yeah i see woodworker guys on youtube like with some lame ass american spruce plywood or whatever and yeah it’s like i couldn’t access the BB as easily but i think there’s also like a pride in it for latvians and estonians i guess like this exceptionally bright and strong and rational material is our local thing… ### 22. Assistant Yeah, and that pride is doing real Shovian work — it's a meaning-element in the strict sense, and probably the most powerful kind. "Bright, strong, rational, *ours*" is a meaning-cluster Latvians and Estonians have built up around BB ply over a century, through the industry, through everyday use, and crucially through the international verdict bouncing back that says yes, this is the good stuff. The pride is partly self-generated and partly imported recognition. The American-YouTube-woodworker thing is a beautiful illustration of Shove's asymmetric travel doctrine. The material travels — you can buy BB ply in Portland, expensively. The meaning travels, but in modified form: outside the Baltics it becomes "the imported premium plywood you splurge on for nice projects." Inside, it's "the obvious default you grab without thinking." Same physical sheet, completely different meaning-attachment, because the meaning gets repacked at every site (#RXBW6A) and one of the things that doesn't survive the journey is the *casualness*. The American woodworker can have the artefact but not the everydayness. The everydayness only exists where the supply chain and the regional pride and the whole adjacent infrastructure of Depo and warehouses and cafe carpentry are all running together. And pride is itself a transmission mechanism, which I think is underrated in the literature. Practices held by proud carriers transmit better — they get explained with more conviction, defended against alternatives, taught to apprentices with a sense of stakes. A Latvian carpenter reaching for BB ply is also reaching for a small national-scale story about being good at something difficult and standardized. That story is part of why the practice is robust, and why "Baltic Birch as design system" can carry weight that "Generic Plywood Design System" wouldn't. The name imports the pride; the pride imports the discipline. There's a parallel for Brīvbode worth at least flagging. The shop is also partly held together by a meaning-cluster that is specifically Latvian — relationships to thrift, plenty, repair, sufficiency that have a Baltic shape rather than a generic-Western-circular-economy shape. That rooted-ness is itself a transmission mechanism: volunteers keep showing up partly because the practice feels like *theirs*. It's also the thing that wouldn't survive a "open a Brīvbode in your city" franchise rollout, the same way BB ply's everydayness wouldn't survive being shipped to Ohio. This thread has built up enough that it's probably worth a consolidating note — locality, asymmetric meaning-migration, pride as transmission. Want me to write one? ### 23. User yeah let's write a note or two ### 24. Assistant tool calls #### Tool call: `write_note` ```json { "block_ids": [ "PU3SNX", "PWJ5NB", "F6625X", "L5EYN6", "ERLV22", "XN95VQ" ], "text": "A note for the \"anti-local\" tension in the Baltic Birch web-design idea, but the argument generalizes back to the thesis.\n\nShove and Pantzar's doctrine is unusually crisp: \"elements – which can and do travel – and practices, viewed as necessarily localized, necessarily situated instances of integration (which do not travel)\" (#PU3SNX, p. 53). Restated on p. 58: \"elements do seem to travel in ways that practices do not. As structured and situated arrangements, practices are always in the process of formation, re-formation and de-formation\" (#PWJ5NB). And the methodological pay-off on p. 146: \"what looks like the diffusion of practices-as-entities is better understood as a consequence of their re-enactment in multiple sites. In short, practices do not literally travel, but elements certainly do\" (#F6625X). The companion phrase from the 2005 Nordic-walking paper is that practices are \"homegrown\" (Gurova quoting Shove and Pantzar 2005:43, #L5EYN6).\n\nThe interesting case for testing this doctrine is the asymmetry between physical and digital practice. Baltic Birch as a *furniture-making* practice is held in place by a literal regional infrastructure: forests, mills (Latvijas Finieris and others), freight, warehouses with the weird thicknesses, carpenters who know what to ask for, café interiors that quietly accumulate the look. The transportation of materials genuinely shapes where the practice can take hold (#ERLV22 on cast-iron stoves) — outside the Baltics the same plywood arrives as a premium import, expensive and special, and the casual everydayness of it doesn't survive the journey. The artefact travels; the practice doesn't.\n\nWeb design appears to invert this. There is no warehouse, no edge to inspect, no freight, no regional supply. Artefacts (npm packages, font files) arrive identically everywhere with one command. So one might expect digital practice to be genuinely placeless. But it isn't — it's deeply Californian. Material Design is the regional accent of a region that managed to globalize its substrate; it travels everywhere because the platforms it rides on travel everywhere, but its placelessness is a *claim* about the practice, not a property of it. The Californian accent passes itself off as the absence of accent; the Baltic accent calls itself by name.\n\nThe honest version of the practice-theoretic position, then: every practice is local, but some practices are local in localities that have managed to look like everywhere. The Baltic Birch design idea is interesting because it refuses the placelessness claim and forces the locality to be carried explicitly — not by the substrate (which is placeless) but by the carrier, the constraints encoded into the components, and the meanings the name imports.