# Assistant conversation N37N8A

- Canonical URL: <https://sheaf.less.rest/N37N8A>
- Resource IRI: <https://sheaf.less.rest/N37N8A>
- Type: assistant conversation
- Mode: quick

## Transcript

### 1. User

i'm playing with this idea: Brīvbode is, in practice-theoretic terms, a node where elements of consumption defect from one practice and are recruited into another. What makes it worth describing in detail is that this defection-and-recruitment, usually hidden inside markets and households, is here performed semi-publicly — sorting in the open, meanings argued aloud, competences shown rather than priced. The swapshop is, in this sense, a practice with the lid off: a site where practice theory’s abstractions become observable, and where their limits — particularly around care, gender, and the plurality of moral framing — become correspondingly visible. ... read the mikael thesis draft and the shove sources and let's reflect on this

### 2. Assistant tool calls

#### Tool call: `list_documents`

```json
{}
```

### 3. Tool result: list_documents

- #4V8VH7 Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] - 2026 | Ieva Lange
- #FYG32U Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [draft] - 2026 | Ieva Lange

Journal articles (91)
- #QUD55H 'Saving' the city: Collective low-budget organising and urban practice - 2015 | Birke Otto, Hans Vollmer, Heike Derwanz, Paula Bialski | ephemera: theory & politics in organization | 20 pp.
- #K52UPR A Critical Review of the Role of Repair Cafés in a Sustainable Circular Transition - 2021 | Mette Alberg Mosgaard, Rikke Marie Moalem | Sustainability | 26 pp. | doi:10.3390/su132212351
- #4EFC4F After Practice? Material Semiotic Approaches to Consumption and Economy [cited] - 2020 | David M. Evans | Cultural Sociology | 17 pp. | doi:10.1177/1749975520923521
- #9D34UM After taste: Culture, consumption and theories of practice - 2014 | Alan Warde | Journal of Consumer Culture | 25 pp. | doi:10.1177/1469540514547828
- #5Y2AD9 An order of distinction (or, how to tell a collection from a hoard) - 2018 | Katie Kilroy-Marac | Journal of Material Culture | 19 pp. | doi:10.1177/1359183517729428
- #FQRNAE Austerity and everyday life: Perspectives on practices of consumption and thrift - 2019 | Alison Hulme | Journal of Consumer Culture | 7 pp. | doi:10.1177/1469540519872079
- #9MNC8T Austerity Ireland, the New Thrift Culture and Sustainable Consumption - 2017 | Fiona Murphy | Journal of Business Anthropology | 17 pp. | doi:10.22439/jba.v6i2.5410
- #59QUM6 Blurring the boundaries: Prosumption, circularity and online sustainable consumption through Freecycle [cited] - 2017 | Sally Eden | Journal of Consumer Culture | 21 pp. | doi:10.1177/1469540515586871
- #X8QHRR Calculating the Environmental Impact Reduction Due to Extended Lifespan of Clothing Through Clothing Swaps - 2025 | Agnė Jučienė, Inga Gurauskienė, Jolita Kruopienė | Sustainability | 22 pp. | doi:10.3390/su17104411
- #AVNZLE Care and circularity: how the enactment of care enables and shapes the circular consumption of clothing [cited] - 2025 | Christian Fuentes, Réka Tölg | Consumption and Society | 19 pp. | doi:10.1332/27528499y2024d00000032
- #XUHRZA Changing understandings of waste reduction and avoidance in moralities of thrift: A comparison of Mass Observers' narratives three decades apart [cited] - 2022 | Helen Holmes, Ulrike Ehgartner | Geoforum | 10 pp. | doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2022.10.014
- #BQ2W57 Circular Consumption Practices as Matters of Care [cited] - 2025 | Elina Närvänen, Malla Mattila, Nina Mesiranta, Outi Koskinen | Journal of Business Ethics | 19 pp. | doi:10.1007/s10551-024-05888-5
- #57LWKZ Cities of care: A platform for urban geographical care research - 2020 | Emma R. Power, Miriam J. Williams | Geography Compass | 12 pp. | doi:10.1111/gec3.12474
- #JXXRQJ Citizen-Consumers as Agents of Change in Globalizing Modernity: The Case of Sustainable Consumption - 2010 | Gert Spaargaren, Peter Oosterveer | Sustainability | 22 pp. | doi:10.3390/su2071887
- #8ZKAT7 Closing the loop or squaring the circle? Locating generative spaces for the circular economy - 2016 | Kersty Hobson | Progress in Human Geography | 17 pp. | doi:10.1177/0309132514566342
- #MCJT5Q Connecting the multi-level-perspective and social practice approach for sustainable transitions - 2022 | Léon Francis Hirt, Margit Keller, Marlyne Sahakian | Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions | 15 pp. | doi:10.1016/j.eist.2022.05.004
- #UB9EAT Consumer engagement in the circular economy: Exploring clothes swapping in emerging economies from a social practice perspective [cited] - 2019 | Casper Boks, Ida Nilstad Pettersen, Juana Camacho-Otero | Sustainable Development | 16 pp. | doi:10.1002/sd.2002
- #Q3G2WY Consumption - 2011 | David Graeber | Current Anthropology | 24 pp. | doi:10.1086/660166
- #N7FUYP Consumption and Commodities - 1995 | D. Miller | Annual Review of Anthropology | 22 pp. | doi:10.1146/annurev.anthro.24.1.141
- #RZ8QTE Consumption and Theories of Practice [cited] - 2005 | Alan Warde | Journal of Consumer Culture | 23 pp. | doi:10.1177/1469540505053090
- #PSBVW7 Consumption in the Circular Economy: A Literature Review - 2018 | Casper Boks, Ida Nilstad Pettersen, Juana Camacho-Otero | Sustainability | 25 pp. | doi:10.3390/su10082758
- #NUEUVY Consumption Work in the circular economy: A research agenda. [cited] - 2021 | Dan Welch, Harald Wieser, Helen Holmes, Katy Wheeler, Kersty Hobson | Journal of Cleaner Production | 8 pp. | doi:10.1016/j.jclepro.2021.128969
- #MNFABA Disposal and simple living: exploring the circulation of goods and the development of sacred consumption - 2009 | Hélène Cherrier | Journal of Consumer Behaviour | 14 pp. | doi:10.1002/cb.297
- #YBKS64 Everyday life after downshifting: Consumption, thrift, and inequality - 2020 | Jo Lindsay, Kim Humphery, Ruth Lane | Geographical Research | 15 pp. | doi:10.1111/1745-5871.12396
- #TBPJS6 Exploring the role of community-based enterprises in consumers' voluntary clothing disposition via UK swapping events using theory of social practice [cited] - 2023 | Aurelie Le Normand, Claudia E. Henninger, Lucie Počinková, Marta Blazquez Cano | Social Enterprise Journal | 21 pp. | doi:10.1108/sej-02-2023-0017
- #N5VYH8 Food practices as part of daily routines: A conceptual framework for analysing networks of practices - 2021 | Aricia F.M. Castelo, Martina Schäfer, Minelle E. Silva | Appetite | 10 pp. | doi:10.1016/j.appet.2020.104978
- #FHZZ6U Freecycling Markets as Sustainable Materialist Movements? Closing Reuse Circularity Loops in Singapore [cited] - 2024 | Brenda S.A. Yeoh, Qian Hui Tan | Worldwide Waste: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies | 15 pp. | doi:10.3197/whpww.63857928646673
- #SJ3K7R Friends, family and the circulation of used goods: overlooked sustainability practices - 2025 | Dharma Arunachalam, Jo Lindsay, Rob Raven, Ruth Lane | Environmental Sociology | 13 pp. | doi:10.1080/23251042.2025.2510410
- #4AE86F From circular consumers to carriers of (unsustainable) practices: socio-spatial transformations in the Circular City - 2020 | Kersty Hobson | Urban Geography | 5 pp. | doi:10.1080/02723638.2020.1786329
- #4UEQN8 Gift or commodity: what changes hands in the U.S. garage sale? - 1997 | Gretchen M. Herrmann | American Ethnologist | 21 pp. | doi:10.1525/ae.1997.24.4.910
- #B6FWAN Governing transitions in the sustainability of everyday life [cited] - 2010 | Elizabeth Shove, Gordon Walker | Research Policy | 6 pp. | doi:10.1016/j.respol.2010.01.019
- #MRANHJ Grey greening: quiet sustainability at auto salvage yards - 2022 | Pavel Mašek | Geografie | 19 pp. | doi:10.37040/geografie2022127010055
- #MBXQXR Growing in Motion: The Circulation of Used Things on Second-hand Markets [cited] - 2015 | Anna Bohlin, Staffan Appelgren | Culture Unbound | 26 pp. | doi:10.3384/cu.2000.1525.1571143
- #B3CVMW Harnessing the Unruly: Anthropological Contributions in Applied Reuse Projects - 2020 | Anna Bohlin, Staffan Appelgren | kritisk etnografi: Swedish Journal of Anthropology | 17 pp. | doi:10.33063/diva-432451
- #YW8AYL Home and the extended-self: Exploring associations between clutter and wellbeing - 2021 | Caroline J. Rogers, Dr Rona Hart | Journal of Environmental Psychology | 10 pp. | doi:10.1016/j.jenvp.2021.101553
- #ZB3YSD Household consumption at the crossroads: A bibliometric decoding of global sustainability trends, research gaps, and collaborative networks (2015-2025) - 2025 | B.K. Prahani, Hendry Cahyono, Iszan Hana Kaharudin, Kukuh Arisetyawan, Ladi Wajuba Perdini Fisabilillah, M. Satriawan, M.A. Ghofur, N. Suprapto, Ruth Eviana Hutabarat, S. Andari, Wenny Restikasari, Zain Fuadi Muhammad RoziqiFath | E3S Web of Conferences | 10 pp. | doi:10.1051/e3sconf/202564001017
- #UGBANU How temporal orientations trigger, nurture and sustain deep engagement with consumption practices - 2025 | Benjamin Rosenthal | Marketing Theory | 21 pp. | doi:10.1177/14705931241264535
- #9GQP2Z In Defense of Consumer Critique: Revisiting the Consumption Debates of the Twentieth Century - 2007 | Juliet B. Schor | The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science | 15 pp. | doi:10.1177/0002716206299145
- #4Y4DVC Incidental sustainability? Notes from a thrift store in Germany - 2023 | Petra Kuppinger | Critique of Anthropology | 20 pp. | doi:10.1177/0308275x231194259
- #XUS5YJ Learning like a Minimalist—Learning from a Minimalist. Consumers as Disseminators for Sustainable Clothes Usage - 2021 | Journal of Sustainability Research | 24 pp. | doi:10.20900/jsr20210017
- #QWH9YU Lifestyles of enough exploring sufficiency-oriented consumption behavior from a social practice theory perspective - 2023 | Maren I Kropfeld | Journal of Consumer Culture | 22 pp. | doi:10.1177/14695405221095008
- #VGCYKU Linking social practice theories to the perceptions of green consumption: An overview - 2025 | Samira Jabin, Shah Md Atiqul Haq | Social Sciences & Humanities Open | 12 pp. | doi:10.1016/j.ssaho.2025.101455
- #R69WZQ Material culture and the circular economy - 2023 | Elizabeth Shove, Jenny Rinkinen | Frontiers in Sustainability | 4 pp. | doi:10.3389/frsus.2023.1158079
- #ARE7AL Materials changing the performance of the household energy consumption practices - 2025 | Eliisa Kylkilahti, Henna Syrjälä, Liisa Kääntä, Sara-Ellen Laitinen | Journal of Consumer Culture | 19 pp. | doi:10.1177/14695405251321405
- #FYWZFY My Journey within Practice-Based Approaches Bandwagon - 2019 | Mika Pantzar | Sociologica | 8 pp. | doi:10.6092/issn.1971-8853/10203
- #XATD2A New spaces, ordinary practices: Circulating and sharing within diverse economies of provisioning [cited] - 2018 | Helen Holmes | Geoforum | 10 pp. | doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2017.11.022
- #R9KEKQ Not moving things along: hoarding, clutter and other ambiguous matter - 2009 | Neil Maycroft | Journal of Consumer Behaviour | 12 pp. | doi:10.1002/cb.298
- #VJ8G58 Object Relations in Accounts of Everyday Life - 2015 | Elizabeth Shove, Jenny Rinkinen, Mikko Jalas | Sociology | 16 pp. | doi:10.1177/0038038515577910
- #CUWPC9 On Materiality and Meaning: Ethnographic Engagements with Reuse, Repair &amp; Care - 2019 | Cindy Isenhour, Joshua Reno | Worldwide Waste | 8 pp. | doi:10.5334/wwwj.27
- #D8EAVV Online Clothing Resale: A Practice Theory Approach to Evaluate Sustainable Consumption Gains - 2020 | Cosette M. Joyner Armstrong, Hyejune Park | Journal of Sustainability Research | 24 pp. | doi:10.20900/jsr20200017
- #AG36RW Paradoxes of openness and distinction in the sharing economy - 2016 | Connor Fitzmaurice, Emilie Dubois Poteat, Juliet B. Schor, Lindsey B. Carfagna, Will Attwood-Charles | Poetics | 18 pp. | doi:10.1016/j.poetic.2015.11.001
- #86EHHS Practice theory approach to Gen Z’s sustainable clothing consumption in Finland [cited] - 2024 | Olga Gurova | Young Consumers | 19 pp. | doi:10.1108/yc-06-2023-1765
- #XAYNBH Practice-ing behaviour change: Applying social practice theory to pro-environmental behaviour change - 2011 | Tom Hargreaves | Journal of Consumer Culture | 21 pp. | doi:10.1177/1469540510390500
- #WVG7HV Quiet sustainability: Fertile lessons from Europe’s productive gardeners [cited] - 2013 | Joe Smith, Petr Jehlicka | Journal of Rural Studies | 10 pp. | doi:10.1016/j.jrurstud.2013.05.002
- #4YG3VP Repair for a Broken Economy: Lessons for Circular Economy from an International Interview Study of Repairers - 2021 | Duncan McLaren, Johan Niskanen, Jonas Anshelm | Sustainability | 15 pp. | doi:10.3390/su13042316
- #AY4Z4C Repair Work as Care: On Maintaining the Planet in the Capitalocene - 2025 | Julia E. Corwin, Vinay Gidwani | Antipode | 21 pp. | doi:10.1111/anti.12791
- #V9QTJP Reuse practices and household consumption work [cited] - 2026 | David M. Evans, Peter Jackson, Rorie Beswick-Parsons | Social &amp; Cultural Geography | 21 pp. | doi:10.1080/14649365.2025.2549709
- #HJXUZN Selling Thrift: Work Practices in an American Thrift Store [cited] - 2023 | Frederik Larsen | Journal of Business Anthropology | 19 pp. | doi:10.22439/jba.v12i1.6914
- #ANC583 Social bases of material consumption: The relationship between social groups and possession of household appliances in Denmark - 2019 | Mette Hove Jacobsen | Journal of Consumer Culture | 20 pp. | doi:10.1177/1469540516684190
- #NE9YL5 Sustainability as a Moral Discourse: Its Shifting Meanings, Exclusions, and Anxieties - 2022 | Al Lim, Lav Kanoi, Michael R. Dove, Shoko Yamada, Vanessa Koh | Sustainability | 17 pp. | doi:10.3390/su14053095
- #EPZXEW Sustainable Consumption and Practice Theories: Connecting Elements of Clothing Sharing - 2024 | Marcia de Freitas Duarte, Minelle E. Silva, Márcia R. Cavalcante Costa | BBR, Braz. Bus. Rev. | 25 pp. | doi:10.15728/bbr.2021.1182.en
- #5FD8BE The Advent of Practice Theories in Research on Sustainable Consumption: Past, Current and Future Directions of the Field - 2019 | Filippo Corsini, Francesco Paolo Appio, Franziska Meinherz, Luca Mora, Rafael Laurenti | Sustainability | 19 pp. | doi:10.3390/su11020341
- #GAZV32 The communities and materials of repair: collectively reflecting on repair practices of everyday artefacts - 2026 | Bilge Merve Aktaş, Hazal Gümüş Çiftçi | CoDesign | 21 pp. | doi:10.1080/15710882.2025.2452575
- #P7EWHQ The Force of Things - 2004 | Jane Bennett | Political Theory | 27 pp. | doi:10.1177/0090591703260853
- #7VNTAB The gift of waste: The diversity of gift practices among dumpster divers - 2023 | Olli Pyyhtinen, Turo-Kimmo Lehtonen | Anthropological Theory | 23 pp. | doi:10.1177/14634996221117318
- #Q24SW5 The Gift, the Indian Gift and the 'Indian Gift' - 1986 | Jonathan Parry | Man | 22 pp. | doi:10.2307/2803096
- #UMYA27 The limits of the loops: critical environmental politics and the Circular Economy - 2021 | Kersty Hobson | Environmental Politics | 20 pp. | doi:10.1080/09644016.2020.1816052
- #UTEUAD The logics of frugality: Reproducing tastes of necessity among affluent climate change activists - 2017 | Jean Léon Boucher | Energy Research & Social Science | 10 pp. | doi:10.1016/j.erss.2017.06.001
- #P88564 The Minimalist Universe of Things. Living with Less in German Speaking Households - 2023 | Heike Derwanz | Home Cultures | 18 pp. | doi:10.1080/17406315.2024.2338007
- #LB5ACW The Political Economy of Circular Economies: Lessons from Future Repair Scenario Deliberations in Sweden - 2023 | Duncan McLaren, Johan Niskanen | Circular Economy and Sustainability | 25 pp. | doi:10.1007/s43615-021-00128-8
- #7RVN6J The Simple Bare Necessities: Scales and Paradoxes of Thrift on a London Public Housing Estate - 2022 | Catherine Alexander | Comparative Studies in Society and History | 32 pp. | doi:10.1017/s0010417522000159
- #RRPNRF The Sustainability of an Anthropology of the Anthropocene - 2022 | Thomas Hylland Eriksen | Sustainability | 11 pp. | doi:10.3390/su14063674
- #NM4W8T Theories of practices: Agency, technology, and culture - 2011 | Gert Spaargaren | Global Environmental Change | 10 pp. | doi:10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2011.03.010
- #GKZ9HP There is no sustainable circular economy without a circular society - 2021 | Charlotte Jensen, Florian Hofmann, Jakob Zwiers, Melanie Jaeger-Erben | Resources, Conservation and Recycling | 2 pp. | doi:10.1016/j.resconrec.2021.105476
- #XDUQVM Through the practice lens: Where is the bandwagon of practice-based studies heading? - 2010 | Gessica Corradi, Luca Verzelloni, Silvia Gherardi | Management Learning | 19 pp. | doi:10.1177/1350507609356938
- #MB6S7L Toward an Ecology of Materials - 2012 | Tim Ingold | Annual Review of Anthropology | 20 pp. | doi:10.1146/annurev-anthro-081309-145920
- #7BM5AQ Uncontained accumulation: Hidden heterotopias of storage and spillage - 2018 | Sasha Newell | History and Anthropology | 6 pp. | doi:10.1080/02757206.2017.1397647
- #6EFDXH Unpicking contemporary thrift: Getting on and getting by in everyday life - 2019 | Helen Holmes | The Sociological Review | 17 pp. | doi:10.1177/0038026118797837
- #SHZ6RT Valuation in action: Ethnography of an American thrift store - 2019 | Frederik Larsen | Business History | 18 pp. | doi:10.1080/00076791.2017.1418330
- #N7DKM2 Vogel's Net - 1996 | Alfred Gell | Journal of Material Culture | 25 pp. | doi:10.1177/135918359600100102
- #S54TH3 Waste and the superfluous: an introduction - 2017 | Elisabeth Schober, Thomas Hylland Eriksen | Social Anthropology | 6 pp. | doi:10.1111/1469-8676.12422
- #6C82ER Waste is not the end. For an anthropology of care, maintenance and repair - 2017 | Francisco Martínez | Social Anthropology | 5 pp. | doi:10.1111/1469-8676.12436
- #UBF5U3 What does that shirt mean to you? Thrift-store consumption as cultural capital - 2020 | Shelly Steward | Journal of Consumer Culture | 21 pp. | doi:10.1177/1469540517745707
- #LB72BP What future for collaborative consumption? A practice theoretical account - 2019 | Gert Spaargaren, Walter Fraanje | Journal of Cleaner Production | 10 pp. | doi:10.1016/j.jclepro.2018.09.197
- #9X3WKH Whose Collection Is It Anyway? An Autoethnographic Account of `Dividing the Spoils' upon Divorce - 2007 | Jackie Goode | Cultural Sociology | 19 pp. | doi:10.1177/1749975507082055
- #ZNC4FL WITH and WITHOUT THINGS. AN INTRODUCTION - 2023 | Francisco Martínez, Tomás Errázuriz | Home Cultures | 15 pp. | doi:10.1080/17406315.2024.2347703
- #ZJUEY4 ‘It will Keep Circulating’: Loving and Letting Go of Things in Swedish Second-hand Markets - 2019 | Anna Bohlin | Worldwide Waste | 11 pp. | doi:10.5334/wwwj.17
- #VWPB2S ‘It's Kind of Saving them a Job isn't it?’ The Consumption Work of Household Recycling - 2015 | Kathryn Wheeler, Miriam Glucksmann | The Sociological Review | 19 pp. | doi:10.1111/1467-954x.12199
- #UTUMYN ‘Nothing Comes Without Its World’: Thinking with Care - 2012 | María Puig de la Bellacasa | The Sociological Review | 20 pp. | doi:10.1111/j.1467-954x.2012.02070.x
- #EDFB5G “If I don’t do it, it feels wrong”: embodying environmental ethical reflexivity through cultivation and enactment of practices [cited] - 2024 | Anne Sofie Møller Askholm | Sustainability: Science, Practice and Policy | 12 pp. | doi:10.1080/15487733.2024.2350204
- #3F4AVR “Still good life”: On the value of reuse and distributive labor in “depleted” rural Maine [cited] - 2020 | Brieanne Berry, Cindy Isenhour | Economic Anthropology | 16 pp. | doi:10.1002/sea2.12176

Books (20)
- #GABXSA Acknowledging Consumption: A Review of New Studies - 1995 | Daniel Miller | 350 pp.
- #UX42KU Anthropology and the Economy of Sharing [cited] - 2016 | Thomas Widlok | 240 pp. | doi:10.4324/9781315671291
- #VC6397 Clothing Poverty: The Hidden World of Fast Fashion and Second-hand Clothes - 2015 | Andrew Brooks | 298 pp. | doi:10.5040/9781350219243
- #8J3FXD Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience: The Social Organization of Normality [cited] - 2003 | Elizabeth Shove | 236 pp. | doi:10.5040/9781474214605
- #2EDLQU Elusive Consumption - 2004 | Helene Brembeck, Karin M. Ekström | 254 pp. | doi:10.5040/9781474214704
- #BJ6B3C From the Cult of Waste to the Trash Heap of History: The Politics of Waste in Socialist and Postsocialist Hungary - 2007 | Zsuzsa Gille | 266 pp.
- #4LST57 Household Recycling and Consumption Work [cited] - 2015 | Kathryn Wheeler, Miriam Glucksmann | 249 pp. | doi:10.1057/9781137440440
- #R26U48 Materiality - 2005 | Daniel Miller | 302 pp.
- #Y3KME8 My Life with Things: The Consumer Diaries - 2016 | Elizabeth Chin | 248 pp. | doi:10.1515/9780822374268
- #B5KMLA Second-Hand Cultures and Economies of Reuse, Repair, Sharing, and Care - 2025 | Petra Kuppinger | Palgrave Macmillan | 28 pp. | doi:10.1007/978-3-031-99875-1
- #VKBZ23 Social Practices: A Wittgensteinian Approach to Human Activity and the Social - 1996 | Theodore R. Schatzki | 256 pp. | doi:10.1017/CBO9780511527470
- #5AXAEJ The Dynamics of Social Practice: Everyday Life and How It Changes [cited] - 2012 | Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar | 206 pp. | doi:10.4135/9781446250655
- #83R4U2 The Ethics of Waste: How We Relate to Rubbish - 2006 | Gay Hawkins | 80 pp.
- #R49AUC The Nexus of Practices: Connections, constellations, practitioners - 2017 | Allison Hui, Elizabeth Shove, Theodore Schatzki | 237 pp. | doi:10.4324/9781315560816
- #3LSRBZ The Perception of the Environment: Essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill - 2000 | Tim Ingold | 480 pp.
- #6J5MKL The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory - 2001 | Eike von Savigny, Karin Knorr Cetina, Theodore R. Schatzki | 253 pp. | doi:10.4324/9780203977453
- #RCRP8Z The World of Goods: Towards an anthropology of consumption - 1996 | Baron Isherwood, Mary Douglas | 198 pp.
- #BX2YWY Thinking Through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically - 2007 | Amiria Henare, Martin Holbraad, Sari Wastell | 248 pp.
- #8YF7LY Thrift and its Paradoxes: From Domestic to Political Economy - 2022 | Catherine Alexander, Daniel Sosna | 232 pp. | doi:10.3167/9781800734623
- #3N7TTE Time, Consumption and Everyday Life: Practice, Materiality and Culture - 2009 | Elizabeth Shove, Frank Trentmann, Richard Wilk | 251 pp. | doi:10.5040/9781474215862

Book chapters (12)
- #TNE9JN Habits and Their Creatures - 2012 | Elizabeth Shove | The Habits of Consumption | Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies | pp. 100-112 | 13 pp.
- #EVCWDH Introduction. Storing and storying the serendipity of objects - 2013 | Patrick Laviolette | Things in Culture, Culture in Things | Approaches to Culture Theory | pp. 13-33 | 11 pp.
- #PB2Z6X Introduction: commodities and the politics of value [cited] - 1986 | Arjun Appadurai | The Social Life of Things | Cambridge University Press | pp. 3-63 | 31 pp. | doi:10.1017/CBO9780511819582.003
- #WMSENQ Sustainable consumption as a systemic challenge: inter- and transdisciplinary research and research questions - 2015 | Philip J. Vergragt, Sylvia Lorek | Handbook of Research on Sustainable Consumption | Edward Elgar Publishing | pp. 19-31 | 14 pp. | doi:10.4337/9781783471270.00008
- #V4V7XC Sustainable Consumption, Behaviour Change Policies and Theories of Practice [cited] - 2012 | Andrew McMeekin, Dale Southerton, David Evans | The Habits of Consumption | Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies | pp. 113-129 | 17 pp.
- #BZ63DX Sustainable practices: social theory and climate change - 2013 | Elizabeth Shove, Nicola Spurling | Sustainable Practices | Routledge | pp. 17-30 | 22 pp. | doi:10.4324/9780203071052-6
- #Y3CFPX The Assembling of Circular Consumption: A sociomaterial practice approach - 2023 | Christian Fuentes, Elina Närvänen, Nina Mesiranta | The Routledge Handbook of Catalysts for a Sustainable Circular Economy | Routledge | pp. 535-549 | 15 pp. | doi:10.4324/9781003267492-30
- #9DHD6K The cultural biography of things: commoditization as process - 1986 | Igor Kopytoff | The Social Life of Things | Cambridge University Press | pp. 64-92 | 15 pp. | doi:10.1017/CBO9780511819582.004
- #3SKV2A The cultural dimension of sustainable consumption practices: an exploration in theory and policy - 2013 | Gert Spaargaren | Innovations in Sustainable Consumption | Edward Elgar Publishing | 13 pp. | doi:10.4337/9781781001349.00022
- #72GVQ9 The Habits of Consumption [cited] - 2012 | Alan Warde, Dale Southerton | The Habits of Consumption | Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies | pp. 1-25 | 25 pp.
- #KWZ2A4 Theories of Practice and Sustainable Consumption [cited] - 2015 | Alan Warde, Daniel Welch | Handbook of Research on Sustainable Consumption | Edward Elgar Publishing | pp. 84-100 | 17 pp. | doi:10.4337/9781783471270.00013
- #Q8AKGZ Towards a Better Accounting of the Roles of Body, Things and Habits in Consumption - 2012 | Harold Wilhite | The Habits of Consumption | Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies | pp. 87-99 | 13 pp.

Doctoral theses (3)
- #QRRZP2 Consumption and Practice: Unfolding Consumptive Moments and the Entanglement with Productive Aspects - 2013 | Benjamin Julien Hartmann | 157 pp.
- #ZC3PHV Patchworks of Care: Ethics and Practice of Care in the Organic Food Movement in Latvia - 2020 | Agnese Bankovska | 234 pp.
- #8EVNK8 The (im)possibilities of circular consumption: Producing and performing circular clothing consumption in retail and household settings - 2025 | Réka Tölg | 138 pp.

Reports (1)
- #XBPXDL Inconspicuous consumption: the sociology of consumption and the environment - 1998 | Alan Warde, Elizabeth Shove | 17 pp.

Spreadsheet (1)
- #XGCWS4 Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet

### 4. Assistant tool calls

#### Tool call: `get_document`

```json
{
  "id": "4V8VH7"
}
```

#### Tool call: `get_document`

```json
{
  "id": "5AXAEJ"
}
```

#### Tool call: `get_document`

```json
{
  "id": "8J3FXD"
}
```

#### Tool call: `get_document`

```json
{
  "id": "R69WZQ"
}
```

### 5. Tool result: get_document

THESIS #4V8VH7
Title: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia

Outline:
  - 1 #ZF9EYF Introduction
    - 1.1 #LAR465 Latvian context and research
    - 1.2 #MUKRGA A note on terms
    - 1.3 #FVXBEK The structure of the thesis
  - 2 #L759F3 Circulation, Practice, and Consumption Work: A Theoretical Framework
    - 2.1 #Q2WXHP Theories of Practice
    - 2.2 #WULWDF Theories of Practice to Study Alternative Practices?
    - 2.3 #HQ4PZX Consumption practices
    - 2.4 #23NMLX Consumption Work
    - 2.5 #ULSUAX Conclusion
  - 3 #LYTS7L Research methodology: A Practice  Freecycle
    - 3.1 #ZXRYYU The site
    - 3.2 #3CQF69 Setting the scene: A day in Brīvbode
    - 3.3 #U3GSXB Ethnography of Practice
    - 3.4 #VMQSHJ Participant observation
    - 3.5 #GU86TB Interviews
    - 3.6 #BRBBF9 Data analysis
    - 3.7 #TGAMBJ Research ethics
  - 4 #9XAKTW Keeping Things Moving: Brīvbode as a Practice of Circulation
    - 4.1 #2JEZWG Incoming Flow: Divestment From Home
    - 4.2 #PBFQ5E Where It Begins: The Site as Active Flow
    - 4.3 #QP7HMF Reading the Room: Norms and Competencies of Circulation
    - 4.4 #PZH45P Not a Charity: The Moral Economy of Exchange
    - 4.5 #7Z8WUY Letting Go: Attachment Without Price
    - 4.6 #W2WRDC What People Find Here: Plural Meanings of Acquisition
    - 4.7 #GTJY22 Quiet or Reflected Sustainability?
    - 4.8 #A3X9XX Conclusion: Holding Together Incompatible Orientations
  - 5 #82G2QE Holding It Together: Care and Consumption Work in Brīvbode
    - 5.1 #N8D3HT Time to Give: Volunteers and the Sufficiency Lifestyle
    - 5.2 #SLFJ9K Priceless Valuation: Sorting, Curation, and Care
    - 5.3 #EBTHSE Not the Bin: Modal Labour and the Informal Route
    - 5.4 #L38KUE It’s On Me: Networks, Gender, and the Transmission of Care
    - 5.5 #75D5UH Conclusion
  - 6 #M9WQLY CONCLUSION
  - 7 #FTE3UX SUMMARY
  - 8 #9GJAHS LIST OF SOURCES
  - 9 #TY2EB4 KOKKUVÕTE

### 6. Tool result: get_document

DOCUMENT #5AXAEJ
Title: The Dynamics of Social Practice

Outline:
  - 1 #5W2PJB THE DYNAMICS OF SOCIAL PRACTICE
  - 2 #SM2ASL THE DYNAMICS OF SOCIAL PRACTICE
  - 3 #MLWG3R THE DYNAMICS OF SOCIAL PRACTICE
  - 4 #ERYLEX CONTENTS
  - 5 #RJD3SC LIST OF FIGURES AND TABLE
    - 5.1 #AQ5ZUD Figures
    - 5.2 #K42KWM Table
  - 6 #3JT2SD ABOUT THE AUTHORS
  - 7 #47JF6S ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
  - 8 #WWSYJP 1
  - 9 #MV5P3X THE DYNAMICS OF SOCIAL PRACTICE
    - 9.1 #XKXCG8 INTRODUCING THEORIES OF PRACTICE
    - 9.2 #CGRC4S MATERIALS AND RESOURCES
    - 9.3 #BBQ2U3 SEQUENCE AND STRUCTURE
  - 10 #4F5G4N 2
  - 11 #W6VMCW MAKING AND BREAKING LINKS
    - 11.1 #Z73JHW MATERIAL, COMPETENCE AND MEANING
    - 11.2 #XZV45L CAR-DRIVING – ELEMENTS AND LINKAGES
      - 11.2.1 #DBJWEC MAKING LINKS
      - 11.2.2 #VEDDZZ BREAKING LINKS
    - 11.3 #EBZCFW ELEMENTS BETWEEN PRACTICES
    - 11.4 #QM4X2J STANDARDIZATION AND DIVERSITY
    - 11.5 #J9P8DZ INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE CAREERS
  - 12 #NX87WU 3
  - 13 #XG9NDT THE LIFE OF ELEMENTS
    - 13.1 #6H9VRT MODES OF CIRCULATION
      - 13.1.1 #3KWGMM Transportation and access: material
      - 13.1.2 #THMJ59 Abstraction, reversal and migration: competence
      - 13.1.3 #SY5EDK Association and classification: meaning
      - 13.1.4 #YLZQUZ Packing and unpacking
    - 13.2 #WPPBPJ EMERGENCE, DISAPPEARANCE AND PERSISTENCE
  - 14 #A7D5SC 4
  - 15 #NXZT4D RECRUITMENT, DEFECTION AND REPRODUCTION
    - 15.1 #F8JCHW FIRST ENCOUNTERS: NETWORKS AND COMMUNITIES
    - 15.2 #7QBCW8 CAPTURE AND COMMITMENT: CAREERS AND CARRIERS
    - 15.3 #8JX39Z COLLAPSE AND TRANSFORMATION: THE DYNAMICS OF DEFECTION
    - 15.4 #PLFBHW DAILY PATHS, LIFE PATHS AND DOMINANT PROJECTS
  - 16 #9XVXK2 5
    - 16.1 #CXK5CC CONNECTIONS BETWEEN PRACTICES
    - 16.2 #ELA87Q BUNDLES AND COMPLEXES
    - 16.3 #TVA3KY COLLABORATION AND COMPETITION
    - 16.4 #67PN8N SELECTION AND INTEGRATION
    - 16.5 #XC89XB COORDINATING DAILY LIFE
  - 17 #7HCNWJ 6
  - 18 #KTKRHR CIRCUITS OF REPRODUCTION
    - 18.1 #5LUMHC MONITORING PRACTICES-AS-PERFORMANCES
      - 18.1.1 #E8H23B MONITORING PRACTICES-AS-ENTITIES
      - 18.1.2 #TCT35W CROSS-REFERENCING PRACTICES-AS-PERFORMANCES
      - 18.1.3 #CRNFAD CROSS-REFERENCING PRACTICES-AS-ENTITIES
      - 18.1.4 #Z5LZBV Aggregation
      - 18.1.5 #JEXR3M Elements of coordination
    - 18.2 #ZUAQBH INTERSECTING CIRCUITS
  - 19 #4JFLZ9 7
  - 20 #GUVB7V REPRESENTING THE DYNAMICS OF SOCIAL PRACTICE
    - 20.1 #Q8XDZB REPRESENTING ELEMENTS AND PRACTICES
      - 20.1.1 #2A3N85 CHARACTERIZING CIRCULATION
      - 20.1.2 #BFDM4Q COMPETITION, TRANSFORMATION AND CONVERGENCE
    - 20.2 #QPH46U REPRODUCING ELEMENTS, PRACTICES AND RELATIONS BETWEEN THEM
      - 20.2.1 #RA7LJ2 TIME AND PRACTICE
      - 20.2.2 #UJXB44 SPACE AND PRACTICE
      - 20.2.3 #SKGSBB DOMINANT PROJECTS AND POWER
  - 21 #6P2ZMD 8
  - 22 #QRSCLP PROMOTING TRANSITIONS IN PRACTICE
    - 22.1 #VC26KP CLIMATE CHANGE AND BEHAVIOUR CHANGE
      - 22.1.1 #8GFJNF Basis of action
      - 22.1.2 #AJ757K Processes of change
      - 22.1.3 #AMQ7FN Positioning policy
      - 22.1.4 #RCW67Z Transferable lessons
    - 22.2 #WNL5BX PRACTICE THEORY AND CLIMATE CHANGE POLICY
      - 22.2.1 #8WHQQJ Configuring elements of practice
      - 22.2.2 #4F8F39 Configuring relations between practices
      - 22.2.3 #YVMFU5 Configuring careers: carriers and practices
      - 22.2.4 #NBLH65 Configuring connections
    - 22.3 #LYZ8XN PRACTICE-ORIENTED POLICY MAKING
  - 23 #L9W9UH REFERENCES
  - 24 #3VZ9WM INDEX

### 7. Tool result: get_document

DOCUMENT #8J3FXD
Title: Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience: The Social Organization of Normality

Outline:
  - 1 #5YK59M COMFORT, CLEANLINESS + CONVENIENCE
    - 1.1 #WV8BSE New Technologies/New Cultures Series
  - 2 #QCED92 Comfort, Cleanliness and Compliance The Social Organization of Normality
    - 2.1 #3MKGRE Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
    - 2.2 #LZZ8PJ British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
  - 3 #2X8RYT Contents
  - 4 #FPZ755 List of Figures and Tables
    - 4.1 #MMFRW4 Figures
    - 4.2 #QFXX9C Tables
  - 5 #5YMLUS Acknowledgements
    - 5.1 #XZN3NQ Consumption, Everyday Life and Sustainability
    - 5.2 #UU4GH4 Natural Resources and Consumer Choices
    - 5.3 #Z3B4CE Cycles of Consumption and Escalators of Demand
    - 5.4 #RVX2LM Trajectories and Transitions
    - 5.5 #J2KR9A Reconfiguring Practice
    - 5.6 #ENSA3E Method and Approach
    - 5.7 #R4G8PF The Science of Comfort Constructing Normality
    - 5.8 #65HB3L Defining Comfort: a State of Mind, an Attribute or an Achievement?
      - 5.8.1 #VALGK7 Playing God with the Indoor Climate
    - 5.9 #UXWQ29 Quantifying Comfort
      - 5.9.1 #54SJSW Questions and Agendas
      - 5.9.2 #4CPTJE From Laboratory to Design Guide
      - 5.9.3 #DUJK65 From Design Guide to Practice
      - 5.9.4 #K7GJVA Qualifying Comfort
      - 5.9.5 #5W8HW6 Adaptive Opportunity
      - 5.9.6 #H2MXPU Adaptive Science
      - 5.9.7 #F24PP3 Adaptive Standards
    - 5.10 #SN2GXH Constructing Comfort
    - 5.11 #EGP7WF The Co-evolution of Comfort: Interdependence and Innovation
      - 5.11.1 #AQTWRZ Dimensions and Dynamics
    - 5.12 #ATSUW2 Difference and Coherence: Acquiring and Using Air-conditioning
      - 5.12.1 #9KTCUK Difference and De/revaluation
      - 5.12.2 #34T33T Coherence and De/restabilization
      - 5.12.3 #LXUSSZ Diffusion, Diversity and Lighting
      - 5.12.4 #38CCQC Comfort as Collective Practice: the Siesta
      - 5.12.5 #NV49TF Reconfiguring Comfort
    - 5.13 #NPFZYZ Regimes of Comfort: Systems in Transition
      - 5.13.1 #E625NC Levels, Layers and Landscapes
    - 5.14 #VV3LPD Convergence, Abstraction and Reversal
      - 5.14.1 #H9PLKG Escalating and Standardizing Concepts of Comfort
    - 5.15 #6XQ5SM Introducing Cleanliness: Morality, Technology and Practice
      - 5.15.1 #KT2BDN Questions of Cleanliness
      - 5.15.2 #CYV6H2 Morality, Technology and Practice
      - 5.15.3 #XDMV2H Humours, Miasmas and Germs
      - 5.15.4 #VVCMU8 Dirt and Discrimination
      - 5.15.5 #JCR6WH Commodifying Cleanliness
      - 5.15.6 #J65X9A Qualifying Cleanliness
    - 5.16 #EYAEZ3 Behind the Bathroom Doors: Revolving Rationales
      - 5.16.1 #NB6UES Bathroom Consumption
      - 5.16.2 #GXE4U6 Reasons and Rationales
      - 5.16.3 #KN3VGW Hydrotherapy and Gentility
      - 5.16.4 #982F4V Sanitation and Social Order
      - 5.16.5 #9275H8 The Presentation and Production of Self
      - 5.16.6 #9MQKM8 Comfort and Convenience
    - 5.17 #S5L4ZT Understanding Bathing and Showering
      - 5.17.1 #5B2GHD Bath-time Stories
      - 5.17.2 #7LR5X9 Power Showering in Theory and Practice
    - 5.18 #UCCDX9 Laundering: a System of Systems
      - 5.18.1 #EY58QW Laundering as Work
      - 5.18.2 #GNUKNK Escalating Standards or Redefining Service?
      - 5.18.3 #64GX5D Why Wash?
        - 5.18.3.1 #ALFZXV Sensation
        - 5.18.3.2 #KA4W9P Disinfection
        - 5.18.3.3 #BH4MFA Deodorization
      - 5.18.4 #VQ5E22 What is Washed?
        - 5.18.4.1 #TC48A3 Textile Taxonomies
        - 5.18.4.2 #N973UX Stocks of Stuff
      - 5.18.5 #YH9SBN When is the Laundry Done?
        - 5.18.5.1 #C3WXJP Running Out and Getting Ready
        - 5.18.5.2 #NYN5EP Frequency and Turnover
      - 5.18.6 #9YLBCL What Does 'Doing the Laundry' Involve?
        - 5.18.6.1 #HKB2XQ Definition and Delegation
      - 5.18.7 #72BNB9 The Laundry as a System of Systems
        - 5.18.7.1 #3CQFZ7 What are the tools of laundering?
        - 5.18.7.2 #MVXZAW How is laundry done?
        - 5.18.7.3 #UZ4VG4 When to launder?
        - 5.18.7.4 #WVMFJR Why launder?
        - 5.18.7.5 #HB986T What is there to launder?
    - 5.19 #9PNC8T Laundry Habits: Integrating Practices
      - 5.19.1 #HP7TP8 Classifications and Categories
      - 5.19.2 #SANC7R Machine-made Typologies
      - 5.19.3 #NPTEW7 The Way to Wash
      - 5.19.4 #SQE7LE The Need to Wash
      - 5.19.5 #WM3VQT Innovation and Tradition
      - 5.19.6 #QJEFLW Appropriating Appliances
      - 5.19.7 #HN2B22 Scheduling and Order
      - 5.19.8 #77TNDR Millers of Meaning and Practice
      - 5.19.9 #DFU5LB System and Service
      - 5.19.10 #NTT53V Reconsidering Cleanliness
      - 5.19.11 #QC6RRL Reconfiguring Routine
      - 5.19.12 #U33GXH Redefining Service
        - 5.19.12.1 #CB97FQ 14
    - 5.20 #677ULW Convenience, Co-ordination and Convention
    - 5.21 #FAE2D6 Convenience and the Pace of Life
    - 5.22 #TTEE7X Co-ordination and Fragmentation
    - 5.23 #744KKG Convenience Devices
    - 5.24 #QPW5QU Rush and Calm
    - 5.25 #C78LS6 Convenience and Convention
      - 5.25.1 #X6LDEW 11
    - 5.26 #LUD6UW Ratchets, Pinwheels, Cogs and Spirals
    - 5.27 #3NT2JE Regimes, Services and the Reorganization of Normality
    - 5.28 #85VK8Q Models and Mechanisms
    - 5.29 #4EDKD9 Resetting the Agenda: Consumption, Everyday Life and Sustainability
  - 6 #5QFNN3 Bibliography
  - 7 #XCRPFD Index

### 8. Tool result: get_document

DOCUMENT #R69WZQ
Title: Material culture and the circular economy

Outline:
  - 1 #SUGN84 OPEN ACCESS
  - 2 #FKGYUE EDITED BY
  - 3 #RRN6P5 REVIEWED BY
  - 4 #4UBNYW *CORRESPONDENCE
    - 4.1 #LCPYDW CITATION
    - 4.2 #WYBS6P COPYRIGHT
  - 5 #J8TDC3 Material culture and the circular economy
    - 5.1 #7H9E6C KEYWORDS
    - 5.2 #CNF67G 1. Introduction
    - 5.3 #9XPEAM 2. Practices and object relations
    - 5.4 #CM9YM4 3. Constitution of demand
    - 5.5 #FAPRPA 4. Discussion
    - 5.6 #NHZD3M Data availability statement
    - 5.7 #S3MPWH Author contributions
    - 5.8 #RTZ57Z Funding
    - 5.9 #53YKG2 Conflict of interest
    - 5.10 #ECMZUP Publisher's note
    - 5.11 #EATTT9 References

### 9. Assistant tool calls

#### Tool call: `read`

```json
{
  "blocks": [
    "Q2WXHP",
    "WULWDF",
    "ULSUAX"
  ],
  "expand": true
}
```

#### Tool call: `read`

```json
{
  "blocks": [
    "PBFQ5E",
    "QP7HMF",
    "A3X9XX"
  ],
  "expand": true
}
```

#### Tool call: `read`

```json
{
  "blocks": [
    "SLFJ9K",
    "L38KUE",
    "75D5UH"
  ],
  "expand": true
}
```

#### Tool call: `read`

```json
{
  "blocks": [
    "Z73JHW",
    "EBZCFW",
    "6H9VRT",
    "8JX39Z",
    "TVA3KY"
  ],
  "expand": true
}
```

#### Tool call: `read`

```json
{
  "blocks": [
    "9XPEAM",
    "CM9YM4",
    "FAPRPA"
  ],
  "expand": true
}
```

### 10. Tool result: read

THESIS #4V8VH7
Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia

SECTION #Q2WXHP Theories of Practice

PARAGRAPH #H7MB3H
  The central theoretical grounding for this thesis is practice theory – or rather theories of practice – a heterogeneous cluster of approaches in humanities and social sciences in which practice serves as the primary unit of analysis for understanding human life and sociality. Shifting away from individual motivations and attitudes, behaviours and choices (ABC) based models for change, for example, practice theory rather examines how those doings are organized socially. It enables looking at the interconnectedness of the social and material realms with an emphasis on the role of objects, infrastructures and technology in practice enactment and maintenance. Evolved in a lineage from Bourdieu (1977) and Giddens (1984) in social sciences, in the past decades theories of practice have been influential and applied across various domains in social sciences and humanities, constituting what has been called a practice turn (reference).

PARAGRAPH #A2ACVP
  While varied definitions of social practice exist, Warde suggests a minimal definition: “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: 134).

PARAGRAPH #B4MLVB
  Different frameworks have been articulated to account for the elements constituting practices.

PARAGRAPH #ZA3SED
  Practice-as-performance - “doings and sayings”, embodied actions.

PARAGRAPH #G5LFQA
  Practice-as-entity - materials, meanings, and competencies.

PARAGRAPH #ZALK38
  Practice-as-bundle (practice-as-system)

PARAGRAPH #JCD8P5
  Practices as entities can be distinguished from practices as performances: the specific, recurrent enactments through which practices are reproduced or transformed. Transformation and change comes through  recombination of the elements of practice (Shove et al. 2012) – a complex process that is constantly evolving and difficult to predict.

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.

PARAGRAPH #8MU8D5
  The authors acknowledge that the model sacrifices some nuance to analytical clarity, yet argue that it is analytically productive, especially for studying how practices change and develop when their elements are reconfigured. It allows looking at practices as entities with their own histories and trajectories – recruiting or losing practitioners, appearing and disappearing.

PARAGRAPH #RG72B3
  This threefold structure of elements of practice has been used widely across disciplines as it offers a clear conceptual approach for empirical research.

PARAGRAPH #QPWYY6
  Delineating a practice and setting it apart from adjacent practices can be one of the challenges in practice theory, as there are no fixed procedural rules for determining exactly where one practice ends and another begins. Nicolini (2017: 26-27) notes that, while for analytical purposes, practices can be conceived and examined individually, empirically they are always encountered in arrays and multiplicities. Practices “hang together” in bundles and complexes (Shove et al. 2012), distinguished by the density and “stickiness” of their patterns. Practice bundles refer to the more loose-knit relations between practices, often gathered around the same site or time – practices that are related and shape each other but not strongly. Complexes refer to more integrated combinations that can also constitute new practice entities if the relations become significantly denser. In this thesis, I analyse freecycling in Brīvbode as a practice entity and as performed, while recognising the emerging state of freecycling as a practice in Latvia.

THESIS #4V8VH7
Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia

SECTION #WULWDF Theories of Practice to Study Alternative Practices?

PARAGRAPH #N4RD83
  Practice theory, as developed by Elisabeth Shove, has been applied a lot to analyze stable, dominant, and largely unreflected practices that are taken for granted in everyday domestic routines (Shove 2003), particularly the inconspicuous consumption of energy and resources in affluent Western societies that drives resource use beyond planetary boundaries. Shove has even argued that “investigations into the beliefs and actions of self-confessed environmentalists represent something of a distraction. What counts is the big, and in some cases, global swing of ordinary, routinized and taken-for-granted practice…” (Shove, 2003: 9).

PARAGRAPH #3RASYG
  Yet as Welch and Warde (2015) note, this strategic move away from environmentalists’ motivations has come at a cost, leading to a neglect of the cultural dimensions of sustainable consumption (Spaargaren 2013). Other authors have argued for a greater attention to non-hegemonic practices that serve as alternatives to mass consumption (e.g. Speck and Hasselkuss 2015). Practice theories are useful here too, as a tool for understanding how more sustainable alternatives might become normalised or integrated into existing consumption routines.

PARAGRAPH #QTER48
  Freecycling at Brīvbode sits at an interesting angle in this argument – it has both conventional and unconventional elements. It is not a widely shared, fully stabilised routine practice in Shove’s sense. Yet the practices it draws on – household divestment, secondhand acquisition, sequential use of goods – are not unusual in Riga or Latvia; what is less common is their organisation within a permanent, non-monetary exchange site. It is also a practice that is becoming more prevalent, as similar spaces and infrastructures appear more in Latvia.

PARAGRAPH #6SSXMN
  Recent work in second-generation practice theory has begun to reintroduce questions of ethics, culture, and reflexivity into analyses of consumption (Askholm, 2024; Welch et al., 2020). Earlier approaches tended to focus on routine and inconspicuous practices, often sidelining the role of evaluative judgement and cultural meaning. This study engages with this emerging direction by examining how practices of freecycling involve not only routine forms of circulation, but also moments of reflection, valuation, and ethical consideration.

THESIS #4V8VH7
Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia

SECTION #ULSUAX Conclusion

PARAGRAPH #7RYKMT
  This thesis brings together practice-theoretical perspectives on sustainable consumption and consumption work for a study of non-domestic site of goods circulation within a context of non-monetary exchange. Brīvbode is a site where the ordinarily private and dispersed practices of domestic material life become visible. The continued existence of the swapshop – sustained through regular volunteer labour, participant labour, and a relatively stable social and material infrastructure – can be read as evidence of the demand that household goods circulation generates: a demand for routes of divestment that, while taking some degree of effort, are socially acknowledged.

PARAGRAPH #2G2WSX
  PIEVIENOT

PARAGRAPH #MHZQUS
  “Pinning down the actual practice and its scale, identifying overlaps with other practices or deciding which actions belong to which practice registers as a tricky task, further complicated by the fact that practices change over time.” (Sedlačko, 2017: 53)

PARAGRAPH #CE4SN6
  consumption as a middle class sustainability “issue”?

PARAGRAPH #A3Q9XS
  A central conclusion is that textile disposal has become normalized. – “Sustainability transitions in textiles therefore require systemic reconfiguration of what is considered ‘normal’ in household practices.”

PARAGRAPH #LZ9SHB
  “this dissertation conceptualizes disposal as a material, cultural, and social practice central to consumption, rather than a peripheral or undesirable act.

PARAGRAPH #D3N7FX
  Disposal is treated not simply as the act of discarding but as a meaningful practice that enables and intersects with the reproduction of broader everyday activities.

PARAGRAPH #ER4VSA
  In sociology, the study of consumption has evolved through three major phases: an early focus on economistic models prior to the 1980s; the ‘cultural turn’ of the early 1980s, which emphasized meaning-making, identity, and symbolic value; and, more recently, a ‘practice turn’ that reorients attention toward the routines, materialities, and shared norms of everyday life (Warde, 2014, 2015).

PARAGRAPH #YK565D
  in clothing consumption research consumption of clothing is viewed as a habitual and socially embedded activity rather than a constant, deliberate process of choice and identity construction (Chamberlin & Callmer, 2021; Miller & Woodward, 2012; van der Laan & Velthuis, 2016).

PARAGRAPH #FT8AED
  “In their classical taxonomy for describing consumer disposition behavior, Jacoby et al. (1977) illustrated that disposal may involve keeping, donating, selling, recycling, or throwing away, and even within each category, multiple practices exist. Disposal is thus not inherently destructive or wasteful and cannot be reduced to simply ‘throwing something away’, but is an active social practice embedded in ethical, cultural, and material contexts (Hetherington, 2004). This perspective recognizes disposal as an active, meaning-making practice. As Gregson et al. (2007b) argue, divestment is not simply a negative or absent moment in consumer life, but a practice that enables other practices. To sustain certain routines and identities, other objects must be removed. In this sense, disposal is not the final step in a linear production-consumption-waste chain but a recursive moment that helps reorder consumption itself (Gregson et al., 2007a; Hetherington, 2004). Following Douglas (2002), disposal can be seen as part of the ‘ordering work’ of everyday life, where waste becomes threatening not by its material properties but by its symbolic disruptions of social and domestic order (Gregson et al., 2007a; Heidenstrøm & Hebrok, 2021).”

PARAGRAPH #5TXWXW
  “What we discard reflects who we are but also helps constitute who we become. In this way, waste is both expressive and constitutive of identity (Lucy, 2023).”

PARAGRAPH #D3J7AD
  Maldini et al. (2019), for instance, found that garments are often retained long after they stop being worn, while new items are added without replacing old ones, highlighting the entanglement with disposal and accumulation. Furthermore, as with disposal in general, textile disposal is not merely a matter of getting rid of unwanted things, nor is it a straightforward or linear process.

PARAGRAPH #M53GUY
  “This theoretical approach shifts the analytical focus away from individual behavior to practices allowing textile waste to be understood not as the outcome of isolated decisions but as a meaningful and situated activity embedded in everyday domestic routines.”

PARAGRAPH #W5NCU9
  “Social phenomena are understood as emerging from, and being embedded within, interconnected networks of practices and the materials that sustain them (Schatzki, 2019).”

PARAGRAPH #8Z9KL4
  “Dressing is viewed as a dynamic, lifelong everyday practice comprised of three interdependent elements: materials (e.g., clothing, wardrobes, washing machines), meanings (e.g., symbolic notions such as cleanliness or fashion), and competencies (e.g., dressing, laundering, repairing skills) (Maguire & Fahy, 2022; Skjold, 2016).”

PARAGRAPH #U87FBB
  “Textile disposal is conceptualized as a social practice embedded within everyday routines and shaped by normative expectations, identity work, and material needs.”

PARAGRAPH #2MV3XY
  Schatzki’s site ontology

PARAGRAPH #FZHH6H
  “The deep interdependence between practices and material arrangements is a central theme in Schatzki’s site ontology. According to Schatzki (2002), a social site is not merely a spatial backdrop for action, but a constitutive milieu where social life unfolds across three interrelated dimensions. First, the site refers to the basic location where something happens, whether spatial, temporal, or relational. Second, it represents the broader thematic or systemic context in which specific practices are embedded. Third, the site encompasses a deeper, constitutive context that gives practices their social meaning. In social sites, actions are seldom shaped by a single practice alone but emerge from the complex interaction of multiple overlapping practices.”

PARAGRAPH #MR6SKV
  ​​For example, textile disposal emerges from the intersection of multiple practices, such as cleaning, organizing, shopping, and caring, even when disposal appears as the main activity.

PARAGRAPH #3JUPW7
  Shove conceptualizes material entities as one of the core elements of practice, alongside meanings and competencies (Shove et al., 2012; Shove et al., 2007). Acknowledging the different roles that material entities can play, three categories of materiality are proposed: resources (consumables used up in practices), devices (objects directly mobilized during practices), and infrastructure (supporting systems not directly engaged) (Shove, 2016).

PARAGRAPH #96FRVP
  Practice as entity – how does the threefold model

PARAGRAPH #AHYBAR
  Looking at a practice as entity – materials, meanings, competencies. MESOLEVEL.

PARAGRAPH #MBE4PM
  Individual level of practice – practice as performance – doings, sayings, embodied experiences, movements, everyday parts… PRACTICE AS PERFORMANCE.

PARAGRAPH #WQZYJP
  practice as bundle or practice as entity…

PARAGRAPH #Z769KE
  Acknowledge these three levels, focusing on practice as performance and practice as entity.

### 11. Tool result: read

THESIS #4V8VH7
Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia

SECTION #PBFQ5E Where It Begins: The Site as Active Flow

PARAGRAPH #2PU5ZY
  On Thursdays and Fridays a queue often forms by Brīvbode before noon – sometimes more than ten people wait to be let in. The first two hours are the busiest. Rasa sometimes takes a breath before unlocking the door: "It begins."

PARAGRAPH #X8RDCG
  After an item is divested to Brīvbode, it does not belong to the donor anymore, it belongs to the swapshop. This transfer of ownership is actively managed: takers are discouraged from taking things from the sorting table before they are processed, as their enthusiasm has caused discomfort to other visitors in the past.

PARAGRAPH #SUZYLN
  However, sorting is done “on the spot” and in the same room, and things move fast. As Larsen (2023) observes, in thrift shops, practices are often characterized by a "reversal" of standard economic logic, where the goal is to move things along as quickly as possible rather than to maximize the profit per individual item. This can also be said about Brīvbode – there’s excitement about things moving quickly.

PARAGRAPH #RQ8CCN
  Physical instead of virtual co-presence shapes the quality of encounters between people and objects. As Tan and Yeoh  (2024), writing about freecycling markets in Singapore, observe, “relational-material exchanges play out better as an embodied co-presence with others/things” – objects can be handled, tried on and assessed, and an item of decent quality will eventually find a taker.

PARAGRAPH #LHLZ8Y
  The physicality and permanence of Brīvbode as a site is one of the main attributes setting it apart from other similar initiatives that often struggle with availability of affordable rental space, especially in high density urban areas. Tan and Yeoh (2024) note how, because of this reason, organisers of Singapore markets must bin or redistribute excess items after every event. They identify availability of rental and storage space as one of the main pre-requisites for functioning freecycling initiatives – thus it is important to note how regular operation in the same physical venue constitutes the practice of freecycling, as it becomes a stable and recurring weekly infrastructure for participants. This enables visitors to sustain a regular visiting rhythm through which, for many of them, freecycling becomes genuinely embedded in everyday life.

PARAGRAPH #KMD7AJ
  The space in Brīvbode is organised and decorated to resemble a retail environment with a DIY aesthetic –  with hangers and shelves, and garments sometimes arranged by colour in the manner of the formerly operating secondhand chain Degas. The aesthetic is not fixed, however, as curatorial disagreements exist over the best presentation and each shift can leave its own curatorial mark. Rasa describes the tension between celebrating volunteer initiative and an aesthetic that, in her view, would communicate more value through similarity to a retail environment, leaving more space between things, signifying that quality items can be found in Brīvbode. "The emptier the shelves, the more people find," she notes. A different aesthetic displaying abundance of things on offer and decorating with plushies appeals to another volunteer. These mundane disagreements hold competing views about which meanings the practice of freecycling should enact. Material and meaning elements of the practice are not settled but are actively contested through performance.

PARAGRAPH #CL5CS8
  The regularity of operation that the physical on-site format allows also fosters social contact among participants. Opening hours twice per week is both a way to manage the necessary volunteer labour and a social encounter catalyst – temporal tightening means that visitors are more likely to encounter each other. The volunteer in charge of the shift anchors the social experience, and the personal relationships accumulate over repeated visits. "On Thursdays everyone asks where Nadja is. And on Fridays everyone asks where Viesturs is." While Brīvbode is not a primary site for socialisation for most participants, regular visitors, especially those living in single person households, noted the meaningfulness of the social aspect of visiting, the casual contact with known “faces”, Brīvbode being a place to go and the visits giving a structure to the week.

PARAGRAPH #WW8YUW
  Within the material realm, Brīvbode is also embedded in and dependent upon broader infrastructural arrangements in order to manage the overflow it cannot absorb. The swapshop passes leftover textiles – in some estimates up to 30 % of the received flow (Akule et al. 2023) – to textile collection containers. The shop would not be viable if it had to cover the costs of regular unsorted waste collection. Also, off-season clothing such as winter coats that take a lot of space are stored in collaboration with charity organisations that have access to larger storage premises. Brīvbode can sustain – in a pragmatic, improvised manner – because of this material entanglement instead of trying to resolve the full material cycle on its own.

PARAGRAPH #2TPNCM
  The physical experience of overflow is a constant of volunteering, and bags often arrive faster than they can be processed. Often my task during shifts was to sort and put out children’s items. The boxes were already full, with piles forming, when I asked Rasa: 'Don't you feel like the things are just pouring down on you?' 'Yes, that's why I no longer have any tolerance for things. I realise I feel relief that these clothes are dirty, because there simply isn't any more space."

PARAGRAPH #3USBHB
  During another shift, Rasa offered me a handmade black ceramic plate someone had brought that day. I was glad to take it, but before my departure confusion arose about where it had gone. It turned out, more stuff had piled up on top of it on the sorting table as visitors kept coming with their divestment. Rasa laughed: “This is how it is here.” As a material site, Brīvbode is an active flow that requires tending and occasionally swallows its own offerings.

PARAGRAPH #PNCAWA
  The pull of Brīvbode as a divestment destination persists even when the physical site is temporarily absent. For several weeks after the Brīvbode pop-up venue in Āgenskalns closed at the end of summer 2021, people kept bringing boxes and bags of belongings, leaving them in front of the empty shop. The practice had recruited carriers so effectively that the site’s closure did not interrupt the flow.

PARAGRAPH #SFAYYS
  The things are made visible by being put in the shop. It makes the material overflow more visible – there is no “away” to throw your things.

THESIS #4V8VH7
Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia

SECTION #QP7HMF Reading the Room: Norms and Competencies of Circulation

PARAGRAPH #TDQ4JL
  The material composition of Brīvbode reflects the gendered organisation of (clothing) consumption more broadly. The majority of items circulating through the freeshop are women’s and children’s clothing – a pattern that mirrors the more feminised character of household consumption management. As noted in the methodology chapter, men do participate in Brīvbode, but on a lesser scale and with different practice career tendencies – while men’s clothing is sought after, they also look for books to circulate in second hand markets, CD’s, electronics.

PARAGRAPH #BCDC5C
  The gendered asymmetry extends to the competencies required to manage the space. Viesturs described his initial challenge of developing a workable system for sorting women’s clothing after he started volunteering: "Well, f*ck, look, where do I put it. Trying to systematize women’s clothing, it’s like a tree with many branches." The competence of sorting – especially women’s clothing as in this case – is not self-evident as the proliferation of categories resists simple organisation and has to be worked out through practice.

PARAGRAPH #2U6CTU
  The standards applied to men’s clothing also operate differently. There is simply less of it, and the threshold for what is acceptable is lower – men’s clothing is assumed to be used for physical work and is assessed accordingly. One day two young women looking through the clothing boxes for film costumes picked up an undershirt and commented on how disgusting it was, while a man right next to them took it. Rasa later confirmed the shirt was not in a good condition, but she had put it out because, as she noted, everything gets taken from the men’s section. The norms of assessment reflect whose consumption practices the swapshop is organised around.

PARAGRAPH #F9CK8T
  While there are explicit written rules governing exchange in Brīvbode, those are framed in general relational terms – “bring things that would bring joy to someone; bring things you would give to a friend” – and there are no formal categories of exclusion. Norms regarding acceptability are defined and enacted situationally and relationally, which can be both a strength and a source of friction about where the boundaries lie.