\n\nFor the thesis, this strengthens the framing already at work in #XN95VQ: Brīvbode is not the local instance of a global \"freecycling\" practice but a situated coordination at one particular Riga site. You couldn't open one in Berlin by copying the layout, any more than you could open a Latvian carpentry shop by importing a stack of plywood. The elements would arrive; the practice would have to be re-grown.\n\nBlocks: #PU3SNX #PWJ5NB #F6625X #L5EYN6 #ERLV22 #XN95VQ", "title": "\"Practices do not travel, only elements do\": locality, supply chains, and the Californian accent" } ``` #### Tool call: `write_note` ```json { "block_ids": [ "RXBW6A", "DUUPD6", "SGNCNN", "2BA2KQ", "XEPTAM", "PYHGNL", "XN95VQ" ], "text": "A separate note for an angle the literature treats but doesn't quite name: pride as a meaning-element, and as a transmission mechanism for practice.\n\nShove emphasises that meanings are not properties of objects but get *associated* with them through repeated performance and mediation, and that they \"move, mutate and take each other's place but are never preserved intact\" (#2BA2KQ, p. 75). Crucially, meanings get repacked at every new site (#RXBW6A, p. 71); when Nordic walking poles were exported, manufacturers had to \"very concretely … export and make meaningful a totally new practice\" and the practice was \"radically transformed\" in the process (#XEPTAM). Meanings are mediated — by press, TV, picture, narrative (#SGNCNN, p. 69) — and a major part of the work of establishing a practice is the work of attaching the right meanings to its materials (#DUUPD6, p. 67).\n\nWhat the literature treats less directly is *pride* as a particular meaning-element with distinctive transmission properties. The case of Baltic Birch plywood makes the point clearly. For Latvians and Estonians, BB ply carries a meaning-cluster of \"bright, strong, rational, *ours*\" — built up over a century of industry, everyday use, and international recognition reflected back. American woodworkers on YouTube wanting BB ply, paying premium, treating it as exotic premium stock, is the same material with a different meaning-attachment: outside the Baltics it becomes \"the imported expensive plywood you splurge on for nice projects.\" Inside, it's \"the obvious default you grab without thinking.\" The artefact travels; the *casualness* — the sense that this is just what you reach for — does not. That casualness is part of what the regional pride underwrites.\n\nPride is doing two kinds of work. First, it is itself a meaning-element bound up with the materials, distinct from purely instrumental meanings (durable, cheap, available). Second, it is a transmission mechanism. Practices held by proud carriers transmit better than practices held by indifferent ones — they get explained with more conviction, defended against alternatives, taught with stakes. A Latvian carpenter reaching for BB ply is also reaching for a small national-scale story about being good at something difficult and standardized; that story is part of why the practice is robust. This is the practice-theoretical reason that the name \"Baltic Birch design system\" carries weight that \"Generic Plywood Design System\" wouldn't: the place-name imports the pride, and the pride imports the discipline.\n\nFor the thesis this opens a useful angle on Brīvbode. The shop is partly held together by a meaning-cluster that is specifically Latvian — relationships to thrift, plenty, repair, sufficiency that have a Baltic shape rather than a generic Western circular-economy shape. That rooted-ness is doing transmission work: volunteers keep showing up partly because the practice feels like *theirs*. The same rooted-ness is what would be lost in a \"franchise\" rollout to another city — the materials and the layout could travel; the casualness and the pride could not. This is the asymmetric migration pattern that the research question already gestures at (#PYHGNL: how materials, meanings and competencies travel between practices at the site) extended one step further: between sites, with pride as the meaning that most stubbornly refuses to repack.\n\nBlocks: #RXBW6A #DUUPD6 #SGNCNN #2BA2KQ #XEPTAM #PYHGNL #XN95VQ", "title": "Pride as a meaning-element and a transmission mechanism" } ``` ### 25. Tool result: write_note NOTE SAVED #9KQF7T IRI: https://sheaf.less.rest/9KQF7T ### 26. Tool result: write_note NOTE SAVED #MMW8ES IRI: https://sheaf.less.rest/MMW8ES ### 27. Assistant Two saved. - **#9KQF7T — "Practices do not travel, only elements do": locality, supply chains, and the Californian accent.** Anchors the doctrine in the three Shove passages (#PU3SNX, #PWJ5NB, #F6625X) plus the "homegrown" formulation (#L5EYN6), then runs the asymmetry between physical and digital substrates and lands on the point that placelessness is always a *claim* about a practice, never a property — with a tie-back to your conclusion paragraph #XN95VQ. - **#MMW8ES — Pride as a meaning-element and a transmission mechanism.** Builds on the meanings-travel-and-mutate passages (#RXBW6A, #DUUPD6, #SGNCNN, #2BA2KQ, #XEPTAM) and pushes one step past where the literature usually stops, naming pride as the meaning-element that most stubbornly refuses to repack. Tied back to the research question (#PYHGNL) and the conclusion (#XN95VQ). Together with the four from earlier (#WGKUQ6, #RUQLZG, #MP2D3W, #KP6QEA), there's now a small but coherent cluster on element-migration, locality, transmission, and pride — usable for the framework chapter, for a future paper, or just for the next time someone tries to convince you that web design is universal.