PARAGRAPH #BZ6FJC
  Being in Brīvbode is characterized by constant sorting decisions, trying to maintain an acceptable level of presentation and quality of items. The work of maintaining quality and the work of maintaining relationships sometimes pull in different directions, and the balance between lenience and care is negotiated in every shift. At times I heard people felt uneasy about Viesturs openly commenting on things they had brought.

PARAGRAPH #Y7K4KZ
  This is observable even in the circulation of food items, which, although not central, are also present in Brīvbode. As opposed to many community-based exchange initiatives where the circulation of food is governed strictly, e.g. accepting only unopened items and carefully monitoring expiration dates, in Brīvbode the circulation is shaped less by formal regulation and more by trust and familiarity among participants. Open packages may be accepted when brought by known visitors, suggesting that assessments of safety and acceptability are negotiated socially.

PARAGRAPH #7CR75E
  A stronger boundary emerges in relation to certain categories of items, such as medicine. In one instance, a regular visitor brought various medications, explaining their uses to the day manager. While the items were initially placed on the table for taking, a while later another worker quietly removed them, remarking to me, “I don’t think I support this.” The removal was not communicated directly to the donor, suggesting a reluctance to enforce the norm explicitly. Instead of a formal refusal, workers might suggest that perhaps the giver has not noticed the defects, but items could be washed and brought back or simply delay decisions until the giver is no longer present.

PARAGRAPH #CUBS5Q
  "Man kaut kā mazāka vēlme ņemt visu, ko es redzu, par spīti tam, ka tas it kā ir tas 'brīv'... es kaut kā vairāk cienu to visu, kas tur ir izlikts." [I somehow feel less desire to take everything I see, despite the fact that it's all "free" – I somehow have more respect for everything that's laid out there.] Madara explicitly contrasts her response to freeness with others' – she imagines the hoarder who grabs because it's free, and positions herself as someone for whom freeness activates restraint rather than acquisition. This is the moral economy of freeshopping from the perspective of someone still in the early stages of learning the practice's norms. "Kādam varbūt tas 'brīv' rada vēlmi, ka viss ir bez maksas, tagad ņemam, ņemam, ņemam. Man tas nospēlē kaut kā tieši otrādāk." [For some, maybe "free" creates the urge that everything is free, so now we take, take, take. For me it works the opposite way.] "Es to uztveru kā apmaiņu. To vārdu 'brīvu' kaut kā izslēdzu... Sākumā tas tā bišķiņ mulsināja, ka esmu kā apzagusies." [I see it as exchange. I somehow switch off the word "free"… At first it was a bit confusing, as if I had stolen something.] This is competency acquisition: Madara is learning how to understand and inhabit the value regime of Brīvbode, and she narrates the process explicitly.

PARAGRAPH #MQPMT2
  Competencies of Circulation

PARAGRAPH #76T3WR
  The competencies that sustain freecycling in Brīvbode are largely social and evaluative rather than technical, and none of them require formal training — but each is acquired through repeated participation and is unevenly distributed across practitioners. Material literacy — recognising wool from synthetic fibres, identifying well-made construction, spotting a hidden stain — is foundational, and volunteers develop it most acutely through handling what arrives. Rasa, in the recollection of one student researcher who spent time in the shop, has "the most trained eye for the quality of things" [visuztrenētākā acs uz mantu kvalitāti]; her own acquisition criteria turn on fibre type and durability, preferring what is "more nature-friendly, ecological, and long-lasting." Visitors develop a more limited version of the same competency. Laura describes herself as a careful second-hand user who checks everything thoroughly, though she admits she has still occasionally taken home items that turned out to be broken on closer inspection.

PARAGRAPH #EXTCGS
  On the acquisition side, competence also means knowing when to come and how to navigate the space. Agate has mapped the visitor typology and times her arrivals strategically; Marta describes starting in the first room and returning when something new has arrived. Equally important is the negative competency of not taking — knowing what one needs and what one already has. Zane keeps a list on her phone of items she is actively looking for, and her stylist consultations work as an investment in self-knowledge that guards against impulsive acquisition. Agate explicitly asks herself while browsing whether a given item could be combined with what she already owns. This is cognitive work — holding a mental model of one's wardrobe and household — and without it, acquisition becomes impulsive and the divestment work follows. The competencies of acquisition and divestment are therefore inseparable: each unconsidered acquisition becomes future divestment labour.

PARAGRAPH #73DSQT
  On the divesting side, the practice expects items to arrive clean and in reasonable condition, requiring washing, stain-checking, and sometimes minor repair, though norms vary: Marija leaves the washing to the recipient, while Anna says she never divests anything that has been repaired. The boundary between "ready to circulate" and "needs more work first" is itself negotiated through the practice.

PARAGRAPH #J4CQAN
  “on material literacy, meaning the skills and knowledge about different materials, how durable they are and with what treatment they last longest. This includes knowledge about appropriate washing, storing (Figures 2 and 3) and other care techniques like using a lint shaver or an iron.”

THESIS #4V8VH7
Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia

SECTION #A3X9XX Conclusion: Holding Together Incompatible Orientations

PARAGRAPH #M3VCHH
  Freecycling in Brīvbode is sustained by a plurality of meanings that are compatible enough to coexist within the same space. Givers come to resolve the moral weight of unwanted things, the site’s permanence and visibility offer a trusted route for it. Takers come for dignity, experimentation, craft materials, social contact or simple convenience. The moral economy of exchange holds these heterogenous orientations together, as it is actively maintained against the pressure of resellers, heavy takers and people looking for charity, yet flexible enough to accommodate them when the alternative is overflow.

PARAGRAPH #4V448P
  Sustainability can be an outcome without it being a requirement and a conscious orientation for practitioners. The practice recruits and retains carriers through meanings that also have little to do with environmental concern and yet the circulation it enables has sustainable dimensions that persist regardless of how participants frame their involvement.

PARAGRAPH #MHM9Q5
  This does not resolve the tension running through the chapter of Brīvbode functioning simultaneously as a moral circularity infrastructure embodying an alternative value regime of exchange and responsible material life – and as a low threshold overflow channel that absorbs the surplus generated by the consumption patterns it aspires to counter. This tension just reflects the observed dynamic of how sustainable practices are embedded in contemporary life.

### 12. Tool result: read

THESIS #4V8VH7
Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia

SECTION #SLFJ9K Priceless Valuation: Sorting, Curation, and Care

PARAGRAPH #U7QJHT
  Valuation work is the ongoing effort of assessing what is worth taking and bringing, and what should be left or discarded. Tölg (2025) describes valuation as comprising both evaluation — judging whether something is valuable — and valorising — the process of making it so — and shows that consumers rely on a range of valuation devices such as garment tags, retail staff knowledge, and resale platforms to perform this work. In retail, the price signal is the most legible such device, quietly slowing acquisition and supplying a shorthand for worth. When it is removed, that work does not disappear; it shifts onto participants and volunteers, drawing on moral and relational registers instead. As Beswick-Parsons et al. (2025) note, those committed to reuse develop the ability to perceive value where others do not, and this evaluative skill is a key competence of circulation work.

PARAGRAPH #KWPAYN
  The shift is most acute for volunteers, who absorb the valuation labour donors and visitors do not. Anna describes how she has developed her intuition for the gap between donor self-assessment and actual quality: “I really know it won’t be good even before I’ve opened the bag. I ask them: ‘Is everything really okay in there?’ ‘Yes, yes, only the best!’ And you open it, and there are moth-eaten pillows, piss-soaked blankets.” This competency has been developed over years of handling what arrives. The work of maintaining quality — assessing, sorting, deciding what goes out and what does not — is a form of consumption work that in commercial retail would fall to paid warehouse or quality-control staff; here it is absorbed by volunteers as a constant and largely invisible competency that visitors, who see only the finished presentation, mostly miss.

PARAGRAPH #7X9BV4
  Curation extends valuation work beyond sorting into knowing and managing people’s needs. Rasa describes it as having “a filter.” She sometimes holds specific items for specific regular visitors based on accumulated knowledge about their life circumstances: a particular colour of top for a visually impaired visitor, a wedding gift set aside for a regular who recently moved from homelessness into social housing. This is care work and consumption work simultaneously — the kind of matching labour that in retail is performed automatically through pricing, display, and inventory systems, but here depends on Rasa’s relational knowledge of specific people, which cannot be systematised or delegated, and which makes Brīvbode function as something more than a drop-off point.

PARAGRAPH #4HW9DD
  For visitors, the absence of price requires a new framework for what counts as legitimate taking. Madara recalled how disorienting the freeness was on her first visit: “At first it felt a bit like I was stealing.” She resolved this by reframing the transaction: “I see it as exchange. I somehow switch off the word ‘free’.” For her, freeness activates restraint rather than acquisition: “Someone maybe sees ‘free’ and thinks – everything is free, let’s take, take, take. For me it works the opposite way.” Her self-imposed restraint is itself valuation work — a moral framework constructed in the absence of the device that would otherwise supply one.

PARAGRAPH #4EZCAK
  Divestment, too, is shaped by valuation. When an item retains monetary value, participants take on the labour of online selling — photographing, writing descriptions, communicating with buyers, arranging meetings. As one participant noted: “you have to pull yourself together, photograph it and put it somewhere.” Brīvbode lowers this work considerably: it is a known, walkable destination that absorbs some of the divestment labour through volunteers and releases participants from finding a buyer or judging a recipient.

PARAGRAPH #A2APRY
  Across donating, curating, taking, and divesting, valuation in Brīvbode is at once consumption work — the labour of sorting, assessing, and redistributing — and care work, in the form of attention to what specific things will mean for specific people. Without the shorthand of price, both come into the open.

THESIS #4V8VH7
Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia

SECTION #L38KUE It’s On Me: Networks, Gender, and the Transmission of Care

PARAGRAPH #8JYYXC
  Wheeler and Glucksmann's processual dimension attends to how labour is distributed across the full span of a consumption process. In Brīvbode, this dimension is most visible in the extended divestment networks through which household surplus reaches the swapshop. The work that sustains Brīvbode is continuous with domestic consumption work  which is consistently organised through women's labour.

PARAGRAPH #PNGSGT
  Miller's (1998) research on shopping demonstrates that consumption is often organised around care for others rather than individual satisfaction, and that women frequently function as moral agents in household consumption as they are the ones acquiring, managing, and disposing of goods in relation to the needs of children, partners, and wider social networks. Wheeler and Glucksmann (2015) find the same gendered pattern in recycling: women typically take responsibility for sorting while men handle transport. The fieldwork conducted for this thesis reflects this consistently. Anna states it directly: "It's on me. I'm the one who supplies everyone with clothes and shoes." Silvija organises all divestment decisions in her household and says her husband "would just throw it in the bin." Men's role, where it appears, is typically transport and carrying the bags that women have sorted, selected, and prepared.

PARAGRAPH #3BY9GH
  The reach of Brīvbode extends considerably beyond those who physically visit it. Several of the most embedded participants perform substantial divestment work not only for themselves but for neighbours, colleagues, and family members, functioning as logistics nodes through which others' surplus flows to the freeshop. Marija's neighbours give her things to take to Brīvbode as she is a frequent visitor and the role has naturalised into her social identity in the building. Māra coordinates pickups from at least five neighbours, takes requests for specific items, and is the only one of her immediate network who actually visits – the rest route their divestment through her. Anna's work colleagues prepare parcels for her to deliver: "They use me. They prepare the bags I need to bring to Brīvbode. And then they say: 'Can you look for something for my teenage daughter?'" What looks like consumption work performed on behalf of others is, in Tölg and Fuentes’s (2025) terms, also care for neighbours and for the imagined future users of the things — the logistical labour and the relational orientation are inseparable.

PARAGRAPH #Y344XY
  Madara does divestment work for her aunt whose belief that worn objects carry the energy of previous owners prevents her from donating. In order to get to Brīvbode, the objects must pass through Madara first. "I know that most likely they would simply be thrown away or burned." The most laborious divestment case came from Aiga, who spent months coordinating the recirculation of her relatives' possessions after a relocation, making thirty trips to Brīvbode. A single call to a clearance firm would have resolved everything in one visit, Aiga says, but she chose the harder route because she could not allow things to be discarded: “Sometimes you really do want to just throw it out, but that inner feeling simply won’t let me.” This is consumption work in Bankovska’s (2020) sense of care not-work — labour that is unremunerated, hard to see as work from the outside, and yet performed because the alternative is unbearable. It is care as obligation that cannot be put down.

PARAGRAPH #VCEUP7
  Consumption work is both currently gendered and being transmitted along gendered lines. Kristīne takes her daughters to Brīvbode and uses the visits as occasions for explicit moral education: discussing why they are giving things away, what makes a good divestment decision, what is too worn to donate. She sometimes goes without them to avoid the tears when they want things back; other times the difficulty is the point. "It's also an opportunity to talk about things." The children are learning material quality, the ethics of giving, and the difference between good enough to donate and good enough only to discard — competencies that are simultaneously consumption-work skills and the dispositions of care that Bankovska (2020) shows being transmitted across generations in the everyday work of provisioning.

PARAGRAPH #SZVP2G
  What neither sufficiency nor valuation quite revealed, the processual dimension makes visible: the labour of Brīvbode is gendered not only structurally but ethically — women carry it because they have always carried care, and the consumption-work skills it requires are inseparable from the care dispositions through which they are taken on.

THESIS #4V8VH7
Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia

SECTION #75D5UH Conclusion

PARAGRAPH #5YXGE6
  This chapter has examined the labour that sustains freecycling in Brīvbode, finding it distributed across structural, ethical, and gendered dimensions that existing circular economy frameworks tend to overlook. Wheeler and Glucksmann’s consumption work concept names the structure: tasks that paid institutions would perform in formal retail or waste management contexts are here absorbed by unpaid volunteers and participants, distributed across modal and processual dimensions that stretch well beyond the freeshop itself. The feminist ethics of care and its recent applications to circular consumption (Mesiranta et al. 2025; Tölg and Fuentes 2025), together with Bankovska’s (2020) care not-work and Graeber’s (2018) account of work as what just needs to be done, name the orientation: much of this labour is not transferred from institutions onto reluctant consumers but self-imposed through ethical commitment and care – activities people perform because they cannot bring themselves not to. Miller (1998) names who bears it: consistently and disproportionately women, from household sorting and routing to managing others’ generosity to transmitting these competencies to the next generation.

PARAGRAPH #HM56MD
  Circular consumption requires substantial labour, and that labour is unevenly distributed. Sustainability of initiatives like Brīvbode depends on a structural condition – the sufficiency-oriented, time-rich, predominantly female volunteer and participant base that circular economy policy rarely names or supports (Hobson et al., 2021). Some of this labour is unreflexive and habituated – Aiga's inner feeling that prevents easy disposal, Marija's building logistics naturalised into her social role. Some is deliberate and effortful – Kristīne's category-by-category method, Madara working on her impulse-acquiring. Both are labour, but they are differently visible, and the unreflexive forms are the hardest to see and the hardest for policy to reach.

PARAGRAPH #RX9JDU
  What Brīvbode reveals — and what makes it analytically valuable for circular economy debates — is that the absence of price does not produce a frictionless flow of materials. It produces a different kind of work: gendered, ethically motivated, absorbed into household routines, and sustained by people who have organised their lives to be able to do it. Recognising this work as both consumption work and care work is the first step toward circular economy policy that can see it, support it, and not depend on its invisibility.

### 13. Tool result: read

DOCUMENT #5AXAEJ
The Dynamics of Social Practice

SECTION #Z73JHW MATERIAL, COMPETENCE AND MEANING

EXCERPT #6AYWKA p. 36
  In Chapter 1 we referred to Reckwitz's claim that practices consist of interdependencies between 'forms of bodily activities, forms of mental

EXCERPT #WV7RBR p. 37

EXCERPT #5QGASA p. 37

EXCERPT #NV5AVK p. 37
  activities, “things” and their use, a background knowledge in the form of understanding, know-how, states of emotion and motivational knowledge’ (2002: 249). With this catalogue as our starting point, we now put forward an even simpler scheme based on just three elements. The key features of this scheme are described below.

EXCERPT #TDJPUZ p. 37
  ‘Things’ feature barely at all in the writings of Giddens (1984) or Bourdieu (1984), whose theories are indeed almost entirely ‘social’. However, these aspects are important not only for Reckwitz but also for Schatzki who explores the various ways in which ‘practices are intrinsically connected to and interwoven with objects’ (2002: 106). In reviewing recent contributions to practice theory, Röpke (2009) suggests that there is now broad agreement that things should be treated as elements of practice. This is a position we share. ‘Materials’, encompassing objects, infrastructures, tools, hardware and the body itself, consequently figure as the first of the three elements on which we focus (Shove et al., 2007).

EXCERPT #92MUR9 p. 37
  In most accounts, know-how, background knowledge and understanding are taken to be crucial whether in the form of what Giddens (1984) describes as practical consciousness, deliberately cultivated skill, or more abstractly, as shared understandings of good or appropriate performance in terms of which specific enactments are judged. Knowing in the sense of being able to evaluate a performance is not the same as knowing in the sense of having the skills required to perform, and in some situations this is an important distinction (Warde, 2005). For the purposes of this chapter, which is in essence about how links are made between the elements of which practices are composed, we lump multiple forms of understanding and practical knowledgeability together and simply refer to them as ‘competence’, our second element.

EXCERPT #NG66CJ p. 37
  Our next simplifying move is to collapse what Reckwitz describes as mental activities, emotion and motivational knowledge into the one broad element of ‘meaning’, a term we use to represent the social and symbolic significance of participation at any one moment. This is tricky territory in that those who write about social practices are in much less agreement about how to characterize meaning, emotion and motivation. In Schatzki’s analysis, ‘teleoaffective’ structures – embracing ends,

EXCERPT #U6DTNB p. 38

EXCERPT #Z9D9GB p. 38

EXCERPT #7KTXEY p. 38
  projects, tasks, purposes, beliefs, emotions and moods (1996: 89) – are central to the organizing and ordering of practice and to the location of social practice within what Schatzki describes as ‘timespace’ (Schatzki, 2010b). He uses this concept to elaborate on the point that what people do has a history and a setting; to show that doings are future oriented, and that both aspects are united in the moment of performance. Instead of emphasizing the ongoing, unfolding character of ends and projects, we short-circuit this discussion and instead treat meaning as an element of practice, not something that stands outside or that figures as a motivating or driving force.

EXCERPT #UG44UW p. 38
  In what follows we work with the idea that practices are defined by interdependent relations between materials, competences and meanings. This deliberately streamlined approach has many advantages, but like all other such accounts it supposes that elements, however they might be defined, are somehow ‘out there’ in the world, waiting to be linked together. If we go along with the idea that practices exist when elements are integrated, we need to recognize two related possibilities: one is that relevant elements exist but without being linked (proto-practice); the second is that practices disintegrate when links are no longer sustained. Figure 2.1 illustrates these three scenarios.

EXCERPT #8PTVJJ p. 38
  This basic scheme reveals little about the nature of the linking entailed in keeping a practice together, it tells us nothing about who is involved, how access to relevant elements is distributed or how instances of integration themselves transform and generate new competences, meanings and materialities. However, it does underline the centrality of linkage: if specific configurations are to remain effective, connections between defining elements have to be renewed time and again. This suggests that stability and routinization are not end points of a linear process of normalization. Rather, they should be understood as ongoing accomplishments in which similar elements are repeatedly linked together in similar ways.

EXCERPT #668425 p. 38
  Having introduced the idea that practices consist of active integrations of material, competence and meaning, the rest of this chapter is designed to address two related questions. First, what do we gain by analysing the invention and disappearance of practices (as relatively enduring entities) with reference to the changing relationships between

EXCERPT #CX5JYV p. 39

EXCERPT #3ZHA55 p. 39

EXCERPT #R7BSXU p. 39
  The figure consists of three separate diagrams, each enclosed in a vertical rectangular frame, illustrating different stages of practice formation. Each diagram features three circular nodes: a dark grey circle labeled 'Meaning' at the bottom left, a light grey circle labeled 'Material' at the bottom right, and a medium grey circle labeled 'Competence' positioned above them. In the first diagram, titled 'Proto-practices Links not yet made', the nodes are not connected by lines. In the second diagram, titled 'Practices Links being made', the nodes are connected by solid black lines forming a triangle. In the third diagram, titled 'Ex-practices Links no longer being made', the nodes are connected by dashed grey lines forming a triangle. Figure 2.1: Three diagrams illustrating the stages of practice formation: Proto-practices, Practices, and Ex-practices.

EXCERPT #RQSUNG p. 39
  Figure 2.1 Proto-practices, practices and ex-practices

EXCERPT #LSCF7L p. 39
  the elements of which they are, or were composed? Second, does this strategy allow us to analyse change in a manner that bridges between accounts of practices-as-performances and practices-as-entities? As promised, we address these questions with reference to the development of car-driving in part because this is a familiar, well documented practice that has developed fast and diffused widely during the last century. In addition, driving is remarkably standardized despite having taken hold through different routes and at different times in diverse countries and cultures. As will become clear, our approach is useful in conceptualizing commonality (a result of the circulation of elements) and local variation (in how these elements are integrated).

EXCERPT #AUUFW7 p. 39
  To reiterate, our opening propositions are that practices like driving a car depend on specific combinations of materials, meanings and competence; that driving evolves as these ingredients change; and that such changes are in part a consequence of the integrative work involved. In the paragraphs that follow we comment on different aspects of this process, showing how elements have been linked and how ties have been made and broken along the way. We do so not with the aim of providing a detailed or coherent history of driving but in order to show what an element-based approach has to offer.

EXCERPT #39MYR4 p. 40

EXCERPT #NPE26F p. 40

DOCUMENT #5AXAEJ
The Dynamics of Social Practice

SECTION #EBZCFW ELEMENTS BETWEEN PRACTICES

EXCERPT #PTD3K6 p. 49
  This far we have considered the making and breaking of links between the various elements of which driving is composed. In taking this approach we have paid no attention to related practices, or to the possibility that the elements involved have an existence beyond the doing of driving. This is an important omission. As we have just seen, driving has

EXCERPT #GZFATE p. 50

EXCERPT #MUHZQV p. 50

EXCERPT #3ZANVQ p. 50
  at times been associated with concepts like those of Westernization, youth or masculinity, all of which are defined and constituted through their 'participation' in many practices at once.

EXCERPT #6F446F p. 50
  Do shared elements bridge between different practices, and if so with what consequences for the different pursuits of which they are a part? In relation to driving, Volti claims that the novelty, speed and unreliability of the first cars were important in framing driving as a dashing and exciting thing to do. As such driving acquired characteristics already 'intertwined with masculine culture' (Volti, 1996: 667). Kline and Pinch make a similar argument, suggesting that

EXCERPT #VFHB4F p. 50
  competence in the operation and repair of the machinery formed a defining element of masculinity ... Consequently, the gasoline automobile, which was symbolically inscribed for masculine use ... came onto farmsteads headed, in general, by men partly because of their technical competence.

EXCERPT #W599DB p. 50
  (Kline and Pinch, 1996: 779)

EXCERPT #FAHWH9 p. 50
  In both accounts, notions of masculinity provide a point of connection between practices of repairing and driving. This is not a stable relationship. As driving becomes less thrilling and less mechanically demanding, its significance for gendered identity shifts. In the same moment, the meaning of masculinity evolves. Figure 2.5 illustrates this double movement.

EXCERPT #XWGYUQ p. 50
  As this figure suggests, links are made and broken not only between the elements that constitute a single practice (driving), but also between the multiple practices of which similar elements are a part (driving and repairing). In the case considered here, associations with masculinity (part of the element of meaning represented at the centre of the Figure) are formed by and constitutive of at least two practices at once: driving on the one hand, and repairing on the other.

EXCERPT #AY4T33 p. 50
  This hints at a much more elaborate picture in which diverse elements circulate within and between many different practices, constituting a form of connective tissue that holds complex social arrangements in place, and potentially pulls them apart. To the extent that this is so, the attaching and detaching of meaning and signification sends ripples

EXCERPT #N3WCQB p. 51

EXCERPT #7CHB5R p. 51

EXCERPT #X8WLGX p. 51
  The diagram consists of two large, overlapping dashed circles. The left circle is labeled 'Driving' and the right circle is labeled 'Repairing'. Inside the 'Driving' circle, there are three nodes: a central light grey circle, a dark grey circle to its left labeled 'Material', and a light grey circle above it labeled 'Competence'. Lines connect the central circle to both the 'Material' and 'Competence' nodes. Inside the 'Repairing' circle, there are also three nodes: a central light grey circle, a dark grey circle below it labeled 'Material', and a light grey circle above it labeled 'Competence'. Lines connect this central circle to its 'Material' and 'Competence' nodes. An arrow points from the central circle in the 'Repairing' circle to the central circle in the 'Driving' circle. Next to this arrow is a text box that reads: 'Meaning of driving associated with masculinity and hence with other practices including those of repair'. Diagram illustrating elements between practices of Driving and Repairing.

EXCERPT #VP4GPL p. 51
  Figure 2.5 Elements between practices

EXCERPT #ERE3YQ p. 51
  across the cultural landscape as a whole. Something similar happens when forms of competence circulate (as when skills transfer) and when material elements figure in more than one practice at a time.

DOCUMENT #5AXAEJ
The Dynamics of Social Practice

SECTION #6H9VRT MODES OF CIRCULATION

EXCERPT #MLSV89 p. 58
  In theory it would be possible to plot the reach and range of specific practices on a map. Such an exercise could be used to identify places (cities, regions, countries) where baseball is a majority interest (Wang, 2007), where it is normal to shower at least once a day, or where people have toast for breakfast. Should such maps exist they would reveal

EXCERPT #6HQ4NU p. 59

EXCERPT #HRNYJD p. 59

EXCERPT #JZAH27 p. 59
  locations in which necessary elements co-exist. For example, toast eating depends upon bread of a certain type and size; a toaster; a concept of breakfast in which toast is included; and a measure of toast-related competence (Molotch, 2003). Rather than imagining one map of practice, we might therefore think of three separate layers – one depicting the distribution of requisite competence, another showing access to necessary materials, and a third plotting the prevalence of toast as a meaningful part of breakfast. Having toast in the morning is only possible where all three layers overlap. In all other situations one or more of the necessary ingredients is missing; for example, toasters are not available, the bread is absent or not of a form that would go in the toaster, or toasters and bread both exist but not the convention of making breakfast at home. The fact that requisite elements co-exist does not guarantee that they will be linked together, but the potential is there.

EXCERPT #85A9JM p. 59
  In considering the diffusion of practice – how did toast eating become established and how did the practice spread? – it is evidently important to analyse the distribution of constitutive elements and to understand how they travel. The next three sections describe some of the modes of circulation involved, starting with transportation.

SECTION #3KWGMM Transportation and access: material

EXCERPT #QSX8E3 p. 59
  For many years, methods and styles of building reflected the local availability of natural resources like timber, stone or clay. According to Manzini and Cau (1989), vernacular traditions of design and construction have been eroded by the importation of ‘foreign’ materials and correspondingly foreign ways of using them. In this analysis the capacity to ship goods around the world has reconfigured the doing of building, and has done so on a global scale. As this rather obvious example suggests, the movement of material elements of practice often involves their physical relocation. As such, trucks, trains, boats and planes have an important part to play in facilitating the circulation of goods and in establishing the contours of potential practice.

EXCERPT #9A865Y p. 59
  Some things are very much heavier or more awkward to move than others; again an obvious point, but again one that is relevant in thinking about how maps of material availability and sociotechnical potential are

EXCERPT #D534KE p. 60

EXCERPT #QQ7UX8 p. 60

EXCERPT #6LRVME p. 60
  configured. Although not written with this in mind, Harris's history of the production and diffusion of cast-iron stoves provides a fine illustration of the close-coupled relation between infrastructures of mobility and comfort. In the USA in 1820, cast-iron stoves were viewed as 'an expensive item of restricted utility, and thus in limited demand'. Just 30 years later, they had become 'the first consumer durable with near-universal market penetration – available, affordable, versatile, and reliable' (Harris, 2008: 337). Harris's explanation is as follows:

EXCERPT #PZT3XN p. 60
  From the 1820s through at least the 1840s, unless consumers lived a relatively short wagon trip away from a navigable waterway, the ability of most of them to buy heavy, bulky goods, or those with a low value-to-weight ratio, from any but local makers and suppliers, was quite restricted. Similar considerations applied to the manufacture of such goods: from the 1810s through the 1830s, for example, the making of heavy cast-iron products like stoves stayed tied to the blast furnaces providing their raw material, i.e. it was more or less confined to those locations where iron ore from mines or bogs, flux (limestone or sea-shells), and fuel (generally charcoal) could be sourced close to one another.

EXCERPT #QDZTEL p. 60
  (Harris, 2008: 340)

EXCERPT #DKAD3N p. 60
  As described here, canal systems and railway routes opened the way for more complex and more specialized systems of provision, innovation and distribution, releasing stove makers and potential stove buyers from the basic constraints of heavy material geography. Harris argues that this was crucial for the development and diffusion of stoves that were in turn essential in redefining the meaning and practice of comfort:

EXCERPT #Q2C4E8 p. 60
  Without a sustained, multilayered improvement in the means for transporting information and goods around the country, the rapid development of a nationwide stove market between the 1830s and 1850s could not have taken place, and no general transformation of the American indoor climate would have happened.

EXCERPT #XTKV5V p. 60
  (Harris, 2008: 349)

EXCERPT #JAX25H p. 61

EXCERPT #95BRJR p. 61

EXCERPT #RUCXLU p. 61
  Not all material elements of practice are quite as weighty as a cast-iron stove and since it is in any case access that matters, sites of production are often as important as modes of transportation. In 1854, 30,329 packages of corrugated iron were exported from England to the Australian state of Victoria as emigrants arrived with their future dwellings packed, in kit form, in the holds of ships. This mass movement of metal came to a halt when a sheet rolling and galvanizing works was established in Newcastle, Australia in 1921. By 1939 this and one other plant produced almost all Australia's galvanized sheeting (Warr, 2000). The fact that corrugated iron rusts, and that sheets need replacing, reminds us of the further point that many practices depend on supplies of consumables as well as on more durable objects, tools and infrastructures. Staying with this example, practices that involve corrugated iron (like constructing a shed) are also likely to require an array of related materials including timber, nails, screws and fixings, each of which have different histories and geographies of production and distribution. To complicate matters, while it is sometimes possible to use alternatives or substitutes, swapping nails for screws, many material components have what Akrich (1992) describes as a 'closed' script, meaning that their role, and relation to other artefacts, is tightly defined. By these means material arrangements configure each other, frequently doing so in ways that are of relevance for who has access to what. In Chapter 2 we noticed that cars have been (re)designed to prevent amateur tinkering. On a different scale, the design and operation of infrastructures, mains water systems, cities and transportation networks reflect and structure inequalities of access and hence the social distribution of different practices. Graham and Marvin's (2001) argument that urban networks are becoming increasingly exclusive is relevant in this regard.

EXCERPT #JT4CNZ p. 61
  As these few comments indicate, the topic of how and where things move, and how access to them is structured, is vast. In touching on processes involved, our aim is not to track the freight of the world or identify the very many ways in which material elements of practice are distributed, accumulated, managed or policed. Rather, the point is to recognize that whereas forms of (co)location, transportation and access are typically important for the diffusion of material elements, forms of competence and meaning circulate in characteristically different ways.

EXCERPT #SMSEWL p. 62

EXCERPT #U5CLVN p. 62

SECTION #THMJ59 Abstraction, reversal and migration: competence

EXCERPT #R5VD84 p. 62
  In everyday life, learning through doing goes on all the time and often without noticing. While some skills can be picked up in this way, others require much more deliberate effort, sometimes involving hours of dedicated training. For any one individual, the experience and process of becoming a competent practitioner is important, but for the purposes of this chapter we take the element of know-how and competence as our unit of enquiry rather than the persons involved, whether as recipients, translators, mediators or sources. Since we are interested in the circulation and distribution of elements, we concentrate especially on cases in which know-how travels beyond the confines of face-to-face interaction between master and apprentice, teacher and pupil or parent and child. In other words, we step back from situated practice-specific instances of learning-by-doing in order to consider how competences circulate between practices as well as between people. We begin by suggesting that concepts of abstraction and reversal are useful, and unusual, in describing processes that apply equally well to the analysis of practices as moments of performance and to the conceptualization of practices as recognizable entities.

EXCERPT #HFP7QW p. 62
  The basic idea that knowledge has to be 'abstracted' from a local situation before it can travel, and that it needs to be 'reversed' when it arrives in some new destination, complicates popular interpretations of knowledge transfer as a simple process of sending and receiving. This representation is, however, consistent with an account of practices as integrative performances in which elements are conjoined. The suggestion that abstracted knowledge circulates between such moments or sites of enactment is also relevant in thinking about how competences circulate.

EXCERPT #XLCZNT p. 62
  Theories of abstraction and reversal depend on distinguishing between local understanding on the one hand, and what Disco and van der Meulen (1998) term 'global-level cognitive constructs' on the other. As these authors explain, such constructs constitute forms of 'cosmopolitan' knowledge, that is, knowledge that has been disembodied from its local origins and is consequently capable of travelling widely whilst maintaining its own integrity. As discussed in Chapter 2, this idea brings

EXCERPT #959TPK p. 63

EXCERPT #ATV2L5 p. 63

EXCERPT #T692HK p. 63
  with it the related, and somewhat strange, image of knowledge temporarily existing in limbo, contained in what Arie Rip describes as a dislocated holding tank or reservoir. In his words, 'knowledge products are delivered into a knowledge reservoir, carried by what one might call an epistemic community, and knowledge users pick up their own new combinations from the reservoir' (1998). This vision of a gigantic depot of abstracted, de-contextualized but not yet re-embedded knowledge is intriguing, as is the related suggestion that resources like libraries and the Internet, along with material objects and systems of regulation and certification, harbour pools of knowledge that have been variously certified, legitimated and prepared for travel.

EXCERPT #TVARG8 p. 63
  The qualities and characteristics of the reservoir are surely relevant, but given that our aim is to understand how competences move, we focus on what 'has to be done to make knowledge movable (decontextualization and packaging), to let it move (infrastructure) and to make it work elsewhere (recontextualization, standardization)' (Deuten, 2003: 18).

EXCERPT #WD4YPP p. 63
  Never mind what the range of relevant and available resources includes, the potential for effective circulation is limited by the capacity to 'reverse' or de-code packages of cosmopolitan knowledge. As Duguid puts it, 'Codification is remarkably powerful, but its power is only realized through the corresponding knowing how' (2005: 114). Duguid goes on to suggest that the necessary knowing how (i.e. knowing how to decode) is unevenly distributed because it is itself an outcome of prior experience. This suggests know-how can only travel – by means of abstraction and reversal – to sites in which practitioners are already prepared to receive it because of prior, first-hand, practice-based experience.

EXCERPT #RRZ23M p. 63
  If the preparation, reversal and effective appropriation of abstracted knowledge depends on highly localized practice-based expertise, processes of movement are perhaps not as generically cosmopolitan as Rip and as Disco and van der Meulen suggest. To put it another way, the distribution and extent of the capacity to decode is itself dynamic and practice-based. Deuten's (2003) analysis of the standardization and diffusion of reinforced concrete as a reliable building material shows how this works.

EXCERPT #W6CMVR p. 64

EXCERPT #8RM8HD p. 64

EXCERPT #B7E5DG p. 64
  Before reinforced concrete could be adopted as normal, many people had to become familiar with its qualities and with the conditions and circumstances of its effective use. This was especially challenging in that the properties of concrete differ from one batch to the next because of the variable nature of the raw materials involved and the conditions in which they are mixed and applied. In the early days, concrete expertise was craft-based, embedded and locally reproduced. As knowledge of the material became more widely shared it also (and in the same move) stabilized to the point that it could be defined, taught and learned regardless of the situation. Subsequent developments in standard specifications and regulation have the further effect of stabilizing what counts as expertise and of shaping both the nature of reinforced concreting and the first-hand experience-based competences of those involved.

EXCERPT #3WMLF4 p. 64
  It is true that agreed recipes and precisely codified testing regimes (i.e. abstracted knowledge) had to be in place before the practice of reinforced concrete construction could be established and routinized on any scale. It is also clear that the codification of relevant knowledge is important for how recruitment to a practice is organized (novice concrete contractors can now be taught en masse ); for what practitioners actually do; what they learn in the process; and how reinforced concreting is reproduced and potentially transformed. To this Deuten adds the further point that the capacity to read and work with such recipes itself requires cultivation. In his words, 'to understand translocality, the methods, practices, instrumentations and technologies through which translocal knowledge is manifested have to be taken into account' (2003: 58). From this point of view, processes of sharing and standardizing knowledge are not merely channels through which competences spread, but are themselves part of the narrative of technological development.

EXCERPT #LQLZJG p. 64
  This subtle analysis emphasizes the co-existence of localized and cosmopolitan knowledges and their mutual interdependence. It also suggests that elements of knowledge – in this case, how to make and use reinforced concrete – are transformed by and also transform the several practices of which they are a part. Standardized knowledge of concrete production was, for instance, critical in facilitating the rapid uptake of reinforced concrete construction with implications for architecture, design and style, as well as for the practicalities of working on site.

EXCERPT #TR9FXD p. 65

EXCERPT #NMAQP8 p. 65

EXCERPT #EZDYFX p. 65
  Deuten's project was to describe the work involved in 'cosmopolitannizing' concrete technology and in making it available in many locations, not to show how related forms of knowing and doing rippled out across neighbouring professional domains. But for us this is an interesting question. Do such movements depend on similar sequences of abstraction and reversal? Are other processes involved?

EXCERPT #LBJYN7 p. 65
  The concept of transferable skills is relevant in this regard. Having been mastered in one setting, competences like those of controlling a ball or speaking in public can be carried over and reproduced in others. People who are familiar with social situations like formal meetings or birthday parties can deploy and adapt this knowledge when participating in variants of these generic forms. This does not necessarily involve recognizable stages of abstraction and codification. Instead, specific competences are transferable because they are common , or at least common enough to a number of different practices. The potential for know-how to accumulate, circulate and travel sideways in this manner consequently depends on the degree to which diverse practices correspond. How are such commonalities established and at what level do they occur?

EXCERPT #6B37YD p. 65
  During the nineteenth century, techniques of rational planning and work efficiency along with specific methods of management, record-keeping and financial control travelled from office to home. Popular texts like The Homemaker and Her Job (Gilbreth, 1927) and Scientific Management in the Home: Household engineering (Frederick, 1920) were quite explicit about the source of their inspiration and about the benefits and values of running the home according to principles borrowed from the world of work. Appropriating techniques like those of time-and-motion studies and producing variants of economics suited to the home required a measure of culturally and historically specific adaptation (Jerram, 2006). One might therefore argue that elements of competence were abstracted from the world of work, codified in the form of manuals and instruction, and subsequently reversed into the domains of home, or more recently personal health.

EXCERPT #GR2ETD p. 65
  However, this is not the only possible explanation. At a very practical level, Parr (1999) and Cowan (1983) make the point that concepts of rational and efficient management were actively promoted by companies keen to position new appliances as necessary tools for the proper

EXCERPT #89H9J9 p. 66

EXCERPT #H6P3WH p. 66

EXCERPT #CUG2BK p. 66
  ordering of domestic life. For this to work, family life had to be framed as a certain kind of project. This suggests that commonality had to be actively built at the level of ideas and discourses before related forms of know-how could be transferred.

EXCERPT #VTF9WQ p. 66
  From a more Foucauldian perspective, corporate success in this endeavour depended upon and at the same time reproduced generic techniques of self-regulation. By implication, methods of record-keeping, monitoring and discipline were capable of travelling across different areas of daily life because they tapped into (and formed) an underlying self-regulatory substructure. Developing these ideas, certain elements of know-how bridge between practices not by means of abstraction and reversal but by somehow constituting – and potentially changing – the texture and the quality of the social fabric in which many such practices are rooted. In their analysis of changing modes of governmentality, Miller and Rose (2008) address similar issues. Having identified ‘ways of categorizing persons, rearrangements of factory layouts, treatments for various disorders, the testing of various groups or populations and so on’, they go on to suggest that these represent ‘multiple centres of calculation and authority that traverse and link up personal, social and economic life’ (2008: 20). We explore the potential for characterizing societies in terms of types of linkage of which they are constituted in Chapter 6, ‘Circuits of reproduction’, but for the moment it is enough to recognize that these ties are important in establishing conditions of transferability and possibilities of exchange between one practice and another.

EXCERPT #XX2F9W p. 66
  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

EXCERPT #WQ3PRT p. 67

EXCERPT #4MJX7K p. 67

EXCERPT #RTTGR3 p. 67
  certain circumstances. As we have noticed, the capacity to decode is unequally distributed and itself born of previous practice-based experience. This is relevant for the ways in which competences accumulate and build during the course of an individual's life (see Chapter 4, 'Recruitment, defection and reproduction'). It is also critical for the 'life' of individual elements: for how they travel, for their availability within and between different social groups, and hence for the settings in which they might be integrated in practice.

SECTION #SY5EDK Association and classification: meaning

EXCERPT #T4QGHV p. 67
  For Miller and Rose (2008), and for Foucault, discourse and technique are so closely entwined that it makes little sense to separate them. But if we are to persist with our analytic method of distinguishing between the elements of which practices are made, we need to press on and ask whether there is anything distinctive about how meanings and images circulate and move. This is a huge topic and in order to make any headway at all we need to make other radically simplifying moves. One is to concentrate on instances in which interpretations and symbolic associations are relatively uncontested. A second is to play down the fact that attributions of meaning are unavoidably relative, situated and emergent. These steps allow us to proceed with a discussion of how elements of meaning diffuse and of what this means for the circulation of practices in and of which they are a part.

EXCERPT #DUUPD6 p. 67
  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,

EXCERPT #UPVJUT p. 68

EXCERPT #GL3CWB p. 68

EXCERPT #KDC8TC p. 68
  one of personal health, the other of fresh air, nature and outdoor life (Shove and Pantzar, 2005).

EXCERPT #AKS9K3 p. 68
  Two aspects of this story are relevant for a discussion of meaning. First, this semiotic positioning of Nordic Walking was only possible because concepts of wellbeing and nature already existed in the popular imagination, each having recognizable qualities born of prior practice-based associations. Second, although efforts to frame Nordic Walking in this way have been relatively successful, defining and classifying an emergent practice is not something that any one actor can control. As things turned out, Nordic Walking was initially associated with health and nature, as the promoters hoped, and soon after with specific categories of age and gender. These new connections arose as a consequence of the fact that middle-aged women were the first to take up the practice. As more and different people became involved, the social significance of participation and the meaning of Nordic Walking changed.

EXCERPT #ZLPL4U p. 68
  The dynamic relation between the status of participants and the meaning of the practices they carry is widely discussed, usually with the aim of understanding how social and cultural hierarchies are reproduced and sustained. By participating in some practices but not others, individuals locate themselves within society and in so doing simultaneously reproduce specific schemes and structures of meaning and order. In Bourdieu's terms, all cultural practices are 'automatically classified and classifying, rank ordered and rank ordering' (1984: 223). Writing in this tradition tends to emphasize the relative positioning not of the practice but of the practitioner within the social order. In other words, the interest is in what Nordic Walking says about the person who does it, not in how meanings like those of outdoor life circulate between practices or in how they combine with or break away from other symbolic constructs. By contrast, we want to put the element of meaning at the centre of our enquiry. One method of doing so is to think about how practices are classified and how categories themselves evolve. The business of sorting things and practices is politically significant, and it is this aspect that has attracted most attention (Bowker and Star, 2000a). But in the context of the present discussion the question is not 'Who determines whether smoking cigarettes and driving fast cars is transgressive or cool?', but rather, 'How are categories like those of being cool,

EXCERPT #87JUD4 p. 69

EXCERPT #4GQCLD p. 69

EXCERPT #2YZH22 p. 69
  healthy or youthful populated with practices, how does this population change and with what consequence for these frames of meaning?'

EXCERPT #VFW2VT p. 69
  One possibility is that meanings are extended and eroded as a result of dynamic processes of association. Accordingly, when Nordic Walking is linked with health, the meaning of wellbeing extends to encompass this practice, along with many others. The extension of one set of meanings sometimes implies the contraction of others. For example, concepts of 'freshness', conventionally associated with qualities of air, have found their way into the realm of laundering and bathing. As this 'new' element entered the practice of washing, other previously dominant themes of cleanliness or hygiene have been overlain, transformed or displaced. This is relevant in that notions of freshness legitimize and in a sense demand more frequent showering and laundering than ever before (Shove, 2003; Hand et al., 2005).

EXCERPT #AFJFVU p. 69
  There are also instances in which meanings merge. In some circles, notions of youth and modernity are concurrently carried by practices like those of wearing jeans and leather jackets, and driving certain kinds of cars (O'Dell, 2001). Hebdige discusses similar processes of semiotic convergence in his article 'Towards a cartography of taste 1935-1961' (reproduced in Hebdige, 1988). His account of how 'ideologically charged connotational codes' intersected to constitute an 'Americanization' of taste is useful in showing that new meta-categories, like Americanization, can emerge through multiple conjunctions and can go on to have a life of their own. However, Hebdige's analysis concentrates on the consequences of such processes for social class distinctions and concepts of high and popular culture (in England), not on the details of intersection.

EXCERPT #SGNCNN p. 69
  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,

EXCERPT #PFS9MN p. 70

EXCERPT #NMJX9X p. 70

EXCERPT #3RX274 p. 70
  there is no guarantee that these will stick. As with the abstraction and reversal of competence, the decoding and appropriation of meaning is an inherently local, inherently uncertain process. In addition, opportunities for association and re-classification are, to a degree, constrained and enabled by existing patterns and distributions of meaning.

EXCERPT #Y5VBYQ p. 70
  The preceding paragraphs explored the possibility that what looks like the circulation and mutation of elements of meaning depends on successive, multi-sited, processes of de- and re-classification. This is what happens when concepts of freshness become important for the laundry, or when being healthy becomes linked to walking with 'sticks'. Similar processes are involved in the emergence and distribution of composite notions, including those of gender, youth and modernity. More abstractly, the classificatory texture of society changes as meanings merge and fragment, and although not the focus of this discussion, this ordering is important for questions of power (Bowker and Star, 2000a).

SECTION #YLZQUZ Packing and unpacking

EXCERPT #DDW65K p. 70
  We began this chapter by wondering about how the materials, competences and meanings of eating toast for breakfast circulate, and hence about how and where this might become (or remain) a normal thing to do. This led us to comment, element by element, on some of the routes and means of travel potentially involved. Rather than trying to provide a comprehensive catalogue of all possible forms of circulation we have picked on a few examples and used them to illustrate a handful of simple observations.

EXCERPT #Z7DKTH p. 70
  First, materials are the only elements that literally move in the sense of being physically transported. While competences and images appear to circulate, critical processes have to do with localized forms of de- and re-linking, a feature about which we have more to say below. Second, materials have characteristics (weight, fragility etc.) that affect, but which are only sometimes transformed by, processes of transportation. By contrast, meanings and competences are routinely modified as their reach and range extends or contracts. Third, with materials as with competences and meanings, the rate and extent of actual and potential circulation depends on the existence or otherwise of appropriate infrastructures, for instance, of transportation or mediation. Fourth, processes of codification

EXCERPT #MVL26Q p. 71

EXCERPT #WTABLX p. 71

EXCERPT #LD9ACL p. 71
  and de-codification matter for the circulation of competence and meaning, but not for material. Fifth, some kinds of know-how can only be acquired and can only 'travel' if there is a base or foundation of existing competence on which to build. This limits the population of potential carriers and the extent to which specific competences can move. Sixth, acquiring new forms of skill often takes time. By contrast, meanings (i.e. forms of association) can change and emerge and can travel far and fast. That said, the effective appropriation of meanings and competences depends on local capacities to embed, 'reverse' and interpret. Such capacities are unevenly distributed and are, in turn, born of practices past.

EXCERPT #RXBW6A p. 71
  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.

EXCERPT #R2TDPN p. 71
  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.

DOCUMENT #5AXAEJ
The Dynamics of Social Practice

SECTION #8JX39Z COLLAPSE AND TRANSFORMATION: THE DYNAMICS OF DEFECTION

EXCERPT #ED5VNK p. 88
  Schatzki suggests that judgements about whether practices have died or merely been transformed should reflect the extent and character of change. He provides the following guidance: 'where multiple mutations are accompanied by continuities in other components, a practice lives on', but 'when changes in organization are vast or wholesale, or a practice's projects and tasks are simply no longer carried out, former practices expire' (2002: 244).

EXCERPT #YR8ATW p. 88
  Expiration can be an outcome of radical transformation, a consequence of mass defection, or both. In a recent analysis of differences between innovations, fashions and fads, Gronow (2009) describes a range of possibilities. He argues that innovations generate lasting change in routines and habits. To the extent that this is so, innovations entail extinction: old ways are abandoned as new ones are adopted. Fashions are different in that they are characterized by cyclical processes of substitution: last year's model is replaced by this year's design, but in the end and at the level of practice, nothing really changes. 'Despite its novelty a new fashion does not change any social habits' (Gronow, 2009: 134). Finally, fads spring up and then simply die. Unlike innovations, there is nothing waiting in the wings to take their place. We use this scheme to discuss the different forms of defection involved, starting with fads.

EXCERPT #6VP9F8 p. 88
  Meyersohn and Katz contend that 'The study of fads and fashions may serve the student of social change much as the study of fruit flies has served geneticists: neither the sociologist nor the geneticist has to wait long for a new generation to arrive' (1957: 594). We are not interested in fads for this reason, for their significance as expressions of crowd psychology (Meyersohn and Katz, 1957) or as moments in cycles of distinction and identification (Simmel, 1957). For us their value lies in the clues they provide as to how massively popular practices suddenly lose their grip. Hula-hooping is a fine example. In the late 1950s, 25 million hula hoops were sold in two months with 100 million international orders following soon after (Knerr, 1997). Two years later the craze had largely passed. So how come so many new recruits gave up so

EXCERPT #VBH7XD p. 89

EXCERPT #APM6J4 p. 89

EXCERPT #7HCZVT p. 89
  fast? We consider three possible explanations, all relevant for a broader discussion of defection.

EXCERPT #4P8MD9 p. 89
  The first has to do with the extent and character of what MacIntyre describes as 'internal rewards' (MacIntyre, 1985). In brief, the idea is that performing a practice well, that is in terms of standards that are part and parcel of the definition of a practice itself, is of immediate, internal reward. For example, being an excellent teacher is satisfying in and of itself and not (only) because this role attracts public recognition or a good salary, these being external rather than internal rewards. There are certainly some for whom hula-hooping is, in these terms, internally rewarding. However, hula-hooping's brief career might suggest that self-propelling circuits of satisfaction were limited, or distinctly short-lived. Compared with long-standing leisure pursuits like gardening, home improvement or cooking, all fields in which expertise accumulates through sequences of variously successful accomplishment and in which one project often begets another, hula-hooping appears a little thin. Though capable of retaining a handful of enthusiasts, it seems that the experience was not of itself enough to generate lasting interest nor the reward sufficient to sustain the commitment of the 125 million or more who gave hula-hooping a go. To put this observation the other way around, practices are, perhaps ironically, better able to retain commitment when they afford scope for innovation.

EXCERPT #MYWK7W p. 89
  A second possibility is that hula-hooping disappeared as rapidly as it arrived because it had no symbolic or normative anchoring: it was not strongly associated with either good or bad behaviour, with the reproduction of distinctions, or with fulfilling injunctions and obligations. Exactly which practices fall into the 'must do' category and exactly how layers of symbolic meaning are lost and acquired differs widely, but at any one moment daily lives are organized by sets of seemingly unavoidable commitments (Douglas, 1984; Kaufmann, 1998). Since fads like swinging a ring of plastic around the hips are of no wider significance, defection is easy. A third related point is that hula-hooping was not obviously connected to and not obviously dependent on any other practice: it came into being, existed briefly and then died alone.

EXCERPT #Y8QUBK p. 89
  These interpretations suggest that mass defection is possible, and perhaps even likely, where practices are not consistently internally rewarding, not laden with symbolic significance and not enmeshed in wider networks.

EXCERPT #ZZ4NE7 p. 90

EXCERPT #RUVVA9 p. 90

EXCERPT #ASGEDV p. 90
  However, there are many exceptions. Routinely cycling to work is one. In the early 1950s in the UK, around 40 per cent of journeys to work were by bike. In less than twenty years this dropped to just a few per cent (Pooley and Turnbull, 2000). In thinking about how cycling lost so many carriers in such a few years we need to think about how practices fit together. Cycling to work was, for a while, deeply embedded in a whole set of social and institutional arrangements. Rather than constituting a form of enduring strength, this interdependence was a source of weakness: the entire cycle-based regime caved in as automobility took hold. One by one, hundreds and thousands of previously committed cyclists abandoned this mode of travel and in so doing reinforced the dominance of the car.

EXCERPT #9XBMC8 p. 90
  In Gronow's terms, cycling is not a fad: though it disappeared fast, it did so in relation to an incoming innovation. In everyday terms this is but one example of an entirely familiar process in which old ways are abandoned as new ones become established. Moral and ideological changes have similar effect: ruling out and in some cases outlawing arrangements that were once taken for granted, and sometimes doing so in ways that affect many practices at once. More straightforwardly, letting go is part of moving on.

EXCERPT #KPK49K p. 90
  But again this is not the whole story. Although there is some merit in thinking about how hours are allocated, and although it is true that (multi-tasking aside) time spent on one practice is not devoted to another, defection and recruitment are not simply two sides of the same coin. As illustrated by the dynamic relation between Internet use and meanings of family life, social and technical innovation is not just a matter of swapping one cohort of carriers for another. In its first five years the Internet managed to capture an average of 10 hours a week from around 50 per cent of the population of the USA (Nie, 2001: 430). In wondering about where these 201,017,857 hours (based on 2001 figures) had come from, commentators worried that the Internet was stealing time previously spent with friends and family (Kraut et al., 1998: 1031). Early surveys suggested that this might be so. However, more detailed analyses demonstrated that time spent on the computer is routinely defined and configured by multiple coexisting practices, including those through which bonds of friendship and family are maintained (Slater, 2003). Rather than taking time away, the Internet appears to be

EXCERPT #K9Y2NU p. 91

EXCERPT #AK4BQT p. 91

EXCERPT #HXJTAS p. 91
  changing what it is to do family and friendship and modifying the practices involved. Some kinds of defection are involved, but the process is not one of replacement or simple competition.

EXCERPT #QK4B7S p. 91
  It might be possible to identify features typical of a fad, or to anticipate the kinds of collapse associated with radical innovation, one practice at a time. But as is already obvious, the margins of a practice, its ability to capture and retain recruits and prevent them from defecting depend on its positioning in a sea of other practices, each with relatively volatile, relatively static trajectories of their own. This argues for thinking about the relation between recruitment, defection and reproduction on a societal scale.

EXCERPT #X8KYZA p. 91
  Again this is a mind-boggling suggestion, but what if there were some means of assessing the rates at which individual practices are changing, and hence the relative 'plasticity or rigidity (lock-in) of the interlocking systems of practice of which society is composed' (Shove, 2009: 30)? During the course of any one day, individuals devote time and attention to an immense variety of practices by which they are captured. Some of these are on the way in, others are on the way out. Some are stable, others are mutating fast. Should such a thing as a societal index of practice transformation exist, it might indicate that certain domains of daily life are moving more quickly, or are more dynamic than others. It might show that some such changes are necessarily synchronized, or cumulative, and that others are not. As they go about their daily lives, people are unknowingly engaged in reproducing and enacting multiple and varied cycles of change, simultaneously shaping the lives of practices and being shaped by them.

EXCERPT #NXNA9T p. 91
  In the last part of this chapter we elaborate on the relation between what Allan Pred (1981) describes as the daily paths and life paths of individuals and the practices and dominant projects they carry. This allows us to show how patterns of recruitment and defection play out over the longer run.

DOCUMENT #5AXAEJ
The Dynamics of Social Practice

SECTION #TVA3KY COLLABORATION AND COMPETITION

EXCERPT #KYA5GQ p. 101
  Pantzar and Sundell-Niemenen (2003) talk about an 'ecology of goods' within the home and go on to describe 'predatory' relations between a digital camera and its analogue 'prey', contrasting these with mutually supportive arrangements like those between a computer and associated furniture including shelves and chairs. Can similar ideas be used to understand and characterize relations between practices? We have already made quite some moves in this direction. In Chapter 4, 'Recruitment, defection and reproduction', we explored the possibility that practices compete with each other for recruits and carriers. Elsewhere we argued that their survival depends on the existence of requisite materials, meanings and

EXCERPT #LCHGLZ p. 102

EXCERPT #X4834B p. 102

EXCERPT #6MB84V p. 102
  forms of competence, and on their capacity to capture these resources (Chapter 3, 'The life of elements'). In this section we explore the suggestion that bundles and complexes arise and disappear as a consequence of competition and/or collaboration between practices.

EXCERPT #WLFJWD p. 102
  As described above, certain practices (docking a ship, conducting a surgical operation) suppose and require the reproduction of others. For example, oil-tanker captains depend on harbours and docks and on global networks of people capable of faithfully reproducing docking practices when called upon to do so. In cases where sequences are important, and where one practice produces elements (for example, competences or materials) on which another depends, pre- and co-requisite practices 'collaborate' in the reproduction of more extensive complexes in which all have a part to play.

EXCERPT #JPEYA9 p. 102
  Not all chains of interdependence are symmetrical and relatively 'flat' examples of mutual support exist alongside other more complex hierarchies. For example, in the world of organized sports, national and international leagues depend on players and local clubs willing and able to enter higher level competitions. The benefits probably flow in both directions: local clubs certainly gain from interest generated at the international level, but at the end of the day, international forms could not exist without the grass roots versions. In this situation, one set of practices sustains another but the balance of power is unequal. Whilst practices arguably compete for elements, they are also united by those they have in common. For example, material innovations like the Sony Walkman linked otherwise unrelated practices such as going for a run or doing the housework and listening to music (Weber, 2005). Although impressive, the coordinative potential of the Walkman is as nothing compared to that now offered by laptops and smart phones capable of bridging between entertainment (games, watching TV/DVD); socializing (Skype, email, Facebook); household management (online banking); learning and working (Røpke, 2001). Meanings and concepts like those of freshness or Westernization have a similarly coordinative role, providing a common point of reference for disparate pursuits. As we saw in Chapter 3, drinking, driving and wearing jeans became associated with each other, each reproducing and at the same time being reproduced by cross-cutting images of modernity and youth (O'Dell, 2001). In these ways, shared

EXCERPT #AUZWMM p. 103

EXCERPT #P4TT4K p. 103

EXCERPT #Z292U5 p. 103
  elements sustain and are sustained by forms of cross-practice ‘collaboration’, broadly defined.

EXCERPT #M7BW9J p. 103
  There are surely other forms of mutual support but in describing these few we give a sense of the potential for sharing and integration and the terms on which this might be based. What then of competition? How do practices compete with each other, and how do the outcomes of such contests affect the spatial and temporal ordering of daily life and the bundles and complexes of which it is composed?

EXCERPT #VRYB9P p. 103
  In the previous chapter we referred to a seemingly competitive relationship between the Internet and family life. While some commentators worried about computers stealing time from friends and family, others argued rather than being undermined by this technology such relations were, instead, mediated by it. As this debate suggests, it is not always easy to tell whether relations between practices are competitive (such that the Internet erodes family life) or collaborative (such that the Internet strengthens family ties). In this case, knowing how much time people spend glued to the computer is not particularly informative. However, there are instances in which time-use data reveals what seem to be aggressively competitive moves in which one practice colonizes resources and captures recruits at the expense of another.

EXCERPT #JFVNDU p. 103
  Time use studies from the 1950s onwards show that the arrival of the television has transformed both the sequencing and the character of other leisure pursuits. In the early days this was not a foregone conclusion. Griffiths and Holden refer to a newspaper article ( Daily Sketch , 14 April 1952) which indicates that gardening was, at the time, holding its own:

EXCERPT #5DL6YA p. 103
  Many people will watch television this afternoon and evening instead of going out. There will be few gardeners among them however. A BBC inquiry into the changes TV makes in family life reveals that it is seldom allowed to come between a man and his flowerbeds.

EXCERPT #C6BGY4 p. 103
  (Griffith and Holden, 2004: 1)

EXCERPT #AL5PDU p. 103
  Gardening remains extremely popular but audience figures demonstrate that television has gained ground and that flowerbeds have lost the prime-time commitment they once commanded.

EXCERPT #7T4XBD p. 104

EXCERPT #Y33CCD p. 104

EXCERPT #PB5BAT p. 104
  With the television, as with the Internet, the ecological metaphor needs to be taken further if it is to be of value. Up to a point, it may be useful to think of practices collaborating and competing for resources and attention. However, simple representations of this kind overlook the more subtle point that the recurrent enactment of practices and of links between them transforms the terms in which competition and/or collaboration are framed. Put differently, bundles and complexes of practice are implicated in the reproduction of space and time and the distribution of requisite elements (material, meaning and competence). Other studies of television viewing give a sense of what more is involved.

EXCERPT #GFWGJW p. 104
  On average, people spend more time watching television now than they did ten or even five years ago, but to understand what this means for changing relations between practices, we need to know more about how these minutes are allocated, and about the details and dynamics of sequence and timing. Within any one home, evening meals are variously planned to coincide with a favourite programme, or to allow those partaking of them the opportunity to eat together, or to eat and then go out and so on. Each scenario involves an interweaving of different practices (eating, viewing television, interacting, gardening etc.) that in combination define a specific pattern of daily life. While there is enormous individual variation in when and how television watching takes place, this juggling is anything but random (Silverstone, 1993). The now well-established concept of prime time – the time when audience figures are highest – consequently emerges as an outcome of collective and dynamic ‘negotiation’ between television programmers and millions of different households. Having become established, prime time in turn affects other kinds of domestic scheduling. The resulting re-arrangements are not simply outcomes of competition, but are instead collectively implicated in changing the terms on and the times in which practices vie with each other for attention.

EXCERPT #Z2DZMW p. 104
  More abstractly, interpretations of possible, potential and proper time and timing are critical for the ongoing reproduction and transformation of specific practices and for sometimes supportive, sometimes uneasy relations between them. It is common to think of practices as consumers, simply competing for resources, but the conclusion that understandings of space and time are usefully understood as outcomes of such relations complicates this analysis. It does so by suggesting that in

EXCERPT #CQ6LKS p. 105

EXCERPT #2FX4P8 p. 105

EXCERPT #6ZS9Q4 p. 105
  competing and collaborating with each other, certain practices establish the terms and conditions on which others interact.

EXCERPT #XX4F7H p. 105
  Whatever their basis, relations between practices are important in shaping the availability, distribution and circulation of elements, in configuring loose bundles and dense complexes, and in consequently making some future linkages more likely than others. At the end of Chapter 4, 'Recruitment, defection and reproduction', we referred to Pred's discussion of dominant projects, these being sets of practices and around which individual and collective careers revolve. We are now in a position to think about how practices, and sets of practice, acquire dominant status. In the next section we consider two methods of approaching this problem.

### 14. Tool result: read

DOCUMENT #R69WZQ
Material culture and the circular economy

SECTION #9XPEAM 2. Practices and object relations

EXCERPT #VCT37S p. 1
  There is a long tradition of understanding systems of consumption and production from the perspective of material culture. In his book, The social lives of things , Appadurai (1988) writes about the meaning of objects within and as part of complex systems and histories of social and cultural valuation. He argues that judgements of value, and the lives of things are densely interwoven, so much so that it makes no sense to strip an object out of the broader material culture in which it exists.

EXCERPT #8CYMM2 p. 1
  More pragmatically, objects are rarely mobilized in isolation. In daily life and in use they depend on each other and on an array of background infrastructures and resources that make related practices possible (Shove, 2016). The result is a mesh of what Rinkinen et al. (2015) describe as “object relations”, a term that underlines the point that the histories of objects are entangled with the societies in which they develop. Understanding how objects connect calls for further understanding of extensive networks and material arrangements and of how these evolve. If these ideas are taken to heart, objects, infrastructures and systems of provision and consumption must be treated as part of, and not outside, the wider plenitude of practice (Shove et al., 2012; Schatzki, 2019).

EXCERPT #GYAYXG p. 1
  It is only by focusing on relations between objects and practices that we can describe and understand the extent as well as the form of material flows (linear, circular, etc.), and to show how these vary and change (Ingold, 2012). This not only implies a more fluid and unsettled understanding of objects, but also a more relational account of the material world (Haberl et al., 2021). Building on these ideas, it is important to ask: “how do materials of all types (resources, appliances, infrastructures) figure in the emergence and transformation of different, but often linked complexes of social practice” (Rinkinen et al., 2020; p. 36)?

EXCERPT #2NXYDM p. 1
  As already mentioned, circular economy discussions of repair, sharing and re-use tend to consider objects in isolation, focusing on items like glass bottles (Stahel, 2016), mobile phones (Wieser and

EXCERPT #DPB8Z2 p. 1
  Tröger, 2018) or cars without paying attention to the surrounding network of social-material relations, or to the interwoven histories of consumption and production. For example, in concluding that “cleaning a glass bottle and using it again is faster and cheaper than recycling the glass or making a new bottle from minerals” (Stahel, 2016), Stahel disregards the place of the “glass bottle” in the wider world of food and drink, and in changing systems and infrastructures of provision. Similarly, those who evaluate the relative costs and benefits of repairing, sharing, or replacing a car (Chen and Kockelman, 2016) do so without reference to what Urry (2004) describes as a system of automobility, or to changing patterns of car-dependence (Mattioli et al., 2020).

EXCERPT #2JL9VM p. 1
  This kind of purification is necessary if commentators are to evaluate the relative benefits of recycling and repair vs. new production. The problem is that documenting the lifecycle of a product does not reveal the broader status and role of that product in society.

DOCUMENT #R69WZQ
Material culture and the circular economy

SECTION #CM9YM4 3. Constitution of demand

EXCERPT #SVVCVX p. 1
  Those who focus on material culture and consumption foreground questions about the constitution of demand (Rinkinen et al., 2020). As Warde (2005) explains, patterns of consumption arise from, and are rooted in social practices. From this point of view, resource flows are bound up with the long run histories of social life, and with the material arrangements associated with them. Past and present systems of provision, ownership, and design, including the details of repair, sharing and second-hand markets (for example, for buildings, cars, phones, clothes etc.) are part of this dynamic.

EXCERPT #WVCB9P p. 1
  The study of fridge freezers by Rinkinen, Shove and Smits is a good example (Rinkinen et al., 2021). This research examines the increasing “need” for freezers and for frozen food in two fast growing cities: Hanoi and Bangkok. As described, the significance of having a freezer cannot be separated from parallel changes in food production, provisioning, and diet. Whether the freezer is second-hand, or not makes little or no difference to this dynamic. Instead, what matters is the ongoing rearrangement of daily practice (shopping, cooking, eating) within and alongside related systems of provision. Similarly, the “need” for a car, for example, is bound up with the emergence of global systems of automobility, and not with consumer desire alone.

EXCERPT #MJBU3T p. 1
  In accounts of the circular economy, crucial debates about longer-term trends in consumption and needs are usually missing. Although Stahel and others (see Friant et al., 2020; Jaeger-Erben et al., 2021) refer to “sufficiency” (for Stahel, see the quote in Introduction), this concept tends to be narrowly defined, focusing on the extent to which a second hand, repaired or recycled object is sufficient, i.e., up to the job, or roughly equivalent to the “new” product for which it is substituted. From this point of view, the environmental costs of owning and using fridge-freezers, or SUVs, fade into the background: instead discussions focus on the relative merits of buying these items new or second hand. As with talk of efficiency or of dematerialization, the aim of which is to deliver “the same” service but with fewer resources (Shove, 2018; Hobson, 2020), more fundamental questions about consumers’ “needs” and how they evolve are out of scope.

EXCERPT #4T8YXK p. 1

EXCERPT #ZYXKBT p. 1

EXCERPT #CKKFGG p. 1

EXCERPT #WNNGQD p. 2

EXCERPT #C5C44U p. 2

EXCERPT #BLN2TC p. 2
  Theories of material culture and practice provide a means of re-engaging with really basic questions about production, consumption, and need—questions that should be integral to contemporary debates about the circular economy, but that are sidelined in what remains classically “economic” object-centric discussions of markets, substitution, manufacturing, and waste.

DOCUMENT #R69WZQ
Material culture and the circular economy

SECTION #FAPRPA 4. Discussion

EXCERPT #3PSC8C p. 2
  Ideas about the circular economy and how it works have informed policies that are designed to reduce carbon emissions by closing loops, increasing efficiency, and reducing waste. In bringing this piece to a close we highlight three tendencies in circular economy policies and conclude with a brief discussion of the policy implications of taking a broader view of material culture and practice, and of how this evolves and changes over time.

EXCERPT #NF4MTB p. 2
  As we have seen, accounts of the circular economy generally focus on the lives of objects, considered in isolation. This makes it possible to compare and evaluate processes of production, distribution, and appropriation, and to recognize the scattered nature of environmental impact (e.g., Tukker, 2000). Analyses of this kind take heed of the lifecycles of products and resources, but they proceed by stripping objects and resources out of context, and by “obscuring the distinctive social and historical processes of enmeshed material relations and shifting patterns of consumption” (Rinkinen et al., 2020). Policy responses inspired by mainstream discourse on the circular economy do the same.

EXCERPT #FUWLKX p. 2
  A second tendency, also evident in efforts to promote a circular economy, is to propose what are expected to be generic measures. For example, the potential to recycle materials is usually taken for granted, and usually seen as an evidently sensible thing to do. This skates over important differences in when and how diverse materials can or cannot be recycled. In so far as this is acknowledged, it is treated as largely technical issue, not as something that varies depending on the complexity and resource-base of the supply chain. For example, in the case of digital technology, recycling the end-product would only recover a small fraction of the input (see De Decker, 2018). This is a simple point but taking a broader view of objects is a necessary step in understanding the characteristics of specific networks and systems of provision, and how they might change. Whilst market specific knowledge is used in planning more circular business models and whilst there might be scope for learning across sectors, material realities and resource flows differ across products and supply chains. What is missing is a style of policy analysis, and a form of policy intervention that is sensitive to these differences, and to how materials “fit” in different systems of provision and practice.

EXCERPT #RP8YNG p. 2
  A third still more significant issue is that policies that are intended to foster a circular economy avoid or marginalize fundamental questions about the constitution of need, including the part that policy making itself plays in reproducing unsustainable practices and systems of provision. If the primary ambition is efficient flow and use of resources and goods, then changes in patterns of consumption and reduction of resource use is secondary ambition and treated as such. There is a risk that circular economy initiatives cling on to narrow growth-oriented

EXCERPT #JEWYYC p. 2
  notions of demand, without acknowledging the potential of more sufficiency-oriented circular economies.

EXCERPT #4BP9PM p. 2
  By contrast, sociological and anthropological theories of material culture, consumption and practice have very different policy implications. As outlined above, these disciplines provide a means of conceptualizing the changing status of material culture, and longer-term transitions in the resources “required” to participate effectively in society. If policy interventions were to be informed by these ways of thinking, policy makers would start by seeking out opportunities for shaping interpretations of normality and need in ways that reduce (rather than increase) resource consumption overall. At a minimum this argues for critical policy reflection and analysis and a willingness to think about how policies across all areas of government constitute taken for granted patterns of demand, in both formal and informal ways (Rinkinen et al., 2020). It also argues for broadening the scope of research to address temporal, spatial and infrastructural aspects of social practices and their connections. For policy makers this implies broader cross-sectoral cooperation.

EXCERPT #27LR4T p. 2
  In our view, concepts from the fields of material culture and practice provide policy makers with a means of going further and of identifying strategies that limit and reduce absolute resource use and environmental impact. To be more specific, focusing on objects as part of systems of provision and practice, and taking heed of the material bases of “ordinary practice” provides a starting point from which to combine analyses of need and normality with some of the tools and techniques associated with the circular economy (e.g., material flows, life cycle analyses).

### 15. Assistant tool calls

#### Tool call: `read`

```json
{
  "blocks": [
    "XZN3NQ",
    "UU4GH4",
    "J2KR9A",
    "4EDKD9"
  ],
  "expand": true
}
```

#### Tool call: `search_text`

```json
{
  "document_id": "8J3FXD",
  "limit": 8,
  "query": "normality inconspicuous consumption ordinary routine environmentalists distraction everyday practices"
}
```

#### Tool call: `search_text`

```json
{
  "document_id": "4V8VH7",
  "limit": 8,
  "query": "Brīvbode visible private dispersed domestic material life semi public open sorting meanings competencies price"
}
```

### 16. Tool result: read

DOCUMENT #8J3FXD
Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience: The Social Organization of Normality

SECTION #XZN3NQ Consumption, Everyday Life and Sustainability

EXCERPT #4X242T p. 15
  To outsiders, sociology has a reputation for dealing with the everyday and the ordinary. This is often cast as a thinly veiled criticism: who needs a whole discipline to understand what people do as a matter of course? In the context of this book, such a reputation represents a challenge and an ideal to live up to. Turning the spotlight back on generally invisible forms of practice, its purpose is to investigate the constitution of normality and the dynamics of habit and routine.

EXCERPT #LDKYVX p. 15
  It would be misleading to draw too sharp a distinction between the realm of the spectacular and that of the grindingly ordinary. Even so, I'll start by suggesting that the slicing of academic debate reveals a contemporary preoccupation with the explicit, the visible and the dramatic. Analyses of the tangible threats and traumas of risk society and of catastrophes, controversies and high-profile developments in science, politics and technology all illustrate this trend. Although the gleam of novelty gives issues like biotechnology, genetic modification or the future of e-commerce an immediate allure, closer inspection suggests that even fashionable topics have muddy and sometimes extensive taproots reaching back into long-standing programmes of theoretical concern. Familiar questions of social division and cohesion, consumption and production, agency and structure are rarely far away. Although familiar, these foundational questions are, of course, subject to reinterpretation and revision through and in the light of current concerns. It is easy to see why intellectual resources concentrate around themes that sparkle and spike the interest of research funders, the media, the public and fellow academics. Such focusing is to be expected. But what are the longer-term consequences of grounding ideas about contemporary society in the analysis of its more tangible and explicit characteristics? Might the tendency to pursue novel and fashionable topics not lead to the unwitting elaboration of lopsided conceptual frameworks? Would current lines of theoretical development be any different if they were, by contrast, anchored in the study of ordinary habits and routinized aspects of everyday life?

EXCERPT #BYFQD2 p. 15

EXCERPT #YZ3WXS p. 16

EXCERPT #ZSZ8X3 p. 16
  This is a question that runs throughout the book. Along the way, it takes specific forms. How might we conceptualize inconspicuous consumption as opposed to that which is overtly wrapped up with questions of style, status and symbolic significance? Can existing theories and analyses of things, objects and material cultures be bent and adapted to take account of the intangible, immaterial and invisible services they make possible? What does the co-evolution of technology and practice really mean for you and me and for the way we organize our lives? With what means might we explain the creep of convention and the escalation and standardization of conditions and circumstances that people take for granted? This is not to suggest that the social organization of normality is in some way distinctive, or that the processes involved are not also at play in other domains. Rather, the point is to discover what new theoretical challenges the study of a handful of ordinary practices might generate for a discipline that has, on balance, and perhaps to its cost, drifted from the systematic scrutiny of the mundane.

EXCERPT #EW8WKC p. 16
  Of course arrangements that are normal for some strike others as being extremely strange. Though I have no intention of defining the ordinary in any absolute sense, the book engages with sets of practices and expectations that constitute the barely detectable gridlines of everyday life. They form what would commonly be seen as a neutral backdrop against which the dramas of contemporary social interaction are played out. In Goffman's terms (1969), this book is more about the production of the scenery, the lighting and the setting than the action itself. These features are, none the less, actively constituted and reproduced in ways that demand the skilful deployment of rules, resources, technologies and other persons.

EXCERPT #2AZ6JA p. 16
  Despite inhabiting the shadowy region of the back-stage, the themes with which I deal are themselves subject to sometimes rapid development. In Western societies the sense of changing scenery is both pervasive and elusive.

EXCERPT #9X9UPM p. 16
  To give just a few examples, expectations of the indoor environment have shifted substantially in less than a single generation: although some people still wake to patterns of frost on the inside of the window, many more have come to take the comforts of central heating and air-conditioning for granted. In this as in other respects, experiences of cosiness and wellbeing are on the move. To give a second quite specific example, the Saturday night bath, once a standard feature of British family life, has given way to patterns of daily showering, a form predominantly valued for its convenience. The valuing of convenience is itself indicative of further transformation. Any number of devices and solutions are sold in the name of convenience and sold to those who feel themselves to be harried, hurried and harassed. Few can pin down just how and when their habits change but again there is a sense that things were not always so.

EXCERPT #SM4PWJ p. 16

EXCERPT #84HN3P p. 17

EXCERPT #CVT9SU p. 17
  These instances point to the significance of middle-range concepts like those of comfort, cleanliness and convenience. Such cross cutting terms encompass a variety of inter-linked conventions and habits and as such offer a vocabulary with which to explore and follow the evolution of routine, and with which to show how new arrangements become normal . One ambition of this book is to investigate unspectacular dimensions of daily life along these lines as a means of better understanding the dynamics of social change.

EXCERPT #FCNWP9 p. 17
  There are several reasons for concentrating on these three Cs – comfort, cleanliness and convenience – in particular. First, these complexes of practice appear to change in ways that challenge established theories of consumption and technology. Second, despite persistent and extensive variation, there is some evidence to support the view that comfort and cleanliness are subject to distinctive forms of escalation and standardization. Escalation here refers to the ratcheting up of demand, for instance for levels of comfort or for degrees of cleanliness. Standardization implies that the reach of what counts as normal is more and more encompassing. Conventions once confined to particular cultures seem to be extending (and eroding) in ways that suggest convergence in both technology and practice. Global acceptance of the business suit, the waning of the siesta and the expectation of always wearing freshly laundered clothing give an indication of this kind of change. Such trends are neither simple nor inevitable: pockets of habit stick fast, old ways die hard and some are obdurately resistant to change. Even so, there is an arguably new and certainly niggling tension between the production, appropriation and maintenance of standardized and localized interpretations of normal practice.

EXCERPT #WNPBH9 p. 17
  The prospect of exploring processes of escalation, standardization and resistance is appealing in its own right, but it is of more than academic interest. While the three Cs do not represent the full range of ordinary practice, they do encompass the environmental hot spots of consumption. Around half the energy in the world is used in buildings and much of that is devoted to keeping people comfortable. In the UK, cleaning now accounts for approximately 70 per cent of domestic water usage and demand for hot water is rising. The increasing importance of convenience and of devices designed to ease problems of temporal co-ordination relates, I argue, to the contemporary challenge of scheduling valued aspects of everyday life. As well as engendering the multiplication of energy-consuming but time-saving or time-shifting technologies, this trend has further implications for the definition and delivery of normal and necessary standards and services.

EXCERPT #MKLV8Y p. 17
  These points are not missed by environmentalists, many of whom are concerned about the proliferation of unsustainable ways of life and the consequences of such for climate change and global warming. Environmentally inspired analyses, usually framed in terms of restraint, excess and individual

EXCERPT #DP9N7U p. 17

EXCERPT #THT567 p. 18

EXCERPT #EUXVWD p. 18
  choice, tend to focus on the consumption of energy, water and other natural resources, but not on the services and experiences they make possible. By focusing so exclusively on individual action, such enquiries miss the bigger picture, failing to detect cultural and generational shifts of expectation and practice. In response, and in contrast, I take a different tack: starting rather than ending with a discussion of the sociotechnical transformation of collective conventions and thereby generating a more thoroughly social understanding of environmentally significant change.

EXCERPT #ZPBQYU p. 18
  This book is therefore driven by three ambitions. One is to revisit theories of consumption, technology and social change through an analysis of ordinarily invisible practices. A second is to work out how and why conventions of comfort and cleanliness are on the move. The third is to shift the focus of social environmental research and policy so as to comprehend the collective restructuring of expectation and habit. This involves tracking what have become routinized and inconspicuous practices. It means thinking again about the definition and appropriation of services , rather than discrete objects, and trying to understand both the convergence and divergence of everyday practice . This is not an innocent exercise. In focusing on comfort and cleanliness and on the dynamics of co-evolution and integration, the book offers and illustrates a different way of cutting the cake for environmental policy as for social theory.

EXCERPT #CZWH92 p. 18
  While questions of comfort, cleanliness and convenience have yet to receive sustained sociological attention, the notion of investigating the escalation and standardization of consumption or the reproduction of habit is by no means novel. As a result, there are many resources on which to draw. The remainder of this chapter isolates relevant ingredients from the sociology of environment, of consumption and of technology.

DOCUMENT #8J3FXD
Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience: The Social Organization of Normality

SECTION #UU4GH4 Natural Resources and Consumer Choices

EXCERPT #FMJC53 p. 18
  For all the effort invested in analysing consumer culture and consumer society, and despite the view that these concepts are 'central to unlocking some of the mysteries of contemporary societies' (Shove and Warde 2001: 231), interest in energy and water consumption has been largely confined to the environmental field. One somewhat paradoxical consequence is that consumer practices relating to routine forms of domestic reproduction, to washing, drying, cleaning, heating, lighting, cooling and so on, are as likely to have been studied by environmentalists or by feminists as by those for whom consumption is core business.

EXCERPT #4X8DSK p. 18
  This has led to a particular bunching of priorities. It comes as no surprise to discover that environmentally inspired programmes are guided by a prior

EXCERPT #KL9GHS p. 18

EXCERPT #VANB54 p. 19

EXCERPT #RE7D93 p. 19
  interest not in consumption per se, but in what that means for carbon emissions, pollution, waste and the depletion of finite resources. Building on this initial framing of the problem, dominant questions have concerned the ecological limits to growth, the specification of environmental 'carrying capacities' and the figuring out of where the end of the road really lies. In all of this, escalating consumption and economic growth are generally taken to be interdependent, one leading to and being a precondition for the other (Weyant and Yanigisawa 1998; Laitner, De Canio and Peters 2000). Continual monitoring of the resource and energy intensities of world economies, further fuelled by economic modelling and forecasts of future trends, tends to produce a somewhat depressing picture. One can sometimes glimpse the steadying impact of improvements in technological or market efficiency (Romm and Rosenfeld 2000), but projections of future per capita demand for energy generally point ever upwards.

EXCERPT #KEPA92 p. 19
  Although purportedly indicating patterns of consumption, such images are uninformative with respect to the specifics of how peoples' expectations and practices change. As indicated above, increasing demand is a foregone conclusion and in this style of economic/environmental analysis, people, in so far as they feature at all, do so as the aggregate consumers of socially anonymous resources.

EXCERPT #YH9BPZ p. 19
  Even so, plotting future trends in the countries of the North and the South is a contentious matter and one that highlights the political significance of consumption in general and of environmentally significant consumption in particular. In response, technically minded policy analysts have taken advantage of the apparent neutrality of economic and environmental modelling. Some have sought to demonstrate the long-term sustainability of a world in which demand is 'allowed' to increase to levels currently obtaining in western Europe, providing the USA scales back to that level too. Other assessments identify the need to reduce the material intensity of consumption and production by factors of four, or ten or twenty. Such assessments have prompted further, similarly intense, discussion about how the dials of demand might be returned through policy initiatives or technological fixes (Giovannini and Baranzini 1998; von Weizsäcker, Lovins and Lovins 1997). Exemplifying this approach, Schmidt-Bleek, founder of the 'Factor 10 institute' claims that 'Within one generation, nations can achieve a ten-fold increase in the efficiency with which they use energy, resources, and other materials', and advises industry and government on how this might be done (Factor 10 Club 1997). Exercises of this kind are immensely influential not, or not only, for the results they produce but for the questions they cast and the shadows these throw.

EXCERPT #4WZH6D p. 19
  By definition, forecasts and projections make assumptions about the extent and character of future consumption. Also by definition, proposed policy

EXCERPT #U4KW33 p. 19

EXCERPT #T2H9U2 p. 20

EXCERPT #AK48CK p. 20
  responses imply that projected trends can be changed and modified. In this they carry with them an understanding of basic 'needs' and variable 'wants' and of standards of living that might be compatible with a sustainable future. But which elements of anticipated demand should be taken as read, which are negotiable, by whom, and on what basis? Like it or not, environmental models are shot through with questions of inequality, social justice, entitlements, responsibilities for future generations and visions of the good society. Yet the purpose and process of their production tends to disguise this point with the result that the social conditions and circumstances in which needs are defined slips from view. One ironic consequence is that much – although certainly not all – environmental research, policy and academic comment sidesteps explicit engagement with its own social and political assumptions. Despite and in fact precisely because of its environmental focus, fundamental issues about the specification of demand fall (or are pushed) beyond the bounds of normal policy debate.

EXCERPT #PVHLMT p. 20
  Given the importance of energy and other natural resources, research and policy has focused on their consumption rather than on consumption in general. Accounting tools used to assess the 'ecological footprints' of regions or commodities, to calculate the weight of the 'ecological rucksack' attached to specific lifestyles, or, less commonly, to evaluate the impact of entire ways of life celebrate this resource-based focus (Wackernagel and Rees 1995) as do technical exercises in modelling household 'metabolism' (Noorman and Uiterkamp 1998). Having distinguished between the resources currently used and those potentially required to deliver the same standard of living, it is possible – and politically sensible – to promote 'green' ways of life not substantially different from those we have come to expect, but less damaging in how they are achieved and sustained. Initiatives designed to increase the efficiency with which existing services are provided take no account of how standards of living have been established or what they are.

EXCERPT #Y55C8A p. 20
  While environmental impact can be added to the list of evils associated with consumer culture, it is just as easily incorporated into that culture itself. A common strategy, and one that again ducks the question of how needs are defined in modern societies, is to commodify the environment. This takes many forms ranging from trade in carbon emissions permits to the labelling of green products. By imbuing ordinary things and practices with environmental significance, policy makers encourage consumers to make 'the environment' their preferred brand as part of a broader strategy of ecologically modernizing their lives (Spaargaren 1997). Adopting similar methods but for commercial purposes, manufacturers use green credentials in pursuit of higher sales, product differentiation and more precise niche marketing.

EXCERPT #EPNST5 p. 20

EXCERPT #3897LX p. 21

EXCERPT #GFFGVT p. 21
  In keeping with this approach, research into the relationship between environmental commitments, beliefs, actions and lifestyles sustains and reinforces a model of isolated individuals whose variously green identities are expressed through a precisely calibrated and increasingly extensive palate of green consumer choice (Hincliffe 1996; Stern et al. 1997; Moisander 2000; Hobson 2001; Zavestoski 2001). Grounded in the belief that better information will allow consumers to make 'better' decisions, labelling and standard-setting represent important planks of national and international policy. Such initiatives have the dual purpose of stimulating interest in the environment and of offering a ready-made channel for its expression through the purchase of commodities like high-efficiency freezers, ecological washing powder, green electricity and more. Caught within this paradigm, studies showing that generalized environmental concerns do not simply translate into practice have inspired further programmes of research designed to spot intervening factors that complicate and confound the translation of belief into action.

EXCERPT #FP6FJU p. 21
  One might of course wonder, as Don Slater does, 'whether "consumer choice" is the best way for a society to go about defining, let alone filling, its basic needs' (Slater 1997: 136), or for that matter responding to its environmental crises. After all, a green freezer is still a freezer and although advocates of voluntary simplicity might worry about whether to use one at all, studies like those reported in Green Households (Noorman and Uiterkamp 1998) take the preservation of current practice – including reliance on frozen food – pretty much for granted. Schor (1999) has called for a debate about the 'quality of life and the quantity of stuff' but for the most part environmental policy makers have been unwilling to consider the social construction of routinized needs and wants. They have instead confined themselves to the limited but still demanding task of jogging consumers into thinking about the efficiency with which their needs are met. In keeping with this approach, the OECD has produced a number of reports on sustainable consumption detailing strategies policy makers might adopt in guiding consumer choice in more sustainable directions. As the title of one such study – 'Information and Consumer Decision-Making for Sustainable Consumption' – indicates, the aim is to help consumers 'see' the environment in what they do, and see if there are other more efficient ways of achieving the same result. All else has the negative connotation of 'cutting back' and smacks of government restraint on citizen-consumers' choice.

EXCERPT #W3CN38 p. 21
  Sharing these policy ambitions, but offering a solid critique of the simplistic, individualistic and 'decisionistic' paradigms that dominate, Gert Spaargaren recognizes that many environmentally relevant 'choices' do not appear as such. Buried in the realm of routine and what Giddens (1984) terms practical consciousness, Spaargaren notes that water consumption only penetrates the plane of discursive consciousness when it comes out brown, or in the wrong place,

EXCERPT #BTG3WD p. 21

EXCERPT #4YWFSB p. 22

EXCERPT #RDFCQF p. 22
  or when the utility bill arrives. For Spaargaren, an environmentalist himself, such moments of deroutinization are critical because they enable people to examine and assess their habits from a green perspective (Spaargaren 1997: 28). Borrowing Giddens's ideas regarding the duality of agency and structure, Spaargaren makes the point that citizen-consumers are not just shoppers. They are also implicated in the production and reproduction of structural constraints and opportunities such as those afforded by public utilities and household infrastructures. Though initiated through cycles of deroutinization and reroutinization, he argues that the ecological modernization of domestic practice is neither 'actor driven or system-imposed' but is both at the same time. Convinced that a process of environmentally inspired modernization is underway, Spaargaren concludes that consumers' commitments 'will profoundly affect and alter the organization of domestic consumption as well as the interrelations between households and socio-material-collective systems ' (Spaargaren 1997: 30). But will such a move also redefine what people expect by way of comfort, cleanliness and convenience? Not necessarily, and not unless environmental considerations prove weighty enough to displace contemporary understandings of what everyday life should be like.

EXCERPT #S6ZMLD p. 22
  Taking an altogether more robust approach to this subject, Michael Redclift (1996) situates his analysis of environment and consumption in the context of an inter-dependent global economy organized around specific packages of commitment and belief. In his terms, the upward paths of predicted energy demand reflect, and are a consequence of, the social values attached to the production and consumption of energy and resource intensive commodities (Redclift 1996: 40).

EXCERPT #YUDMEW p. 22
  Redclift suggests that in the normal run of environmental discourse, and especially the discourse of environmental management, goals like those of achieving a higher standard of living are accorded almost existential status. More than that, ' the underlying social commitments which drive our consumption, and contribute to waste, are afforded value by being naturalised ' (Redclift 1996: 146). Again the point is that the very process of environmental analysis, debate and modelling, including that concerned with green consumption and ecological modernization, contributes to – and takes for granted – ways of life and suites of values that are at the heart of the environmental problem itself. In concluding that ' we will not be able to undo, through environmental management, what we have done through naturalising our consumption ' (Redclift 1996: 148), Redclift turns back to the dynamics of convention, commitment and consumption.

EXCERPT #7K49NF p. 22
  This is an unusual and radical move. As indicated above, discussions of environmentally significant consumption typically focus on resources rather

EXCERPT #CTG49P p. 22

EXCERPT #Z3VKEZ p. 23

EXCERPT #86XDSE p. 23
  than on the services these make possible, they highlight the promotion of environmental awareness and concentrate on excess and restraint at the level of individual consumer (or citizen-consumer) choice. This politically explicable emphasis overshadows prior questions about the framing and formulation of 'normal' practice. Just as important, it misses the point that much consumption is customary, governed by collective norms and undertaken in a world of things and sociotechnical systems that have stabilizing effects on routines and habits. As indicated above, more sophisticated accounts do take note of how choices are structured, but in concentrating on resources and efficiencies rather than expectations and conventions, environmentalists have largely failed to notice or really engage with critical developments in ordinary consumption.

EXCERPT #8N9SPS p. 23
  The missing agenda identified by Redclift brings a trail of questions in its wake: how do practices, expectations and ways of life become naturalized? What energizes processes of escalation, standardization, differentiation and development? In addition, how do models, ideologies, cultures and ways of life spill over from one country to another: what are the long-term environmental implications of Westernization, modernization and Americanization, and how are these tendencies modified and mediated by local traditions, habits, meanings and modes of appropriation?

EXCERPT #26D2G5 p. 23
  To address these questions head on it is necessary to abandon the resource-based focus of environmental enquiry. As Wilhite and Lutzenhiser (1998) have argued, people do not consume energy. In real life they consume 'cultural energy services' , in other words, culturally meaningful services that happen to depend on a supply of gas, oil, or electricity. Amongst others, these include services like those of comfort and cleanliness. It is therefore necessary to consider not just the more-or-less green means by which expectations are met, but what those expectations actually are. From this point of view, studies of eco-villagers or investigations into the beliefs and actions of self-confessed environmentalists represent something of a distraction. What counts is the big, and in some cases, global swing of ordinary, routinized and taken-for-granted practice. This implies an up ending of the social environmental research agenda, as conventionally formulated. Only by setting 'the environment' aside as the main focus of attention will it be possible to follow and analyse processes underpinning the normalization of consumption and the escalation of demand.

EXCERPT #JXKUBV p. 23
  This is the strategy I propose to take. As already observed, questions about how new practices become normal touch upon familiar themes within the sociology and anthropology of consumption and technology and there is much to work with. In the next section I highlight a selection of potentially useful ideas regarding the escalation of consumption and the direction of socio-technical change.

EXCERPT #YHAEA9 p. 23

EXCERPT #E9V9UC p. 24

DOCUMENT #8J3FXD
Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience: The Social Organization of Normality

SECTION #J2KR9A Reconfiguring Practice

EXCERPT #EQREVD p. 28
  Domestic consumption of energy and water depends on the introduction of new consumer durables, on how such devices and resources are used and on the services they provide. For the most part, the sociology of consumption has concentrated on moments of acquisition rather than the consequent adjustment of what people do. So how does the stuff and substance of consumption relate to the ordering of everyday life and to concepts of normal and proper practice? Again a mixing of traditions is fruitful.

EXCERPT #CZF96H p. 28

EXCERPT #MXBLD5 p. 29

EXCERPT #R4MQXX p. 29
  Less concerned with the engines of macro-economic change than with the co-evolution of the 'hybrid' objects with which we surround ourselves, authors like Akrich (1992), Latour (1992) and Bijker (1997) have sought to understand the mutual constitution of technologies and their consumers and users. The resulting repertoire of concepts promises to be of value in thinking about the escalation and standardization of comfort and cleanliness. The suggestion that technical objects 'define a framework of action together with the actors and the space in which they are supposed to act' (Akrich 1992: 208), has given rise to further discussion of processes like those of 'inscription', in which designers embed visions of future users in the things they make, and of 'de-scription' in which users react to those inscriptions. Work in this tradition prompts us to enquire how taken-for-granted but environmentally problematic practices are sustained and given form and shape by household infrastructures and familiar domestic technologies.

EXCERPT #GGSD32 p. 29
  In an article explicitly concerned with sustainable design, Jelsma (1999) considers the forms of 'green' behaviour built into things like dishwashers, low flow showerheads and water efficient toilet cisterns. He asks how such devices script and thereby enforce an environmental morality upon their unsuspecting users. Can environmental consumption be 'hardwired' into the home? Answers are complicated not least because some technological scripts are more 'open' or 'resistable' than others, because scripts are, in any event, de-scribed in context, and because stories of failure – in which technologies are used in ways other than those intended – abound. For now, the notion of environmental scripting is useful in that it shows how technologies might stabilize or generate new practices. The idea of scripting does not, in itself, reveal much about the extent or direction of change or about how specific technologies and practices relate to more encompassing complexes of meaning, expectation and understanding. In other words, there is still something of a gap between detailed analyses of individual devices and efforts to understand the co-evolution of inter-dependent suites or complexes of technology and convention.

EXCERPT #V3SX5E p. 29
  In so far as technical systems and devices do configure their users (Woolgar 1991) it is important, and in social-environmental terms, vital, to think about their reach and the scope of their effect. The global diffusion of standardized appliances brings with it the prospect of correspondingly standardized routines and practices. Or at least it would do so if it were not for the fact that technologies are rarely appropriated wholesale, or in pure form. Silverstone, Hirsch and Morley (1992) describe the process of appropriation as an active exercise in 'domestication'. As they explain, the politics of technology has as much to do with the locally specific dynamics of its incorporation, customization and conversion as with the conditions of design and production. Even so, and perhaps especially with regard to comfort and cleanliness, it is relevant to take

EXCERPT #2PJSQJ p. 29

EXCERPT #9747S9 p. 30

EXCERPT #ELW82E p. 30
  note of global patterns of import and export: of where systems and ideas originate, of what messages they carry with them and of how these are constructed and reconstructed through local processes of appropriation. In other words, there is a geography of sociotechnical change to take account of too.

EXCERPT #C8PYYM p. 30
  As well as scripting their users' actions, devices like washing machines and freezers inhabit a world of material culture: a world in which they, and the practices they engender, act as carriers and generators of meaning (Meintjes 2001). It is possible, and in fact quite usual, to consider the 'social life of things' (Appadurai 1986) and the symbolic aspects of their design, acquisition and use without reference to the sociotechnical scripting described above. But in thinking about how ordinary practices change, it is important to notice both aspects and to consider the relation between the two.

EXCERPT #8RSQ34 p. 30
  The reconfiguration of meaning is evidently important when the transformation of practice is not strongly related to technological development. Somewhat different concepts are therefore required to make sense of situations in which already familiar tools and infrastructures are put to different use or in which the social significance of practice is redefined. During the course of its long career, the bath has for instance featured as a symbol of social status, an instrument in the war against germs and a site of luxuriating relaxation. The material culture of the bathroom arguably represents a fluid but none the less concrete expression of societal value systems. Just as the meaning of the artifact has been rewritten over time, so has the practice and 'purpose' of bathing. Rationales and legitimizing discourses move in ways that are often difficult to follow and that frequently invoke complicated chains of scientific, moral and social judgement. Yet these shifting contexts of social and cultural positioning are of immediate consequence for what people do and for how they understand and make sense of their actions. In capturing these aspects of changing practice it will be necessary to borrow ideas and approaches from cultural studies, as well as from history and anthropology.

EXCERPT #394VTY p. 30
  Having identified some of the theoretical ingredients with which the book works I now explain how these materials are deployed and how the chapters are organized.

DOCUMENT #8J3FXD
Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience: The Social Organization of Normality

SECTION #4EDKD9 Resetting the Agenda: Consumption, Everyday Life and Sustainability

EXCERPT #W6RQLJ p. 212
  In the first chapter, I took issue with environmentalists' tendency to focus on consumers' choices and to worry about the relationship between green commitments and the adoption of more sustainable products and practices. In response, I made the case for studying the reformulation of collective conventions, ordinary routines and routinely invisible habits. These last few paragraphs set out the implications of such an approach for environmental research and for the sociology of consumption and technology.

EXCERPT #X2F8MG p. 212
  My central claim is that relevant patterns of consumption follow from efforts to provide and sustain what people take to be normal services like those of comfort and cleanliness. As I use the term, 'service' encompasses and holds together complexes of sociotechnical arrangements. It stands for the bunching of imperatives and injunctions that inform senses of what simply has to be done in order to be appropriately clean or comfortable. What this means, and how services are defined and reproduced, depends partly on the co-evolution but also on the integration and co-ordination of suites of technologies and practices and their positioning in the flow of everyday life. There are, I suggest, different modes and forms of integration and these, in turn, relate to the operation of different systems of symbolic coherence, social differentiation and socio-technical interdependence. Completing the loop, and as illustrated in Chapter 10, methods and forms of integration are themselves relevant for the specification of service and for the development and appropriation of new technologies and new ways of doing things.

EXCERPT #P84YJB p. 212
  This line of reasoning resets a number of research agendas. The proposition that levels of energy and water consumption are a consequence of the way we define and achieve services suggests that effort should focus on what it means to be clean and comfortable. These are central issues, but ones that rarely figure on environmental research agendas. It is by now obvious that meanings of comfort and cleanliness do not represent free-floating expressions of personal preference. Again this implies a refocusing of enquiry. The vast majority of environmentally significant consumption is just not a matter of individual choice, green or otherwise. It is instead bound up with, and constitutive of, irredeemably social practices 'governed by norms like respectability, appro-

EXCERPT #VK6XK5 p. 212

EXCERPT #Q26DZE p. 213

EXCERPT #ACB4Y9 p. 213
  priateness, competence and excellence' (Harvey et al. 2001). In understanding how patterns of consumption change and why demand for energy and water is increasing it is necessary to understand the collective dynamics of normalization. How do new ways of life, new concepts of service, take root?

EXCERPT #QY55AW p. 213
  This means thinking about consumption in a different light. Theories of innovation and acquisition are germane, yet the arguably more important issue – but one that is much less well understood – is how commodities, products and services are used through and in the course of sustaining and reproducing conventions of normal practice. Just as the literature on consumption tends to focus on the acquisition of objects, so scholars of science and technology have had more to say about innovation and diffusion than the subsequent uses of things in everyday life. Where efforts have been made in this direction, notably through work on scripting and co-evolution, the tendency has been to track the development of specific devices, showing how they fit into an existing sociotechnical complex, but saying less about how more encompassing concepts of service evolve. In short, modes of integration have yet to get the attention they deserve.

EXCERPT #9E9T22 p. 213
  A revised agenda of consumption, everyday life and sustainability needs to encompass all these issues, concentrating on the processes through which habits are acquired and jettisoned, and on the relation between consumption and convention, technology and practice. Looking ahead, what people take to be normal is immensely malleable. There are no fixed measures of comfort and cleanliness and it is perfectly possible that future concepts will be less resource intensive than those of today. The real environmental risk is not that services will be redefined (this happens all the time), but that there will be sweeping, cross cultural convergence in what people take to be normal ways of life, and a consequent locking in of demand for the resources on which these ways depend. This brings me to a practical conclusion. Rather than promoting energy and resource-efficient versions of products and technologies that inadvertently sustain unsustainable concepts of service, environmentalists should argue for social and cultural diversity. They should do all that can be done to engender multiple meanings of comfort, diverse conventions of cleanliness and forms of social order less reliant on individual modes of co-ordination.

EXCERPT #AEMTTZ p. 213

EXCERPT #EW5F99 p. 214
  This page intentionally left blank

### 17. Tool result: search_text

Exact matches

1. Source: Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience: The Social Organization of Normality (#8J3FXD), Elizabeth Shove, p. 15
  Context:
    #5YMLUS Acknowledgements
      #XZN3NQ Consumption, Everyday Life and Sustainability
  Matching excerpt #4X242T:
      To outsiders, sociology has a reputation for dealing with the everyday and the ordinary. This is often cast as a thinly veiled criticism: who needs a whole discipline to understand what people do as a matter of course? In the context of this book, such a reputation represents a challenge and an ideal to live up to. Turning the spotlight back on generally invisible forms of practice, its purpose is to investigate the constitution of normality and the dynamics of habit and routine.

2. Source: Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience: The Social Organization of Normality (#8J3FXD), Elizabeth Shove, p. 16
  Context:
    #5YMLUS Acknowledgements
      #XZN3NQ Consumption, Everyday Life and Sustainability
  Matching excerpt #ZSZ8X3:
      This is a question that runs throughout the book. Along the way, it takes specific forms. How might we conceptualize inconspicuous consumption as opposed to that which is overtly wrapped up with questions of style, status and symbolic significance? Can existing theories and analyses of things, objects and material cultures be bent and adapted to take account of the intangible, immaterial and invisible services they make possible? What does the co-evolution of technology and practice really mean for you and me and for the way we organize our lives? With what means might we explain the creep of convention and the escalation and standardization of conditions and circumstances that people take for granted? This is not to suggest that the social organization of normality is in some way distinctive, or that the processes involved are not also at play in other domains. Rather, the point is to discover what new theoretical challenges the study of a handful of ordinary practices might generate for a discipline that has, on balance, and perhaps to its cost, drifted from the systematic scrutiny of the mundane.

3. Source: Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience: The Social Organization of Normality (#8J3FXD), Elizabeth Shove, p. 212
  Context:
    #5YMLUS Acknowledgements
      #4EDKD9 Resetting the Agenda: Consumption, Everyday Life and Sustainability
  Matching excerpt #W6RQLJ:
      In the first chapter, I took issue with environmentalists' tendency to focus on consumers' choices and to worry about the relationship between green commitments and the adoption of more sustainable products and practices. In response, I made the case for studying the reformulation of collective conventions, ordinary routines and routinely invisible habits. These last few paragraphs set out the implications of such an approach for environmental research and for the sociology of consumption and technology.

4. Source: Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience: The Social Organization of Normality (#8J3FXD), Elizabeth Shove, p. 18
  Context:
    #5YMLUS Acknowledgements
      #UU4GH4 Natural Resources and Consumer Choices
  Matching excerpt #FMJC53:
      For all the effort invested in analysing consumer culture and consumer society, and despite the view that these concepts are 'central to unlocking some of the mysteries of contemporary societies' (Shove and Warde 2001: 231), interest in energy and water consumption has been largely confined to the environmental field. One somewhat paradoxical consequence is that consumer practices relating to routine forms of domestic reproduction, to washing, drying, cleaning, heating, lighting, cooling and so on, are as likely to have been studied by environmentalists or by feminists as by those for whom consumption is core business.

5. Source: Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience: The Social Organization of Normality (#8J3FXD), Elizabeth Shove, p. 23
  Context:
    #5YMLUS Acknowledgements
      #UU4GH4 Natural Resources and Consumer Choices
  Matching excerpt #26D2G5:
      To address these questions head on it is necessary to abandon the resource-based focus of environmental enquiry. As Wilhite and Lutzenhiser (1998) have argued, people do not consume energy. In real life they consume 'cultural energy services' , in other words, culturally meaningful services that happen to depend on a supply of gas, oil, or electricity. Amongst others, these include services like those of comfort and cleanliness. It is therefore necessary to consider not just the more-or-less green means by which expectations are met, but what those expectations actually are. From this point of view, studies of eco-villagers or investigations into the beliefs and actions of self-confessed environmentalists represent something of a distraction. What counts is the big, and in some cases, global swing of ordinary, routinized and taken-for-granted practice. This implies an up ending of the social environmental research agenda, as conventionally formulated. Only by setting 'the environment' aside as the main focus of attention will it be possible to follow and analyse processes underpinning the normalization of consumption and the escalation of demand.

6. Source: Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience: The Social Organization of Normality (#8J3FXD), Elizabeth Shove, p. 18
  Context:
    #5YMLUS Acknowledgements
      #XZN3NQ Consumption, Everyday Life and Sustainability
  Matching excerpt #ZPBQYU:
      This book is therefore driven by three ambitions. One is to revisit theories of consumption, technology and social change through an analysis of ordinarily invisible practices. A second is to work out how and why conventions of comfort and cleanliness are on the move. The third is to shift the focus of social environmental research and policy so as to comprehend the collective restructuring of expectation and habit. This involves tracking what have become routinized and inconspicuous practices. It means thinking again about the definition and appropriation of services , rather than discrete objects, and trying to understand both the convergence and divergence of everyday practice . This is not an innocent exercise. In focusing on comfort and cleanliness and on the dynamics of co-evolution and integration, the book offers and illustrates a different way of cutting the cake for environmental policy as for social theory.

7. Source: Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience: The Social Organization of Normality (#8J3FXD), Elizabeth Shove, p. 34
  Context:
    #5YMLUS Acknowledgements
      #ENSA3E Method and Approach
  Matching excerpt #RSPLNK:
      This book appropriates and amalgamates concepts from the sociology of consumption and technology in the cause of better understanding the organizing frameworks of everyday life and how they evolve. The resulting mixture does not generate one all-encompassing theoretical model but it does produce a different way of thinking about the transformation of ordinary routines and habits. As the last chapter, 'Ratchets, pinwheels, cogs and spirals' explains, the effect is to focus attention on the formation of regimes and concepts of service, on how meanings, practices and technologies hold together and how integrative processes themselves influence the rate and direction of change.

8. Source: Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience: The Social Organization of Normality (#8J3FXD), Elizabeth Shove, p. 23
  Context:
    #5YMLUS Acknowledgements
      #UU4GH4 Natural Resources and Consumer Choices
  Matching excerpt #86XDSE:
      than on the services these make possible, they highlight the promotion of environmental awareness and concentrate on excess and restraint at the level of individual consumer (or citizen-consumer) choice. This politically explicable emphasis overshadows prior questions about the framing and formulation of 'normal' practice. Just as important, it misses the point that much consumption is customary, governed by collective norms and undertaken in a world of things and sociotechnical systems that have stabilizing effects on routines and habits. As indicated above, more sophisticated accounts do take note of how choices are structured, but in concentrating on resources and efficiencies rather than expectations and conventions, environmentalists have largely failed to notice or really engage with critical developments in ordinary consumption.

Approximate matches

1. Source: Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience: The Social Organization of Normality (#8J3FXD), Elizabeth Shove, p. 23
  Context:
    #5YMLUS Acknowledgements
      #UU4GH4 Natural Resources and Consumer Choices
  Score: 0.688
  Related excerpt #86XDSE:
      than on the services these make possible, they highlight the promotion of environmental awareness and concentrate on excess and restraint at the level of individual consumer (or citizen-consumer) choice. This politically explicable emphasis overshadows prior questions about the framing and formulation of 'normal' practice. Just as important, it misses the point that much consumption is customary, governed by collective norms and undertaken in a world of things and sociotechnical systems that have stabilizing effects on routines and habits. As indicated above, more sophisticated accounts do take note of how choices are structured, but in concentrating on resources and efficiencies rather than expectations and conventions, environmentalists have largely failed to notice or really engage with critical developments in ordinary consumption.

2. Source: Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience: The Social Organization of Normality (#8J3FXD), Elizabeth Shove, p. 213
  Context:
    #5YMLUS Acknowledgements
      #4EDKD9 Resetting the Agenda: Consumption, Everyday Life and Sustainability
  Score: 0.608
  Related excerpt #9E9T22:
      A revised agenda of consumption, everyday life and sustainability needs to encompass all these issues, concentrating on the processes through which habits are acquired and jettisoned, and on the relation between consumption and convention, technology and practice. Looking ahead, what people take to be normal is immensely malleable. There are no fixed measures of comfort and cleanliness and it is perfectly possible that future concepts will be less resource intensive than those of today. The real environmental risk is not that services will be redefined (this happens all the time), but that there will be sweeping, cross cultural convergence in what people take to be normal ways of life, and a consequent locking in of demand for the resources on which these ways depend. This brings me to a practical conclusion. Rather than promoting energy and resource-efficient versions of products and technologies that inadvertently sustain unsustainable concepts of service, environmentalists should argue for social and cultural diversity. They should do all that can be done to engender multiple meanings of comfort, diverse conventions of cleanliness and forms of social order less reliant on individual modes of co-ordination.

3. Source: Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience: The Social Organization of Normality (#8J3FXD), Elizabeth Shove, p. 22
  Context:
    #5YMLUS Acknowledgements
      #UU4GH4 Natural Resources and Consumer Choices
  Score: 0.591
  Related excerpt #RDFCQF:
      or when the utility bill arrives. For Spaargaren, an environmentalist himself, such moments of deroutinization are critical because they enable people to examine and assess their habits from a green perspective (Spaargaren 1997: 28). Borrowing Giddens's ideas regarding the duality of agency and structure, Spaargaren makes the point that citizen-consumers are not just shoppers. They are also implicated in the production and reproduction of structural constraints and opportunities such as those afforded by public utilities and household infrastructures. Though initiated through cycles of deroutinization and reroutinization, he argues that the ecological modernization of domestic practice is neither 'actor driven or system-imposed' but is both at the same time. Convinced that a process of environmentally inspired modernization is underway, Spaargaren concludes that consumers' commitments 'will profoundly affect and alter the organization of domestic consumption as well as the interrelations between households and socio-material-collective systems ' (Spaargaren 1997: 30). But will such a move also redefine what people expect by way of comfort, cleanliness and convenience? Not necessarily, and not unless environmental considerations prove weighty enough to displace contemporary understandings of what everyday life should be like.

4. Source: Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience: The Social Organization of Normality (#8J3FXD), Elizabeth Shove, p. 16
  Context:
    #5YMLUS Acknowledgements
      #XZN3NQ Consumption, Everyday Life and Sustainability
  Score: 0.579
  Related excerpt #ZSZ8X3:
      This is a question that runs throughout the book. Along the way, it takes specific forms. How might we conceptualize inconspicuous consumption as opposed to that which is overtly wrapped up with questions of style, status and symbolic significance? Can existing theories and analyses of things, objects and material cultures be bent and adapted to take account of the intangible, immaterial and invisible services they make possible? What does the co-evolution of technology and practice really mean for you and me and for the way we organize our lives? With what means might we explain the creep of convention and the escalation and standardization of conditions and circumstances that people take for granted? This is not to suggest that the social organization of normality is in some way distinctive, or that the processes involved are not also at play in other domains. Rather, the point is to discover what new theoretical challenges the study of a handful of ordinary practices might generate for a discipline that has, on balance, and perhaps to its cost, drifted from the systematic scrutiny of the mundane.

5. Source: Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience: The Social Organization of Normality (#8J3FXD), Elizabeth Shove, p. 22
  Context:
    #5YMLUS Acknowledgements
      #UU4GH4 Natural Resources and Consumer Choices
  Score: 0.579
  Related excerpt #YUDMEW:
      Redclift suggests that in the normal run of environmental discourse, and especially the discourse of environmental management, goals like those of achieving a higher standard of living are accorded almost existential status. More than that, ' the underlying social commitments which drive our consumption, and contribute to waste, are afforded value by being naturalised ' (Redclift 1996: 146). Again the point is that the very process of environmental analysis, debate and modelling, including that concerned with green consumption and ecological modernization, contributes to – and takes for granted – ways of life and suites of values that are at the heart of the environmental problem itself. In concluding that ' we will not be able to undo, through environmental management, what we have done through naturalising our consumption ' (Redclift 1996: 148), Redclift turns back to the dynamics of convention, commitment and consumption.

6. Source: Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience: The Social Organization of Normality (#8J3FXD), Elizabeth Shove, p. 23
  Context:
    #5YMLUS Acknowledgements
      #UU4GH4 Natural Resources and Consumer Choices
  Score: 0.578
  Related excerpt #26D2G5:
      To address these questions head on it is necessary to abandon the resource-based focus of environmental enquiry. As Wilhite and Lutzenhiser (1998) have argued, people do not consume energy. In real life they consume 'cultural energy services' , in other words, culturally meaningful services that happen to depend on a supply of gas, oil, or electricity. Amongst others, these include services like those of comfort and cleanliness. It is therefore necessary to consider not just the more-or-less green means by which expectations are met, but what those expectations actually are. From this point of view, studies of eco-villagers or investigations into the beliefs and actions of self-confessed environmentalists represent something of a distraction. What counts is the big, and in some cases, global swing of ordinary, routinized and taken-for-granted practice. This implies an up ending of the social environmental research agenda, as conventionally formulated. Only by setting 'the environment' aside as the main focus of attention will it be possible to follow and analyse processes underpinning the normalization of consumption and the escalation of demand.

7. Source: Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience: The Social Organization of Normality (#8J3FXD), Elizabeth Shove, p. 18
  Context:
    #5YMLUS Acknowledgements
      #XZN3NQ Consumption, Everyday Life and Sustainability
  Score: 0.576
  Related excerpt #EUXVWD:
      choice, tend to focus on the consumption of energy, water and other natural resources, but not on the services and experiences they make possible. By focusing so exclusively on individual action, such enquiries miss the bigger picture, failing to detect cultural and generational shifts of expectation and practice. In response, and in contrast, I take a different tack: starting rather than ending with a discussion of the sociotechnical transformation of collective conventions and thereby generating a more thoroughly social understanding of environmentally significant change.

8. Source: Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience: The Social Organization of Normality (#8J3FXD), Elizabeth Shove, p. 212
  Context:
    #5YMLUS Acknowledgements
      #4EDKD9 Resetting the Agenda: Consumption, Everyday Life and Sustainability
  Score: 0.575
  Related excerpt #W6RQLJ:
      In the first chapter, I took issue with environmentalists' tendency to focus on consumers' choices and to worry about the relationship between green commitments and the adoption of more sustainable products and practices. In response, I made the case for studying the reformulation of collective conventions, ordinary routines and routinely invisible habits. These last few paragraphs set out the implications of such an approach for environmental research and for the sociology of consumption and technology.

### 18. Tool result: search_text

Exact matches

1. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange
  Context:
    #ZF9EYF Introduction
  Matching paragraph #BTDD45:
      Hobson et al. (2021) argue that research into circular economy consumption work must “move beyond the domestic sphere and space of the household” to examine consumption-based practices in other spaces, including Repair Cafés and community-based circular economy models, whether or not these are explicitly labelled as such. Brīvbode is such a space: a semi-public site where the ordinarily private labour of divestment and acquisition becomes visible and socially acknowledged, and where volunteer labour — sorting, curating, maintaining quality standards, and managing social dynamics — sustains the infrastructure through which things continue to circulate.

2. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange
  Context:
    #L759F3 Circulation, Practice, and Consumption Work: A Theoretical Framework
      #ULSUAX Conclusion
  Matching paragraph #7RYKMT:
      This thesis brings together practice-theoretical perspectives on sustainable consumption and consumption work for a study of non-domestic site of goods circulation within a context of non-monetary exchange. Brīvbode is a site where the ordinarily private and dispersed practices of domestic material life become visible. The continued existence of the swapshop – sustained through regular volunteer labour, participant labour, and a relatively stable social and material infrastructure – can be read as evidence of the demand that household goods circulation generates: a demand for routes of divestment that, while taking some degree of effort, are socially acknowledged.

3. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange
  Context:
    #9XAKTW Keeping Things Moving: Brīvbode as a Practice of Circulation
      #2JEZWG Incoming Flow: Divestment From Home
  Matching paragraph #MS53CN:
      The supply arriving in Brīvbode is shaped by these contested meanings – participant competencies of evaluating items as appropriate and the rhythms of domestic life. As such it is often unpredictable.

4. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange
  Context:
    #LYTS7L Research methodology: A Practice  Freecycle
  Matching paragraph #NUPTUM:
      Fieldwork gives access to practices as they are performed – the sorting, the finds, the exchanges and hesitations; interviews give access to how participants make sense of those performances – the meanings they find in their doing, the competencies they develop; together they allow claims about practices as entities. The chapter describes the fieldwork with participant observation carried out in Brīvbode, the interviews conducted with volunteers and visitors and the analytical process through which the empirical material was interpreted.

5. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange
  Context:
    #ZF9EYF Introduction
  Matching paragraph #NSNSQ3:
      How is freecycling organised and sustained in Brīvbode as a non-monetary, non-domestic site – what materials, meanings and competencies constitute it and how do they interact?

6. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange
  Context:
    #LYTS7L Research methodology: A Practice  Freecycle
      #GU86TB Interviews
  Matching paragraph #D2HJZP:
      The interview guide was organized around themes: participants' practices of acquisition and divestment, their relationship to the objects they brought and took, and the social and material dimensions of their participation in Brīvbode. While the guide included some questions on attitudes and motivations, most were designed to elicit accounts of what people actually do – how they choose what to bring, what routes objects take through their households, who does the work of sorting and transporting, and what the process of letting go feels like. Following the principles of practice-theoretical methods, the questions sought to access the practical, embodied, and often taken-for-granted dimensions of household goods circulation: the routines, competencies, and emotional labor involved in managing the flow of things. Where questions touched on values and motivations, these were treated not as explanations for behavior but as part of the meanings participants attach to their practices – an element among materials, competencies, and social arrangements in shaping how circulation is organized and reproduced.

7. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange
  Context:
    #82G2QE Holding It Together: Care and Consumption Work in Brīvbode
      #SLFJ9K Priceless Valuation: Sorting, Curation, and Care
  Matching paragraph #A2APRY:
      Across donating, curating, taking, and divesting, valuation in Brīvbode is at once consumption work — the labour of sorting, assessing, and redistributing — and care work, in the form of attention to what specific things will mean for specific people. Without the shorthand of price, both come into the open.

8. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange
  Context:
    #9XAKTW Keeping Things Moving: Brīvbode as a Practice of Circulation
  Matching paragraph #XYAHKP:
      Turning towards the acquisition side, I show how the value and usefulness of Brīvbode is experienced through a plurality of meanings, and how participants negotiate between conceptions of charity and exchange. I also examine how the absence of price reshapes participants’ attachment to objects, and the competencies of letting go that the practice both requires and cultivates. Finally I consider the range of participant orientations towards freecycling as a practice of sustainability.

Approximate matches

1. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange
  Context:
    #ZF9EYF Introduction
      #LAR465 Latvian context and research
  Score: 0.609
  Related paragraph #HZ8D53:
      [Brīvbode focusing on domestic flows]

2. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange
  Context:
    #M9WQLY CONCLUSION
  Score: 0.588
  Related paragraph #GUXEZX:
      While alternative, they simultaneously overlap with some of the meanings present in capitalist consumption –... Brīvbode is at once an answer to a household problem and an arena where people work out possibly alternative relations to things.

3. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange
  Context:
    #ZF9EYF Introduction
  Score: 0.56
  Related paragraph #NSNSQ3:
      How is freecycling organised and sustained in Brīvbode as a non-monetary, non-domestic site – what materials, meanings and competencies constitute it and how do they interact?

4. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange
  Context:
    #82G2QE Holding It Together: Care and Consumption Work in Brīvbode
      #EBTHSE Not the Bin: Modal Labour and the Informal Route
  Score: 0.558
  Related paragraph #QQ9MKA:
      Brīvbode is indirectly embedded in wider textile collection infrastructure, but the chain of work usually connects one household to another. Objects leaving one home pass through the swapshop and arrive in someone else’s home where a new set of consumption work tasks begin – storing, integrating, eventually deciding what to do when the object might no longer be wanted.

5. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange
  Context:
    #9XAKTW Keeping Things Moving: Brīvbode as a Practice of Circulation
      #2JEZWG Incoming Flow: Divestment From Home
  Score: 0.556
  Related paragraph #MS53CN:
      The supply arriving in Brīvbode is shaped by these contested meanings – participant competencies of evaluating items as appropriate and the rhythms of domestic life. As such it is often unpredictable.

6. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange
  Context:
    #9XAKTW Keeping Things Moving: Brīvbode as a Practice of Circulation
      #2JEZWG Incoming Flow: Divestment From Home
  Score: 0.551
  Related paragraph #7Y7J2Z:
      The size of the home is a very constitutive material element for divestment as smaller living spaces generate a more immediate need to move things out in order to fulfill, for example, the ideal of an uncluttered home – this requires both strong competency for managing household material streams and established divestment routes for what must leave. Brīvbode functions as one such route.

7. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange
  Context:
    #9XAKTW Keeping Things Moving: Brīvbode as a Practice of Circulation
      #7Z8WUY Letting Go: Attachment Without Price
  Score: 0.547
  Related paragraph #WABKA8:
      Brīvbode as material infrastructure enabling the practice of letting go. The freeshop does not just receive things; it creates conditions that make divestment possible for people who otherwise could not do it. This is the role of material arrangement in sustaining practice.

8. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange
  Context:
    #82G2QE Holding It Together: Care and Consumption Work in Brīvbode
      #SLFJ9K Priceless Valuation: Sorting, Curation, and Care
  Score: 0.546
  Related paragraph #A2APRY:
      Across donating, curating, taking, and divesting, valuation in Brīvbode is at once consumption work — the labour of sorting, assessing, and redistributing — and care work, in the form of attention to what specific things will mean for specific people. Without the shorthand of price, both come into the open.

### 19. Assistant

Yes — this is a **very strong framing**, and it actually helps unify Chapters 4 and 5 better than “Brīvbode as circulation” alone. I’d keep the core idea, but slightly adjust the practice-theory wording so it is more Shove-compatible.

## 1. The strongest version of the idea

I would phrase it like this:

> Brīvbode can be understood as a site where elements of domestic consumption practices are detached, reclassified, and re-linked into new practices of circulation. Materials physically move from one household practice into another; competences of sorting, evaluating, restraining, and letting go are performed and learned; meanings of waste, generosity, need, thrift, dignity, care, and sustainability are negotiated in the open. What makes Brīvbode ethnographically valuable is that these processes, usually dispersed across homes, markets, wardrobes, bins, and online platforms, are concentrated in one semi-public site.

This keeps your “defection and recruitment” energy but avoids a small conceptual trap: in Shove et al., it is usually **practitioners/carriers** who are recruited or defect, while **elements circulate, migrate, detach, relink, or are integrated**. Shove et al. explicitly talk about practices existing when materials, competences, and meanings are linked, and disintegrating when links are no longer sustained (Shove, Pantzar & Watson 2012, #UG44UW). They also stress that stability is not a finished state but an ongoing accomplishment of repeatedly linking elements together (#8PTVJJ). Brīvbode is basically a theatre of linking. Academic drama, but with moth-eaten pillows.

## 2. “Practice with the lid off” works because it answers Shove 2003

Your phrase works especially well against Shove’s older focus on **inconspicuous, ordinary, routinized practice**. In *Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience*, she argues for turning the spotlight back onto “generally invisible forms of practice” and investigating the constitution of normality and routine (#4X242T). She is interested in the backstage: the “barely detectable gridlines of everyday life” through which ordinary arrangements are actively reproduced (#EW8WKC).

Brīvbode is interesting because it is not exactly ordinary domestic practice, but it **renders ordinary domestic practice observable**. The thesis already says this almost directly: Brīvbode is where “ordinarily private and dispersed practices of domestic material life become visible” (#7RYKMT), and the introduction says it is a semi-public site where private labour of divestment/acquisition becomes visible and socially acknowledged (#BTDD45).

So the move could be:

> Shove’s work asks us to study what is usually inconspicuous. Brīvbode matters because it makes inconspicuous consumption work conspicuous.

That is elegant and defensible.

## 3. What exactly becomes visible?

I’d break the “lid off” claim into three observable processes:

### a) Materials: things literally move, pile up, overflow

Shove et al. note that materials are the only elements that literally move physically, while meanings and competences circulate differently (#Z7DKTH). Brīvbode gives you an almost too perfect empirical case of material movement: bags arrive, things are sorted in the same room, objects are swallowed by new piles, overflow is constant (#SUZYLN, #2TPNCM, #3USBHB). The moment where the ceramic plate disappears under incoming stuff is almost comically good evidence: the site is not a container but an active flow (#3USBHB).

This also connects to Shove and Rinkinen’s circular economy critique: circular economy thinking often isolates objects, but objects only make sense inside systems of provision, use, need, and practice (#8CYMM2, #GYAYXG). Brīvbode does not show “a shirt being reused” in isolation; it shows the entire social-material arrangement that must exist for reuse to happen.

### b) Competences: sorting, valuing, restraining, navigating

The draft already has excellent material here. The competence of sorting women’s clothing is not self-evident; Viesturs has to learn it as a “tree with many branches” (#BCDC5C). Visitors also learn the negative competence of **not taking**, holding a mental model of what they already own and what they need (#EXTCGS). Volunteers develop trained eyes for quality (#76T3WR), and Anna learns to anticipate donor over-optimism before opening a bag (#KWPAYN).

This is exactly where Shove’s “competence” becomes ethnographically visible. Shove et al. define competence broadly as know-how, background knowledge, and the ability to judge appropriate performance (#92MUR9). Brīvbode shows that competence is not just technical skill; it is moral, sensory, social, and gendered.

### c) Meanings: free/not free, charity/exchange, waste/gift, care/burden

The “meanings argued aloud” part is very strong. Shove et al. treat meaning as the social and symbolic significance of participation (#NG66CJ), and they note that meanings travel through association, classification, de-classification and re-classification (#DUUPD6, #3RX274). Brīvbode is full of reclassification: rubbish becomes gift, surplus becomes care, free becomes exchange, charity is refused but sometimes pragmatically tolerated.

Madara is the cleanest example: she explicitly has to reframe “free” as “exchange” so that taking does not feel like stealing (#CUBS5Q, #4HW9DD). The space’s aesthetic disagreements also show meanings being actively negotiated: retail-like emptiness versus abundant plushie chaos are not just display preferences but competing versions of what freecycling should mean (#KMD7AJ).

## 4. The limits of Shove become visible too

This is maybe the most interesting part of your thought. Brīvbode does not only illustrate practice theory; it exposes where a compact element model becomes insufficient.

Shove et al. themselves admit that the materials/competences/meanings scheme says little about “who is involved,” how access is distributed, or how integration transforms elements (#8PTVJJ). That is exactly where your care/gender chapter enters.

The thesis shows that the work of keeping things circulating is not evenly distributed. It is gendered through household management, routing, care networks, and moral obligation: Anna supplies everyone with clothes and shoes; Silvija manages household divestment; men mainly transport sorted bags (#PNGSGT). Some participants become logistics nodes for neighbours, colleagues and family (#3BY9GH). Aiga’s thirty trips show circulation as care that cannot be put down (#Y344XY).

So the theoretical payoff could be:

> Practice theory helps identify how materials, meanings and competences are re-linked in Brīvbode, but the ethnography shows that linking is not neutral. It is labour. It is distributed unevenly. It is sustained through care, gendered responsibility, and moral obligation.

This builds directly on your Chapter 5 conclusion: the absence of price does not produce frictionless circulation, but a different kind of work — gendered, ethically motivated, and absorbed into household routines (#RX9JDU).

## 5. The “semi-public” angle is key

I’d not say Brīvbode is simply public. “Semi-public” is more accurate and analytically richer. It is open enough that sorting, valuation, embarrassment, generosity, and conflict can be observed, but intimate enough that trust, familiarity, and relational judgement matter.

Examples:

- takers are discouraged from taking from the sorting table before things are processed (#X8RDCG);
- food acceptability depends partly on familiarity and trust (#Y7K4KZ);
- medicine is removed quietly rather than through direct confrontation (#7CR75E);
- quality and relationship maintenance pull against each other (#BZ6FJC).

So Brīvbode is not “the market without prices” or “the household outside the home.” It is a hybrid moral-material site where domestic, retail, charitable, activist, and waste-management logics overlap.

## 6. Possible thesis-level formulation

Here is a polished version of your idea that could go into the intro, theory conclusion, or final conclusion:

> In practice-theoretical terms, Brīvbode is a site where elements of domestic consumption are detached, reclassified, and re-linked into practices of circulation. Materials leave households and enter a semi-public infrastructure; competences of sorting, assessing, restraining, curating, and letting go are performed and learned; meanings of waste, generosity, need, dignity, care, thrift, and sustainability are negotiated in action. What makes the swapshop analytically valuable is that these processes are usually dispersed and hidden across households, markets, wardrobes, bins, and online platforms. In Brīvbode, they happen in one room. Sorting takes place in the open, value is argued without price, and competences are shown rather than silently embedded in domestic routine. The swapshop is therefore a practice with the lid off: a site where practice theory’s abstractions become ethnographically observable, but also where their limits become visible. The linking of materials, meanings and competences is not an automatic process; it is labour, and that labour is gendered, relational, morally charged, and sustained through care.

That paragraph could do a lot of work. It links Shove 2012, Shove 2003, circular economy critique, and your empirical chapters.

## 7. One caution

I would avoid saying “elements of consumption defect from one practice” too literally. Better:

- “materials are divested from one practice and recruited into another”
- “elements are detached and re-linked”
- “practitioners are recruited into Brīvbode through the availability of materials, meanings, and competences”
- “Brīvbode captures flows generated elsewhere”

Because in Shove’s vocabulary, **defection/recruitment** usually concerns carriers/practitioners, while **elements circulate** (#EBZCFW, #6H9VRT, #8JX39Z). But the metaphor is productive if slightly disciplined.

Best compact version:

> Brīvbode is not only a place where things circulate; it is a place where the elements that make circulation possible are exposed. Materials move, meanings are reclassified, competences are learned, and the labour of holding these together becomes visible. This is why the swapshop can be read as a practice with the lid off.

### 20. User

this seems interesting to talk about the labor of practice? i assume shove et al themselves are deep into that angle, or? i mean consumption work brings up the work of consumption, does shove focus on the work of practices themselves?

### 21. Assistant tool calls

#### Tool call: `search_text`

```json
{
  "document_id": "5AXAEJ",
  "limit": 10,
  "query": "work labour labor effort integrative work involved who is involved access distributed"
}
```

### 22. Tool result: search_text

Exact matches

1. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 38
  Context:
    #W6VMCW MAKING AND BREAKING LINKS
      #Z73JHW MATERIAL, COMPETENCE AND MEANING
  Matching excerpt #8PTVJJ:
      This basic scheme reveals little about the nature of the linking entailed in keeping a practice together, it tells us nothing about who is involved, how access to relevant elements is distributed or how instances of integration themselves transform and generate new competences, meanings and materialities. However, it does underline the centrality of linkage: if specific configurations are to remain effective, connections between defining elements have to be renewed time and again. This suggests that stability and routinization are not end points of a linear process of normalization. Rather, they should be understood as ongoing accomplishments in which similar elements are repeatedly linked together in similar ways.

2. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 61
  Context:
    #XG9NDT THE LIFE OF ELEMENTS
      #6H9VRT MODES OF CIRCULATION
        #3KWGMM Transportation and access: material
  Matching excerpt #JT4CNZ:
      As these few comments indicate, the topic of how and where things move, and how access to them is structured, is vast. In touching on processes involved, our aim is not to track the freight of the world or identify the very many ways in which material elements of practice are distributed, accumulated, managed or policed. Rather, the point is to recognize that whereas forms of (co)location, transportation and access are typically important for the diffusion of material elements, forms of competence and meaning circulate in characteristically different ways.

3. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 42
  Context:
    #W6VMCW MAKING AND BREAKING LINKS
      #XZV45L CAR-DRIVING – ELEMENTS AND LINKAGES
  Matching excerpt #FSF7GE:
      As new elements of know-how entered the frame, others like those involved in caring for horses were rendered redundant. For a time, necessary skills in metal and maintenance were in relatively short supply, and mechanics capable of keeping cars in repair and on the road were not necessarily content with the deferential service role accorded to them. Borg analyses shifting relationships between motor, mechanic and driver, and the emergence, typically from blacksmiths' shops, of organizational forms like the garage and the petrol station as signs and to some extent causes of a changing social hierarchy. In the context of the present discussion, this particularly awkward moment in the history of driving underlines the close-coupled relation between materiality and competence and the possibility that access to these equally essential elements is unequally and unevenly distributed.

4. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 39
  Context:
    #W6VMCW MAKING AND BREAKING LINKS
      #Z73JHW MATERIAL, COMPETENCE AND MEANING
  Matching excerpt #AUUFW7:
      To reiterate, our opening propositions are that practices like driving a car depend on specific combinations of materials, meanings and competence; that driving evolves as these ingredients change; and that such changes are in part a consequence of the integrative work involved. In the paragraphs that follow we comment on different aspects of this process, showing how elements have been linked and how ties have been made and broken along the way. We do so not with the aim of providing a detailed or coherent history of driving but in order to show what an element-based approach has to offer.

5. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 87
  Context:
    #NXZT4D RECRUITMENT, DEFECTION AND REPRODUCTION
      #7QBCW8 CAPTURE AND COMMITMENT: CAREERS AND CARRIERS
  Matching excerpt #GB3K72:
      There are many possible routes of capture, commitment and change, and we have only described a few. These few nonetheless indicate that learning, sharing and carrying are typically and perhaps unavoidably transformative, both of the practitioners involved and of the practices they reproduce. This conclusion puts issues of access and engagement in a new light. Patterns of participation matter not only for who gets the opportunity to do what, but for who it is that shapes the future of a practice, and for how individuals are shaped by the experience. All are significant for accumulations of expertise, for the meaning of participation and for the distribution of requisite materials: in short, for the production of future possible trajectories, individual and collective. These are important conclusions, but they are also conclusions derived from relatively tame examples of incremental change. In the next section we discuss somewhat more dramatic instances of radical transformation, mass defection and almost total collapse.

6. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 137
  Context:
    #GUVB7V REPRESENTING THE DYNAMICS OF SOCIAL PRACTICE
      #Q8XDZB REPRESENTING ELEMENTS AND PRACTICES
        #2A3N85 CHARACTERIZING CIRCULATION
  Matching excerpt #TA88QJ:
      artefacts 'script' bodily performance and the types of competence required to produce configurations that work (Akrich, 1992). This is much the same as saying that objects act as vectors or carriers of other elements of practice. Since practices-as-performances are culturally and historically situated, elements are unlikely to be integrated in identical fashion in every setting (Shove and Pantzar, 2005). Even so, we have argued that it is useful to think about how elements travel and to consider the implications and consequences of these trajectories for the chances that relevant sets of meanings, materials and competences might coincide (such that practices might be reproduced), and for how these elements are distributed (and thus for who might qualify as an actual or potential practitioner).

7. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 36
  Context:
    #W6VMCW MAKING AND BREAKING LINKS
  Matching excerpt #MGEWWY:
      This 'elemental' approach is unusual in provisionally de-centring the human actor (as integrator) but it is, at the same time, consistent with the argument that in the moment of doing, practitioners (those who do) simultaneously reproduce the practices in which they are engaged and the elements of which these practices are made. In Reckwitz's terms, the elements of a practice – those of which the 'block' is made – are linked in and through integrative moments of practice-as-performance (Reckwitz, 2002). By paying attention to the trajectories of elements, and to the making and breaking of links between them, it is, we suggest, possible to describe and analyse change and stability without prioritizing either agency or structure. In this chapter we explore the possibility and value of such an approach with reference to the history of car-driving. As might be expected, this generates as many questions as it resolves: for instance, do elements exist in several practices at once? Do the elements of which a practice is composed circulate and travel in ways that practices-as-entities do not? How do moments of localized integration relate to spatially distributed processes of diffusion and disappearance? Since these are themes developed in the rest of the book, this chapter has the dual function of setting the scene for further discussion and of introducing the first planks of what will become a more elaborate conceptual framework. Before taking another step in any such direction, we need to say more about what the elements of practice might be and about how we define them.

8. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 164
  Context:
    #QRSCLP PROMOTING TRANSITIONS IN PRACTICE
      #WNL5BX PRACTICE THEORY AND CLIMATE CHANGE POLICY
        #8WHQQJ Configuring elements of practice
  Matching excerpt #CJ4Z52:
      in the winter (Warm Biz). In short, this was a concerted effort to change the meaning of normal clothing as a means of changing the technologies (levels of air-conditioning) and competences (of dress and of facilities management) involved in the routine enactment and effective accomplishment of office life. By most measures Cool Biz (the summer variant) has been spectacularly effective, resulting in estimated 1,720,000-ton reduction in CO 2 emissions (Team-6 Committee & Ministry of the Environment (Japan), 2007) and making a tangible difference to what men and women wear at work and, to a lesser extent, in the home.

9. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 35
  Context:
    #W6VMCW MAKING AND BREAKING LINKS
  Matching excerpt #S2XDCD:
      The contention that people are routinely engaged in making and breaking links of one kind or another is not particularly controversial. John Law writes about 'heterogenous engineers' (1987), who assemble 'bits and pieces from the social, the technical, the conceptual and the textual' so as to make sets of equally heterogeneous 'products' including scientific products, along with institutions, organizations, computing systems, economies and technologies (1992). And in anthropology, Appadurai's (1986: 18) analysis of the social lives of things emphasizes the constructive, constitutive work involved in attaching and detaching symbolic meanings as material artefacts acquire and lose commodity status. In both these cases and

10. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 86
  Context:
    #NXZT4D RECRUITMENT, DEFECTION AND REPRODUCTION
      #7QBCW8 CAPTURE AND COMMITMENT: CAREERS AND CARRIERS
  Matching excerpt #CR49JK:
      In these situations experienced practitioners define career paths that others then follow. In other settings it is novices who bring new ways of doing into being. In both cases the ways in which relations between newcomers and old-hands are structured is critical for the circulation (or not) of expertise and for how careers develop. Lave and Wenger describe the social and political organization of different pathways to full participation in some detail. Butchery is one of the examples they consider. In the organizations they observed, meat-cutting tasks requiring different levels of expertise were clearly demarcated and allocated in terms of a well-defined hierarchy. Apprentices were set to work on simple jobs but had no sense of the complexities of butchery that lay ahead. They only discovered what the next stages involved as they climbed the ladder, rung by rung. By comparison, trainee midwives acquired a better sense of what full participation entailed right from the start. In documenting these arrangements and in noticing that apprentices often learn as much from each other as from their 'masters', Lave and Wenger conclude that 'mastery resides not in the master but in the organization of the community of practice of which the master is a part' (1991: 94).

Approximate matches

1. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 93
  Context:
    #NXZT4D RECRUITMENT, DEFECTION AND REPRODUCTION
      #PLFBHW DAILY PATHS, LIFE PATHS AND DOMINANT PROJECTS
  Score: 0.449
  Related excerpt #5DMLXN:
      combination 'require that participating individuals expend their labour power or in some other way engage themselves in activity in a given manner, at a given time and place' (1981: 16).

2. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 100
  Context:
    #9XVXK2 5
      #ELA87Q BUNDLES AND COMPLEXES
  Score: 0.425
  Related excerpt #2UA9AB:
      Hutchins (1995) provides a brilliantly detailed description of the coordinative work involved in gently easing a massive ship into dock. As he explains, the intensely choreographed business of bringing tonnes of steel to rest at exactly the right spot requires the careful synchronization of many separate practices. As the process of docking proceeds, relations of co-dependence are tangible and real. Complex operations of this kind depend on the efficient and effective sequencing of multiple practices (some have to come before others), on smooth processes of hand-over and on the capacity for rapid mutual adjustment and synchronized adaptation as circumstances change (some practices have to happen at the same time).

3. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 36
  Context:
    #W6VMCW MAKING AND BREAKING LINKS
  Score: 0.414
  Related excerpt #XFESNT:
      in many more besides, social scientific attention routinely revolves around the position, status, ambition and capability of those who do the integrating. In keeping with Latour's (1987) methodological injunction, the tendency is to follow the actors. By contrast, our strategy is to follow the elements of practice and to track changing configurations over time.

4. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 61
  Context:
    #XG9NDT THE LIFE OF ELEMENTS
      #6H9VRT MODES OF CIRCULATION
        #3KWGMM Transportation and access: material
  Score: 0.4
  Related excerpt #JT4CNZ:
      As these few comments indicate, the topic of how and where things move, and how access to them is structured, is vast. In touching on processes involved, our aim is not to track the freight of the world or identify the very many ways in which material elements of practice are distributed, accumulated, managed or policed. Rather, the point is to recognize that whereas forms of (co)location, transportation and access are typically important for the diffusion of material elements, forms of competence and meaning circulate in characteristically different ways.

5. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 24
  Context:
    #MV5P3X THE DYNAMICS OF SOCIAL PRACTICE
      #CGRC4S MATERIALS AND RESOURCES
  Score: 0.399
  Related excerpt #EJD8MW:
      In picking our way through these debates we are broadly sympathetic to the view that agencies and competencies are distributed between things and people, and that social relations are ‘congealed’ in the hardware of daily life. However, we do not go along with the idea (common in STS) that materials constitute the sticky anchor weights of social action or that they should be treated as immutable and relatively incorruptible transporters of power and influence (Law, 1991). While actor network theory has been useful in challenging overly neutral interpretations of the part (or non-part) things play in structuring social action, it has also led to a potentially leaden view of stuff. More abstractly, actor network theory has inspired politically and philosophically intriguing debates about the relation between humans and the non-humans with whom they share their lives, but has ironically done so in ways that divert attention away from more ordinary questions about what these cyborg/hybrid entities are actually doing . In response, we suggest that aspects of human and non-human relations can be better understood when located in terms of a more encompassing, but suitably materialized, theory of practice. Other authors reach much the same conclusion, defining technologies as ‘configurations that work’ (Rip and Kemp, 1998) and observing that ‘individual technologies add value only to the extent that they are assembled together into effective configurations’ (Suchman et al., 1999: 399).

6. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 149
  Context:
    #GUVB7V REPRESENTING THE DYNAMICS OF SOCIAL PRACTICE
      #QPH46U REPRODUCING ELEMENTS, PRACTICES AND RELATIONS BETWEEN THEM
        #SKGSBB DOMINANT PROJECTS AND POWER
  Score: 0.389
  Related excerpt #HWAQX5:
      the dynamics of social practice. In this last part we bring issues of inequality and access to the fore and comment on how these figure in our representation of elements, practices and relations between them. Chapter 4 ended with a rather brief discussion of what Pred (1981) refers to as 'dominant projects', these being complexes of practice that orient the ways in which people spend their time and the priorities around which their lives are organized. For Pred, systems of class and power are sustained through the social reproduction of dominant projects. In his account, and in ours, such projects become dominant and remain so because they are enacted at many levels at once, being reproduced through the daily paths and the life paths of individuals and through the parallel reproduction of institutions, including those of work and family life. From this point of view, states and economies are constituted through the recurrent performance of some but not other practices.

7. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 65
  Context:
    #XG9NDT THE LIFE OF ELEMENTS
      #6H9VRT MODES OF CIRCULATION
        #THMJ59 Abstraction, reversal and migration: competence
  Score: 0.388
  Related excerpt #EZDYFX:
      Deuten's project was to describe the work involved in 'cosmopolitannizing' concrete technology and in making it available in many locations, not to show how related forms of knowing and doing rippled out across neighbouring professional domains. But for us this is an interesting question. Do such movements depend on similar sequences of abstraction and reversal? Are other processes involved?

8. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 103
  Context:
    #9XVXK2 5
      #TVA3KY COLLABORATION AND COMPETITION
  Score: 0.387
  Related excerpt #Z292U5:
      elements sustain and are sustained by forms of cross-practice ‘collaboration’, broadly defined.

9. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 26
  Context:
    #MV5P3X THE DYNAMICS OF SOCIAL PRACTICE
      #CGRC4S MATERIALS AND RESOURCES
  Score: 0.386
  Related excerpt #23HD2B:
      producers and consumers in making new arrangements and in developing and sustaining them over time.

10. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 87
  Context:
    #NXZT4D RECRUITMENT, DEFECTION AND REPRODUCTION
      #7QBCW8 CAPTURE AND COMMITMENT: CAREERS AND CARRIERS
  Score: 0.384
  Related excerpt #GB3K72:
      There are many possible routes of capture, commitment and change, and we have only described a few. These few nonetheless indicate that learning, sharing and carrying are typically and perhaps unavoidably transformative, both of the practitioners involved and of the practices they reproduce. This conclusion puts issues of access and engagement in a new light. Patterns of participation matter not only for who gets the opportunity to do what, but for who it is that shapes the future of a practice, and for how individuals are shaped by the experience. All are significant for accumulations of expertise, for the meaning of participation and for the distribution of requisite materials: in short, for the production of future possible trajectories, individual and collective. These are important conclusions, but they are also conclusions derived from relatively tame examples of incremental change. In the next section we discuss somewhat more dramatic instances of radical transformation, mass defection and almost total collapse.

### 23. Assistant tool calls

#### Tool call: `read`

```json
{
  "blocks": [
    "EY58QW",
    "9YLBCL",
    "HKB2XQ"
  ],
  "expand": true
}
```

### 24. Tool result: read

DOCUMENT #8J3FXD
Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience: The Social Organization of Normality

SECTION #EY58QW Laundering as Work

EXCERPT #9EDYTE p. 133
  The job of washing clothing and household linen can be divided and delegated. Although the task of bathing those too young or infirm to wash themselves can be similarly allocated, the business of personal hygiene is typically indivisible. But it is not just that laundry can be given to other people to do. The management of linen has long been identified with women, whether as housewives, washerwomen or dressmakers. Taking this to be a powerful relationship, Kaufmann suggests that as guardians of its linen, women are the 'guardians of the family destiny', that 'women's history is deeply inscribed in every fold of their linen' and that senses of self are very much at stake in the handling of laundry (Kaufmann 1998: 13). It is certainly the case that in contrast to personal bathing, the definition and distribution of laundry-related responsibilities is inextricably bound up with the reproduction of gendered identities and with the division and management of domestic labour. Understood as housework the details of laundering also reflect and reveal the role of the domestic sphere as a site of production and/or consumption.

EXCERPT #JCZ54R p. 133
  As laundry is routinely positioned as women's work and since the results are constantly on show, judgements about clothing and appearance are at the same time judgements about standards of domestic performance. In the

EXCERPT #NKX57J p. 133

EXCERPT #GQLBT3 p. 134

EXCERPT #CL5VRA p. 134
  postscript to More Work for Mother , Ruth Schwartz Cowan reflects upon her unwillingness to let her daughter wear a stained shirt or a filthy skirt to school: 'the fact of the matter is', she says, 'that I cannot stand the sight of my children in dirty clothes. I associate dirt with poverty, with loss of control; and like a somnambulist, I am walking through the rituals and responding to the symbols that really meant something seventy years ago' (Cowan 1983: 218). As well as indicating the symbolic import of the process , Cowan suggests that the practices of earlier generations throw shadows of expectation that reach deep into the present. This observation reminds us to take note of the changing terms in which laundering is scrutinized and the social significance of such judgement.

EXCERPT #JQJ9S4 p. 134
  In addition, and again in contrast to bathing, laundering is a typically sequential operation consisting of a series of discrete activities. These might now include sorting clothes, filling a washing machine, adding detergent, drying and ironing. In other situations, necessary steps have included lighting fires, boiling water, soaking, hand wringing, rinsing, soaping, bleaching, blueing, starching and crimping. Exactly what 'doing the laundry' means depends, in a rather immediate way, upon the technologies involved and upon contemporary understandings of what it takes to produce a pile of appropriately cleaned clothing. I have more to say about this, but for now it is enough to recognize that innovation in any one part of the system (for instance, in textiles, detergents or washing and drying technology) will have repercussions for the whole.

EXCERPT #DA9VAC p. 134
  A related observation is that the tasks of which laundering is comprised can be organized and managed in different ways and that any one society can sustain parallel but distinct systems of laundry provision (Fine and Leopold 1993). In the 1920s, householders in the UK or the USA might send 'flatwork' like sheets and towels to a commercial laundry but deal with other fabrics themselves. Twenty years later, they might go for a partial service, doing the washing at a laundrette but drying and ironing clothes at home, or they might do everything themselves, or do it with the aid of a domestic washing machine and/or a tumble dryer. The history of options on offer mirrors wider social trends: the decline of the servant classes, the mechanization of domestic labour and the extent to which commercial interests penetrate the home. As Arwen Mohun's history of steam laundries shows so well, the relationship between commercial and domestic laundering directly affects the specification of what people think of as normal standards. Occupying what Mohun characterizes as a 'middle position on the continuum between consumption and production' commercial laundries were continually locked in competition with their own customers (Mohun 1999: 66). While commercial laundries could do washing in spotless factory-style conditions, thereby achieving 'higher' standards (here

EXCERPT #F6A274 p. 134

EXCERPT #LKT9QJ p. 135

EXCERPT #T4YTJB p. 135
  meaning a whiter wash) than would otherwise be possible, they tried to produce laundry that looked as if it had been done by hand. In the symbolic world of laundering, hand washing figured as the necessarily superior solution and commercial laundering as the necessarily inferior substitute. This particular ranking of quality is intriguing, yet the more general point is that different systems of provision generate different definitions of proper cleaning, both in terms of the process involved and the status and quality of the finished result.

EXCERPT #357SPC p. 135
  The decline of the commercial laundry and the failure to sustain other forms of collective provision have been explained with reference to Marxist and/or feminist analyses of women's position within and outside the labour market. In describing collective approaches to housework and reflecting on the routes not taken, Cowan argues that peoples' enduring commitment to preserving activities deemed central to family life, and their pursuit of privacy and autonomy, are vital in understanding why laundering is now done at home (Cowan 1983: 150). Reflecting on the same question, Susan Strasser reaches a different conclusion, pointing to the complex of economic interests at stake in promoting washing as a private activity and in undermining other more collective arrangements. She writes as follows: 'Home laundering – which encompassed not only the washing machine industry but also those that produced detergents, textiles, electrical parts and plumbing supplies – demonstrates the interconnections between segments of the economy that facilitated its continual expansion' (Strasser 1982: 122). Sold as devices to which laundry responsibilities could be delegated, domestic washing machines have challenged and sometimes entirely eliminated other systems of provision. As the rest of this chapter demonstrates, one consequence is that fabric, detergent and appliance manufacturers have together tightened what amounts to a corporate grip on the meaning of cleaning, and have done so within the heart of the home.

EXCERPT #3K7Z77 p. 135
  To summarize, laundering has certain characteristics relevant for an understanding of how expectations and conventions change. First, it represents a form of work that can be divided and delegated in different ways. Second, it is typically viewed as women's work and is, as such, associated with notions of domestic performance. Third, the production of clean clothes depends upon the sequential accomplishment of a number of inter-dependent activities. Finally, the manner in which the laundry is organized (within or outside the home) is of immediate consequence for the definition and reproduction of cleanliness and for the sorts of skills and judgements involved. It is important to acknowledge the social status and positioning of laundering as a form of work, but what does this mean for the escalation of standards and how does it help explain patterns like those of washing every day?

EXCERPT #Z3QC62 p. 135

EXCERPT #YNM3RV p. 136

DOCUMENT #8J3FXD
Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience: The Social Organization of Normality

SECTION #9YLBCL What Does 'Doing the Laundry' Involve?

EXCERPT #SYD86U p. 145
  In my back garden I have a washhouse. This small brick building, now a shed, was where the women of the street would gather to do the washing. Whether communal or private, washing by hand is hard labour and like other kinds of labour it has been shared, bought and sold in different ways. The development of various types of washing machinery has, over the years, generated further

EXCERPT #XXQ3UG p. 145

EXCERPT #8DMC7C p. 146

EXCERPT #VFDLFL p. 146
  possibilities for division and delegation to humans and non-humans alike. Drawing inspiration from the textile and agricultural industries, some of the earliest commercial machines were truly massive pieces of equipment (Giedion 1948). Other smaller scale prototypes sought to mimic the actions of hand washing and of rubbing and scrubbing (Maxwell 2002). As with so many other household technologies, the small-scale electric motor and indoor plumbing were crucial to the domestic washing machine's development and to the meaning of laundry.

SECTION #HKB2XQ Definition and Delegation

EXCERPT #CXBEZ2 p. 146
  It is not necessary to follow the history of the washing machine in any detail to see that at every step along the way such devices have reconfigured the tasks involved, introduced new categories of washing and of washing well, and thereby challenged established routines and habits. Several of the Canadian housewives interviewed by Joy Parr (1999) took the investment of physical energy, time and technique to be so much part of their identity that they were reluctant to even think of delegating 'their' laundry to a man-made appliance. Such persons were 'slow' to adopt automatic machines and relinquish important role-defining abilities like those of correctly estimating quantities and qualities of soap or getting the timing of soaking and boiling exactly right. Meintjes (2001) makes a similar point, also underlining the symbolic importance of hand washing as a form of domestic care. Amongst the Soweto women she studied, the washing machine's semiotic status was ambivalent: on the one hand it signified affluence and membership of modern consumer society, on the other its use indicated indolence, laziness and lack of domestic commitment. Defined by these tensions and by the intergenerational negotiation of proper practice, washing machines were resisted and appropriated in ways that reflected (and also redefined) the structuring of domestic identities.

EXCERPT #WYL5GV p. 146
  Domestic washing machines have none the less come to dominate the process and practice of cleaning clothes in the UK. As well as reshaping the skills involved and establishing new goals like those of minimizing ironing, fluffing towels and refreshing clothing, their widespread diffusion has the further effect of positioning the laundry as a solidly privatized practice involving the use of increasingly standardized technology. In this, washing machines have the dual function of locating clothing care firmly within the home and of rather directly scripting their users' practice. Other technologies – like those involved in drying and ironing – are also important yet it is the washing machine that sets the scene for the rest, and it is around this device that the commercial interests of appliance and detergent manufacturers and of textile and fashion industries spin. One consequence is that washing machines, in association with an array

EXCERPT #JB534M p. 146

EXCERPT #YUNFJ4 p. 147

EXCERPT #XMYR3W p. 147
  of specially formulated detergents and conditioners, have acquired a pivotal role in specifying the meaning of appropriately laundered clothing. For all practical purposes, and as detailed in the next chapter, 'clean' clothes are quite simply clothes that emerge from the machine. That is to say, through dominating and reinforcing a domestic system of provision washing machine manufacturers and other commercial interests have acquired the power to define cleanliness and laundering. Tentacles of commercial interest are consequently wrapped around what people think of as private habits and routines. This is important in that images and assumptions embedded in the modern machine position washing as something to be done more frequently than ever before, at lower temperatures than ever before, and with the aim of freshening as well as cleaning clothes.

EXCERPT #24GABG p. 147
  Having commented on the why, what, when, and how of washing under separate headings the next step is to think about how they fit together.

DOCUMENT #8J3FXD
Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience: The Social Organization of Normality

SECTION #HKB2XQ Definition and Delegation

EXCERPT #CXBEZ2 p. 146
  It is not necessary to follow the history of the washing machine in any detail to see that at every step along the way such devices have reconfigured the tasks involved, introduced new categories of washing and of washing well, and thereby challenged established routines and habits. Several of the Canadian housewives interviewed by Joy Parr (1999) took the investment of physical energy, time and technique to be so much part of their identity that they were reluctant to even think of delegating 'their' laundry to a man-made appliance. Such persons were 'slow' to adopt automatic machines and relinquish important role-defining abilities like those of correctly estimating quantities and qualities of soap or getting the timing of soaking and boiling exactly right. Meintjes (2001) makes a similar point, also underlining the symbolic importance of hand washing as a form of domestic care. Amongst the Soweto women she studied, the washing machine's semiotic status was ambivalent: on the one hand it signified affluence and membership of modern consumer society, on the other its use indicated indolence, laziness and lack of domestic commitment. Defined by these tensions and by the intergenerational negotiation of proper practice, washing machines were resisted and appropriated in ways that reflected (and also redefined) the structuring of domestic identities.

EXCERPT #WYL5GV p. 146
  Domestic washing machines have none the less come to dominate the process and practice of cleaning clothes in the UK. As well as reshaping the skills involved and establishing new goals like those of minimizing ironing, fluffing towels and refreshing clothing, their widespread diffusion has the further effect of positioning the laundry as a solidly privatized practice involving the use of increasingly standardized technology. In this, washing machines have the dual function of locating clothing care firmly within the home and of rather directly scripting their users' practice. Other technologies – like those involved in drying and ironing – are also important yet it is the washing machine that sets the scene for the rest, and it is around this device that the commercial interests of appliance and detergent manufacturers and of textile and fashion industries spin. One consequence is that washing machines, in association with an array

EXCERPT #JB534M p. 146

EXCERPT #YUNFJ4 p. 147

EXCERPT #XMYR3W p. 147
  of specially formulated detergents and conditioners, have acquired a pivotal role in specifying the meaning of appropriately laundered clothing. For all practical purposes, and as detailed in the next chapter, 'clean' clothes are quite simply clothes that emerge from the machine. That is to say, through dominating and reinforcing a domestic system of provision washing machine manufacturers and other commercial interests have acquired the power to define cleanliness and laundering. Tentacles of commercial interest are consequently wrapped around what people think of as private habits and routines. This is important in that images and assumptions embedded in the modern machine position washing as something to be done more frequently than ever before, at lower temperatures than ever before, and with the aim of freshening as well as cleaning clothes.

EXCERPT #24GABG p. 147
  Having commented on the why, what, when, and how of washing under separate headings the next step is to think about how they fit together.

### 25. Assistant

Yes — **“the labour of practice” is a really useful bridge phrase**, but with one important nuance:

**Shove et al. are deeply interested in the work practices require, but they usually theorise it as “integration,” “accomplishment,” “linking,” “coordination,” “reproduction,” “recruitment,” and “competence,” rather than as labour in the feminist/political-economic sense.** Consumption work gives you the vocabulary for who does that work, how it is distributed, and why it matters.

So the move is not “Shove already says this, done.” It is more:

> Shove gives the ontology of practice maintenance; consumption work lets you politicise and ethnographically specify that maintenance as labour.

## 1. Shove does have a “work of practice” idea

In *Dynamics of Social Practice*, Shove et al. say practices exist when materials, meanings, and competences are integrated (#UG44UW). But they immediately admit that this basic model “reveals little about the nature of the linking entailed in keeping a practice together” and says little about “who is involved” or “how access to relevant elements is distributed” (#8PTVJJ). Still, they insist that stability is an ongoing accomplishment: links have to be “renewed time and again” (#8PTVJJ).

That is basically a theory of practice-maintenance work — but they do not usually dwell on it as labour.

They also use the phrase “integrative work” directly: practices change partly through “the integrative work involved” in linking materials, meanings, and competences (#AUUFW7). So yes: the idea is there.

But it remains somewhat abstract. “Integrative work” is not yet “Anna sorting piss-soaked blankets while managing donor feelings.” Your ethnography turns the abstraction into a scene.

## 2. Shove also sometimes talks about literal domestic labour

In *Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience*, Shove is very attentive to laundry as work. She writes that laundering is divisible, delegable, historically identified with women, and bound up with domestic performance (#9EDYTE). She summarises laundering as “a form of work” that can be divided and delegated, is typically viewed as women’s work, depends on sequential activities, and is shaped by how provision is organised inside or outside the home (#3K7Z77).

That is close to your terrain. But Shove is using laundering to understand changing normality, standards, technologies, and conventions. You can use Brīvbode to show something slightly different: **the work required to keep alternative circulation going once price, retail infrastructure, and waste systems are partly suspended.**

## 3. So what does consumption work add?

Consumption work makes explicit what Shove’s element model tends to leave underdeveloped:

- who performs the work;
- who benefits from it;
- how it is gendered;
- how it is hidden or made visible;
- how it is morally framed;
- how institutions depend on unpaid work while not recognising it.

Your Chapter 5 already says this very clearly: Brīvbode’s circulation depends on unpaid volunteers and participants absorbing tasks that formal retail or waste systems would otherwise perform (#5YXGE6). You also show that this work is unevenly distributed, ethically motivated, and largely gendered (#HM56MD, #RX9JDU).

So I’d say: **Shove helps you see that practices require linking work; consumption work helps you name that linking work as labour.**

## 4. “Labour of practice” could be your conceptual hinge

You could define it like this:

> By the labour of practice, I refer to the work required to keep the elements of a practice linked: sorting materials, maintaining meanings, transmitting competences, repairing breakdowns, managing boundaries, and recruiting or retaining participants. In Brīvbode, this labour becomes visible because circulation is not stabilised through price, formal employment, or institutionalised retail systems. Instead, the practice is held together through volunteer judgement, participant restraint, gendered household work, and care.

That gives you a bridge between:

- **Shove:** practices require repeated integration of elements (#8PTVJJ);
- **Consumption work:** consumption depends on socially necessary, often unpaid labour;
- **Care/gender:** this labour is not neutrally distributed;
- **Your ethnography:** Brīvbode makes the labour visible.

## 5. The key sentence for the thesis

Maybe something like:

> Shove et al.’s account of practices as ongoing accomplishments foregrounds the repeated linking of materials, meanings and competences, but it leaves relatively open the question of who performs this linking and under what conditions. Bringing this together with consumption work allows Brīvbode to be analysed not only as a practice of circulation, but as a site where the labour of practice becomes visible: the sorting, evaluating, restraining, curating, routing and relational repair through which circulation is made possible.

This is a very good angle. It lets you say: practice theory does not ignore work, but it often **abstracts it into reproduction**. Your thesis **re-materialises it as labour**.

### 26. Assistant

Shove writes about “linking” as the basic mechanism by which practices exist, persist, change, and disappear. It is one of the most useful pieces for your argument, because Brīvbode lets you show linking as **actual work** rather than only as an abstract process.

## 1. Practices are made of linked elements

In *The Dynamics of Social Practice*, Shove, Pantzar and Watson simplify practice into three elements: **materials, competences, and meanings**. A practice exists when these are connected in performance. They write that practices are defined by “interdependent relations between materials, competences and meanings” and that practices exist when elements are “integrated” (#UG44UW).

So the basic idea is:

> no linking = no practice  
> linked elements = practice  
> links no longer sustained = ex-practice

They even present the sequence as proto-practices, practices, and ex-practices: elements may exist but not yet be linked; elements may be actively linked; or previous links may no longer be made (#R7BSXU, #RQSUNG).

For Brīvbode, this is useful because the elements are all present in a compressed way:

- materials: bags, clothes, shelves, sorting tables, storage, textile containers;
- competences: sorting, judging, restraining, curating, knowing what to bring/take;
- meanings: free, exchange, care, dignity, waste, usefulness, sustainability.

The point is not simply that Brīvbode “has” these elements. It is that the practice only works when they are repeatedly linked.

## 2. Linking is repeated, not once-and-for-all

This is the crucial passage. Shove et al. say their model does not fully explain “the nature of the linking entailed in keeping a practice together,” nor “who is involved” or “how access to relevant elements is distributed.” But it does underline that connections have to be renewed “time and again.” Stability is therefore not an endpoint but an “ongoing accomplishment” (#8PTVJJ).

That is exactly where your “labour of practice” enters.

In Brīvbode, circulation does not happen because things magically become reusable. The links have to be continuously remade:

- donor says “only the best,” volunteer opens bag and decides otherwise;
- item is transferred from donor to swapshop ownership;
- volunteer sorts it into a category;
- someone decides whether it is clean enough / usable enough / appropriate enough;
- shelves are arranged so things appear worth taking;
- taker learns that “free” does not mean grab everything;
- leftover textiles are routed elsewhere.

So the practice is not just “circulation”; it is the repeated accomplishment of circulation.

## 3. Linking is also how change happens

Shove et al. describe practice change through the “making and breaking of links” between elements. They say that in the moment of doing, practitioners reproduce both the practice and its elements; the elements are linked “in and through integrative moments of practice-as-performance” (#MGEWWY). Later, they state that practices evolve as ingredients change and that such change is partly a consequence of the “integrative work involved” (#AUUFW7).

This gives you a nice phrase:

> Brīvbode makes visible the “integrative work” of circular practice.

In your material, that integrative work is very concrete: sorting tables, moral hesitation, trained eyes, awkward refusals, storage improvisation, relational care. Shove gives the conceptual skeleton; your ethnography puts socks on it. Probably mismatched second-hand socks, but still.

## 4. Links can cross between practices

Shove et al. are not only interested in links inside one practice. They also ask whether elements “bridge between different practices” (#6F446F). They argue that meanings, competences, and materials can circulate between practices, forming a kind of “connective tissue” that holds social arrangements together or pulls them apart (#AY4T33). They explicitly note that competence can circulate as skills transfer, and material elements can figure in more than one practice at a time (#ERE3YQ).

This is very relevant for Brīvbode because it is not a sealed practice. It recruits elements from adjacent practices:

- from household cleaning/decluttering: sorting, deciding what must leave;
- from shopping: browsing, trying on, display aesthetics;
- from charity: giving, deservingness, need;
- from retail: curation, quality control, shelf arrangement;
- from waste management: overflow, textile containers, “not the bin”;
- from care: knowing who needs what, routing things to others.

So Brīvbode is not only one practice. It is a **linking site between practices**.

## 5. Materials, competences, and meanings circulate differently

Shove et al. also distinguish how elements travel. Materials literally move; competences and meanings circulate through more complicated processes of learning, decoding, association, and reclassification (#Z7DKTH). This matters because Brīvbode makes all three types of circulation visible at once.

- **Materials** literally arrive in bags and leave with takers.
- **Competences** travel through participation: volunteers learn to sort; visitors learn restraint; children learn what is good enough to donate.
- **Meanings** are reclassified: “free” becomes exchange, “waste” becomes potential, “taking” becomes restraint, “giving” becomes care.

Shove et al. say elements need to be “packed and unpacked”; on arrival, they must be decoded and appropriated locally (#RXBW6A). Brīvbode is almost literally a packing/unpacking machine. Bags come in packed with household meanings; volunteers unpack them materially and morally.

## 6. Shove’s own limit: linking is undertheorised as labour

This is where you can make a contribution without overstating it. Shove et al. do talk about linking, integration, accomplishment, and reproduction. But they also admit that the model says little about:

- who does the linking;
- how access to elements is distributed;
- how integration transforms meanings/materials/competences (#8PTVJJ).

That gives you permission to say:

> Practice theory tells us that links must be repeatedly made; consumption work and care theory help explain who makes them, under what conditions, and with what unequal burdens.

So your angle is not “Shove forgot labour completely.” More precise:

> Shove theorises practice maintenance as repeated linking; this thesis treats that linking as labour.

## 7. Possible paragraph for thesis

You could write:

> Shove, Pantzar and Watson conceptualise practices as configurations of linked materials, meanings and competences. Practices emerge when these elements are integrated, persist when links are repeatedly renewed, and disappear when they are no longer sustained. This makes linking central to practice theory: stability is not a settled state but an ongoing accomplishment (#8PTVJJ). Yet the authors also note that this elemental model says relatively little about who performs the linking, how access to elements is distributed, or how integration itself transforms the elements involved (#8PTVJJ). Brīvbode makes these questions empirically visible. The swapshop is not only a site where things circulate, but a site where the linking work of circulation is performed: volunteers sort and evaluate materials, participants learn and display competences of restraint and divestment, and meanings of waste, exchange, care and need are negotiated in practice. Reading this through consumption work allows the repeated linking described by practice theory to be understood as labour — gendered, relational, morally charged, and unevenly distributed.

That is a strong conceptual bridge. It lets you use Shove faithfully while also showing why your care/consumption work chapter is not an add-on, but a necessary extension.

### 27. User

it's quite cool that the brivbode is not just a clearinghouse for commodities or whatever and it's not simply "a practice" but a messy site where practices can interact and swap elements and so on

### 28. Assistant

Yes — exactly. That is probably the sharper version of the whole idea:

> Brīvbode is not simply a container for second-hand objects, and not even only “a practice” of freecycling. It is a site where multiple practices meet, interfere, borrow from one another, and redistribute their elements.

That lets you avoid flattening it into “the practice of freecycling,” while still staying inside practice theory.

## What Brīvbode is, practice-theoretically

It is a **site of inter-practice traffic**.

Things arrive from household ordering, decluttering, care, moving house, parenting, mourning, shopping mistakes, wardrobe management, craft projects, frugality, ethical consumption. Once inside Brīvbode, they are not merely “exchanged.” They are reclassified and made available for other practices: dressing, gifting, reselling, crafting, furnishing, caring for relatives, experimenting with style, helping neighbours, managing poverty, performing sufficiency.

So it is less:

> Brīvbode = a practice

and more:

> Brīvbode = a situated infrastructure where practices intersect and where materials, meanings and competences are re-linked.

Shove et al. give you language for this. They ask whether elements can bridge between practices and argue that meanings, competences and materials can circulate between practices as “connective tissue” (#AY4T33). They also say material elements can figure in more than one practice at a time and competences can circulate as skills transfer (#ERE3YQ). That is basically Brīvbode in ethnographic form.

## “Clearinghouse” is useful — but only as a contrast

You can say: superficially, Brīvbode looks like a clearinghouse for surplus goods. But that would treat the objects as if they simply pass through a neutral channel.

Your evidence shows the opposite. The “channel” changes the things:

- ownership changes when an item is divested to Brīvbode (#X8RDCG);
- sorting is done on the spot and in the open (#SUZYLN);
- presentation and display actively shape meanings of value (#KMD7AJ);
- items are judged through shifting norms of acceptability (#F9CK8T, #BZ6FJC);
- “free” has to be morally learned as exchange or restraint (#CUBS5Q);
- volunteers absorb valuation work that price would otherwise partly do (#U7QJHT, #A2APRY).

So Brīvbode does not merely move commodities along. It **decommodifies, revalues, filters, delays, redirects, moralises, and sometimes refuses** them.

A nice sentence:

> Brīvbode is not a clearinghouse for commodities but a re-linking site for practice elements: objects pass through it, but so do standards, skills, obligations, affects and moral classifications.

## It is messy because practices do not arrive neatly separated

This is where your ethnography is strongest. Practice theory sometimes diagrams things very neatly: materials here, meanings there, competences there. But Brīvbode shows the diagram getting covered in donated plushies.

For example:

- **Retail practice** enters through shelves, hangers, colour arrangement, display, and the idea that emptier shelves make objects appear more valuable (#KMD7AJ).
- **Charity practice** enters through need, deservingness and discomfort around “free,” even as Brīvbode tries not to be charity (#M3VCHH).
- **Waste management** enters through overflow, textile containers and the problem that there is no “away” (#WW8YUW, #SFAYYS).
- **Household care** enters through women sorting for relatives, neighbours and children (#PNGSGT, #3BY9GH, #VCEUP7).
- **Market valuation** enters negatively through the absence of price, which makes other valuation devices necessary (#U7QJHT).
- **Sufficiency/minimalism/ethical consumption** enters through restraint, not-taking, and knowing what one already has (#EXTCGS).

So the site is not coherent because everyone shares one meaning. It is coherent enough because incompatible meanings are made to coexist. Your Chapter 4 conclusion already says this: Brīvbode is sustained by a plurality of meanings “compatible enough to coexist” (#M3VCHH).

That phrase is gold.

## Maybe “node” is better than “practice”

I would use “practice” carefully. You can still say “freecycling at Brīvbode is analysed as a practice,” but the richer claim is that Brīvbode is a **node in a nexus/bundle/complex of practices**.

Possible terms:

- **inter-practice node**
- **site of relinking**
- **circulation infrastructure**
- **moral-material junction**
- **contact zone of practices**
- **practice interface**
- **redistribution site for practice elements**

“Contact zone of practices” is nice but slightly dramatic. “Practice interface” is clean. “Moral-material junction” sounds thesis-y in a good way. “Site of relinking” is probably the most directly Shove-compatible.

## The argument could become

> Brīvbode matters not because it is a pure alternative to market exchange, but because it is impure. It gathers elements from market, household, charity, waste-management and care practices, and recombines them under conditions of non-monetary exchange. This makes it a privileged site for observing how practices interact: materials move from one practice into another, competences are transferred and transformed, and meanings are negotiated rather than stabilised by price.

This also helps with the circular economy critique. Circular economy often wants clean loops. Brīvbode gives you messy loops with people in them.

## Better version of your earlier “practice with lid off”

Maybe:

> Brīvbode is a practice with the lid off only if “practice” is understood not as a bounded unit but as a messy site of inter-practice traffic. What becomes visible there is not one stable practice of freecycling, but the work through which elements from household management, retail, charity, waste disposal, care and ethical consumption are detached, tested, recombined and sent elsewhere.

That is strong. It solves your concern that calling it “a practice” might be too neat.

## A polished paragraph

> Brīvbode is therefore not best understood as a clearinghouse for second-hand commodities. Nor is it simply a single bounded practice. It is a semi-public site where several practices intersect and exchange elements. Household divestment brings in materials shaped by domestic routines, attachment and storage pressures; retail contributes display techniques and expectations of quality; charity introduces questions of need and deservingness; waste management appears in the problem of overflow; care travels through the gendered work of sorting, routing and remembering others’ needs. In this sense, Brīvbode functions as a re-linking site: materials, meanings and competences are detached from one practice configuration and made available for others. Its messiness is therefore analytically important. It shows not a clean circular flow, but the practical and moral work through which circulation is made possible.

This is likely a thesis-level insight, not just a nice aside.

### 29. User

yes this really helps me see brivbode in an interesting way. maybe we can compare to some other sites and practices and nexuses...

### 30. Assistant tool calls

#### Tool call: `search_text`

```json
{
  "limit": 5,
  "query": "site practices intersect second-hand thrift store sorting valuation work retail charity waste"
}
```

#### Tool call: `search_text`

```json
{
  "limit": 5,
  "query": "Freecycle online freecycling circulation gift commodity community material exchange"
}
```

#### Tool call: `search_text`

```json
{
  "limit": 5,
  "query": "repair cafe repair practices care circular economy materials competences meanings"
}
```

#### Tool call: `search_text`

```json
{
  "limit": 5,
  "query": "garage sale gift commodity household divestment valuation exchange"
}
```

#### Tool call: `search_text`

```json
{
  "limit": 5,
  "query": "consumption work recycling household sorting labour gender"
}
```

### 31. Tool result: search_text

Exact matches

1. Source: Selling Thrift: Work Practices in an American Thrift Store (#HJXUZN), Frederik Larsen, p. 0
  Context:
    #V7GCNS Selling Thrift: Work Practices in an American Thrift Store
      #W76MBZ Abstract
  Matching excerpt #XQQB38:
      Thrift, in its simplest definition, is the practice of using resources in a considered way. The concept has long been employed as a moral trope to condemn or promote a variety of human practices. In the literature, thrift is addressed as it is played out in consumption in and around the household as a way of preserving and saving resources. Thrift stores form part of a thrift economy and, as the receiver of divested objects from the household and a site for thrifty consumption practices, they present aspects of thrift in a variety of ways. In this article, I look at thrift as it relates to work and organizational practices in an American thrift store. Although often linked to work ethics, thrift has mainly been proposed as a moral concept guiding individual and not organizational practices. In order to explore the value of thrift in the thrift store, I present parts of my ethnographic research on second-hand markets. Examining work practices as “thrifty” shows how economic prudence is paired with material frugality and community concern. This, I argue, has significant effect on the flow of consumer goods, as resources flow through the thrift store and appear to be spent, not saved.

2. Source: Selling Thrift: Work Practices in an American Thrift Store (#HJXUZN), Frederik Larsen, p. 2
  Context:
    #V7GCNS Selling Thrift: Work Practices in an American Thrift Store
      #R7W957 Introduction
  Matching excerpt #YWFYNY:
      In this article, I explore the concept of thrift in relation to the thrift store, not as a space for consumption, but as a place of work. As the name indicates, a thrift store is a place where thrifty consumption takes place, and thrift and thrift stores have earlier been addressed in literature on shopping and consumption (Miller 1998; Bardhi and Arnould 2005; Horne and Maddrell 2002). Here, however, I will examine thrift as a principle and value in relation to running the thrift store. In other words, my discussion focuses on how thrift affects the business, the marketing of second-hand objects, the flow of goods, and the everyday work practices. In order to explore the value of thrift in the thrift store, I turn to my ethnographic research on second-hand markets. Examining work practices as thrifty demonstrates how economic prudence is paired with material frugality and concern for the community.

3. Source: Selling Thrift: Work Practices in an American Thrift Store (#HJXUZN), Frederik Larsen, p. 15
  Context:
    #V7GCNS Selling Thrift: Work Practices in an American Thrift Store
      #WGJ6B7 The Practice of Thrifty Selling
  Matching excerpt #WG92ZK:
      In the store, thrift constitutes a business practice that informs marketing, pricing, and selling second-hand objects, and, as such, it unfolds differently than in consumption and the household. This becomes even clearer when re-examining the activities that have been attributed to thrift in the literature: being frugal, preserving, saving, investing, and keeping control over resources. In the thrift store, prices are set to attract patrons as well as wholesale buyers. This means that the prices are deliberately lower than the estimated economic value of the product in the market. When selling, the overarching ambition in the thrift store is to get rid of as many things as possible, as quickly as possible. It is an expression of thrift as the considered use of resources, but frugality, preserving, and saving do not seem to be the aim of thrift in this context. Investing as the purpose of being thrifty, however, seems similar. The way in which thrift is carried out in the thrift store is a form of investing in the future for the community, but it is done by letting resources flow out of the organization instead of keeping them. Thus, investing also has an immediate expression: the investment of time or the investment, even, of thrift. Investing time in sorting and using every donation is in direct opposition to a pure economic rationality. The investment of time allows the organization to fulfil their purpose of transforming donations into marketable goods, but arguably by compromising their purpose of raising money for charity. The employees could be spending their time selling more products instead of investing time in thrift practices. It seems, however, that the investment of thrift is valuable to the organization.

4. Source: Valuation in action: Ethnography of an American thrift store (#SHZ6RT), Frederik Larsen, p. 12
  Context:
    #DLSW98 Valuation in action: Ethnography of an American thrift store
      #6EZUR8 Problematic categorisations
        #WEBSG8 Return to rubbish theory, gifts and commodities
  Matching excerpt #4DJFGU:
      Thompson is concerned with the economic aspect of second-hand markets. But in the thrift store other types of value are also in play. A concern for the community and offering affordable household goods is a form of social value central to the Community Thrift. The emotional aspect of donating to a charity a loved one would have liked to help is valuable to the donors and increasingly an environmental concern is becoming important to the organisation. In this article I will not present a lengthy analysis of how these values interact with each other, but briefly suggest that the practices of valuation in the thrift store display properties of both market and gift exchanges.

5. Source: Valuation in action: Ethnography of an American thrift store (#SHZ6RT), Frederik Larsen, p. 0
  Context:
    #DLSW98 Valuation in action: Ethnography of an American thrift store
      #NJEST3 KEYWORDS
  Matching excerpt #TEN8X8:
      Second-hand; thrift; valuation practices; material culture; ethnography; economic anthropology; commodities; Mary Douglas; charity; exchange; value; markets

Approximate matches

1. Source: Incidental sustainability? Notes from a thrift store in Germany (#4Y4DVC), Petra Kuppinger, p. 4
  Context:
    #AYGQVA Incidental sustainability? Notes from a thrift store in Germany
      #3THHP6 Second-hand cultures and thrift stores
  Score: 0.708
  Related excerpt #RCC3HX:
      Given different names (thrift store, charity shop, opportunity/op-shop) in different countries, thrift stores accept donations from consumers, sort, re-value, and resell them (Gregson and Crewe, 2003; Larsen, 2019). Larger ventures are often located on urban fringes or in commercial districts that provide sizeable premises at lower rents. Charitable thrift stores operate beyond the urban limelight and work in unattractive spaces where they handle huge quantities of consumer waste (Isenhour and Berry, 2020; Minter, 2019).

2. Source: Incidental sustainability? Notes from a thrift store in Germany (#4Y4DVC), Petra Kuppinger, p. 4
  Context:
    #AYGQVA Incidental sustainability? Notes from a thrift store in Germany
      #3THHP6 Second-hand cultures and thrift stores
  Score: 0.689
  Related excerpt #RAVRQM:
      Overwhelmed by stuff and not inclined to do their own garage sales (or having stuff left after sales), many people lug their excess belongings to Salvation Army, Goodwill, local church, and other charitable stores (Gregson et al., 2007; Le Zotte, 2017; Minter, 2019). With time, occasional church rummage sales turned into permanent stores and more thrift stores opened. Commercial consignment stores promise a small profit for those who bring their clothes to be resold. Yet much of the second-hand landscape operates outside the capitalist market and provides work for some and access to affordable goods to others; it extends the lifespan of things, enables the sharing of items, and creates cooperative communities (Bohlin, 2018; Herrmann, 2006). For many customers or participants, thrift stores, repair cafés, clothes-swapping parties, or tool-sharing cooperatives are part of a 'deliberative project of value transformation that challenges dominant paradigms and cultural constructions while building alternative social and physical structures from the "ruins of modernity"' (Crocker and Chivervalls quoted in Isenhour and Reno, 2019: 1).

3. Source: Valuation in action: Ethnography of an American thrift store (#SHZ6RT), Frederik Larsen, p. 1
  Context:
    #DLSW98 Valuation in action: Ethnography of an American thrift store
      #NJEST3 KEYWORDS
  Score: 0.701
  Related excerpt #7EJUMJ:
      This article documents the workings of a contemporary second-hand thrift store in California. It offers descriptions of the actions, considerations and circumstances of performing valuations in the context of a thrift store. The ethnographic notes were collected during six months of fieldwork and subsequent returns, and present accounts of the practices, values and people involved in turning the remainders of consumption into cultural commodities. In the process stories are used to elucidate the interwoven relations between the things, the people and the community. The primary objective of this article is to give a detailed view of the everyday activities of a thrift store. As such it offers a view of contemporary practices to supplement historical accounts. Therefore the ethnographic details are only contextualised towards the end of the article to initiate an analytical understanding of valuation practices. Taking Mary Douglas' statement on dirt as a point of departure, 3 the article shows how values are temporarily fixed in the objects in order to allow them to re-enter the second-hand economies. The process of categorisation of the objects constitutes sense-making practices that allow cultural value to be attached to the objects. The process of transforming discards creates a nexus between gift and market exchange and the valuations manifest a number of values that collectively bring second-hand objects to market. These involve economic factors and knowledge of the market as well as social value for the community and emotional value attached to the process of donating. Identifying categorisation as pivotal in bringing second-hand objects to market, the article shows how valuation practices are constantly adapted to the realities of disorder and how things, no matter how rigorous the practice, continue to fall through the gaps.

4. Source: Valuation in action: Ethnography of an American thrift store (#SHZ6RT), Frederik Larsen, p. 7
  Context:
    #DLSW98 Valuation in action: Ethnography of an American thrift store
      #T28US8 Valuation in action
        #NX5PXC Last stage of commoditisation
  Score: 0.692
  Related excerpt #HCRMFS:
      Objects that have been discarded during the valuation or after being 'called' in the store are collected in bags and boxes and put in a corner in the back area, to be picked up by other companies that either recycle them or sort them again to see if there is anything of value. The donated clothes that go to recycling are those that have turned out to be too dirty or in too poor condition. There are also items that have been in the store for a long time but have not sold. These clothes are all put in plastic bags and are picked up several times a week, by a recycling company. I observed the pickups of most of the different types of objects, from pottery to clothing and books. In the book department Drew explained how the decision is made to get rid of books that have been in the store for too long: 'I try not to get rid of stuff that might sell, but you have to throw some things away'. Like all the others working at the Community Thrift, Drew is highly aware of the organisation's principle that they want to make as much money for the charities as possible, so that getting rid of stuff that might sell is a difficult decision. Since the company that picks up the books pays by bulk and not by individual value, there is no need to throw out valuable books. The process of creating or capturing the value of the donated objects relies on a combination of organisational principles and ad hoc judgements. As the objects leave the thrift store, either as recycled material or by being sold they enter a larger second-hand economy that constitutes the context of valuation practices.

5. Source: Valuation in action: Ethnography of an American thrift store (#SHZ6RT), Frederik Larsen, p. 2
  Context:
    #DLSW98 Valuation in action: Ethnography of an American thrift store
      #RYMFD3 The tavern guild community thrift store
  Score: 0.68
  Related excerpt #8VRSNR:
      in the 1970s with the emergence of a budding interest in protecting the environment. Especially since the mid-1990s, many western countries have seen a dramatic rise in interest in used objects. 6 The Community Thrift operates within this context and while thrift shops, as Le Zotte notes, 7 now cater to a wide audience, the Community Thrift is dedicated to serving its community. What that means specifically is explored in the following. The Community Thrift operates like many other charity organisations in the USA and in Europe by collecting and accepting material donations for resale, from which it generates all of its revenue. People donate their unwanted objects – clothes, furniture, kitchenware, art works, CDs, books, etc. – and the employees, some paid and some volunteers, sort, value and price the objects before they are remarketed. Charity organisations make up a large segment of second-hand economies especially in what could be described as the beginning of the value chain; the point where second-hand objects are ‘produced’ as objects for markets, out of what people donate. In recent years eBay and similar online platforms have facilitated direct sales between end-customers, but in the markets I have studied (US, Denmark and Thailand) charity organisations still report increasing sales.

### 32. Tool result: search_text

Exact matches

1. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange
  Context:
    #ZF9EYF Introduction
      #MUKRGA A note on terms
  Matching paragraph #8S9QR2:
      However, the organizers have a complicated relationship with the term “freeshop”. As Brīvbode manager Rasa shared in an interview, the name already existed when she joined the initiative and they were trying to come up with alternative names in the beginning but did not manage to replace it. Their preferred term is “swapshop” which I also use in this thesis. “Swapshop”, as I discuss in Chapter 4, positions Brīvbode as a site of exchange rather than charity. However, as a descriptive term for “what actually happens there” I consider swapping not suitable enough, as it overstates the symmetry and implies an exchange with one to one logic, which is not the case in Brīvbode. In this thesis, I use the term “freecycling” to refer to the what is done in Brīvbode, as it emphasises the circularity aspect of the practice. While freecycling has its own specific origin, associated with the Freecycle Network, an online platform for giving things away locally, I use the term nonetheless because it captures the non-monetary circulation of goods without implying directness of swapping or the one-directionality of donation.

2. Source: Blurring the boundaries: Prosumption, circularity and online sustainable consumption through Freecycle (#59QUM6), Sally Eden, p. 0
  Context:
    #5V87AY Blurring the boundaries: Prosumption, circularity and online sustainable consumption through Freecycle
      #F75LC8 Abstract
  Matching excerpt #8SBVHD:
      This article explores the digital exchange and moral ordering of sustainable and ethical consumption in online Freecycle groups. Through interactive exchanges in digital (online posts) and material (consumer items) modes, Freecycling blurs three common binaries in analyses of consumption: (1) consumption/production, (2) digital/material and (3) mainstream/alternative. Drawing on Ritzer's notion of 'implosions' as well as practice theory, I show that Freecycling practices reimagine and reproduce both products and consumers, practising prosumption through mixed digital and material practices in a performative economy, and how mainstream and alternative ways of consuming are entangled in pursuit of more sustainable, ethical consumption. This challenges us to think beyond these traditional binaries and to conceptualise a more blurred, less analytically clean and more circular approach to studying consumption.

3. Source: Blurring the boundaries: Prosumption, circularity and online sustainable consumption through Freecycle (#59QUM6), Sally Eden, p. 16
  Context:
    #5V87AY Blurring the boundaries: Prosumption, circularity and online sustainable consumption through Freecycle
      #R7UR8J Discussion
  Matching excerpt #8A6B4Q:
      But in reality, Freecycling practices are far more blurred and 'the gift economy' model (perhaps surprisingly) does not fit well. First, Freecycling does not build social relationships on reciprocity – goods donated via Freecycle are alienable and transferable without reciprocity. Like peer-to-peer sharing of music online, it is more like mainstream markets than is often assumed in the alternative economies literature, because 'these communities are relatively impersonal and anonymous [and] these objects circulate more like quasi-commodities than like gifts' (Leyshon, 2003: 554).

4. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [draft] (#FYG32U), Ieva Lange
  Context:
    #SVS6HK Introduction
      #AKBRP4 A note on terms
  Matching paragraph #3XYWXD:
      However, the organizers have a complicated relationship with the term “freeshop”. As Brīvbode manager Rasa shared in an interview, the name already existed when she joined the initiative and they were trying to come up with alternative names in the beginning but did not manage to replace it. Their preferred term is “swapshop” which I also use in this thesis. “Swapshop”, as I discuss in Chapter 4, positions Brīvbode as a site of exchange rather than charity. However, as a descriptive term for “what actually happens there” I consider swapping not suitable enough, as it overstates the symmetry and implies an exchange with one to one logic, which is not the case in Brīvbode. In this thesis, I use the term “freecycling” to refer to the what is done in Brīvbode, as it emphasises the circularity aspect of the practice. While freecycling has its own specific origin, associated with the Freecycle Network, an online platform for giving things away locally, I use the term nonetheless because it captures the non-monetary circulation of goods without implying directness of swapping or the one-directionality of donation.

5. Source: Growing in Motion: The Circulation of Used Things on Second-hand Markets (#MBXQXR), Anna Bohlin, Staffan Appelgren, p. 3
  Context:
    #3U9XEW Growing in Motion: The Circulation of Used Things on Second-hand Markets1
      #DSNHBJ Unpacking Circulation
  Matching excerpt #SP2DW4:
      Since Malinowski, ethnography and theory dealing with the exchange of material objects and the organization of relationships between people and things have developed into one of anthropology’s prime fields of research. Scholars have expanded the understanding of gender dynamics of the Kula (Weiner 1976; 1992; Strathern 1988), the extent and nature of the interactions (Weiner 1976; Munn 1986; Strathern 1988) and the nature of the gift (Marcel Mauss 1950/1990). The assumption that circulation integrates society has encouraged the analytical breaking down of circulatory phenomena into finer and more distinct forms, such as commodity exchange, gift-giving, reciprocity and barter, in order to study their social significance and cultural diversity. Along with such specialisation, debates about the theoretical importance of these modes of transaction have been intensive (see Humphrey and Hugh-Jones 1992 for an overview, and Graeber 2001), but the idea of circulation has continued to receive relatively limited analytic attention. The concern with the typology of transactions has prompted defining the performative locus of circulation in terms of specific stages along such circuits, at the moment when objects changed hands, during which status and relationships between things and people were negotiated within the specific cultural logics of various forms of exchange (cf. Appadurai 1986 and Myers 2001).

Approximate matches

1. Source: Blurring the boundaries: Prosumption, circularity and online sustainable consumption through Freecycle (#59QUM6), Sally Eden, p. 1
  Context:
    #5V87AY Blurring the boundaries: Prosumption, circularity and online sustainable consumption through Freecycle
      #3HMP6S Introduction
        #ZJX25E Corresponding author:
  Score: 0.675
  Related excerpt #ARHQWR:
      Let me begin by outlining how Freecycle works. Beginning in the United States in 2003, Freecycling has now spread to many other countries. An online Freecycle group is usually centred on (and named after) a local area, town or county and has volunteer moderators who try to police members' online behaviour. Members apply to join a group and if they are accepted by the moderators, they can logon to the website and both read and write online posts. There are four basic types of Freecycle post:

2. Source: Blurring the boundaries: Prosumption, circularity and online sustainable consumption through Freecycle (#59QUM6), Sally Eden, p. 2
  Context:
    #5V87AY Blurring the boundaries: Prosumption, circularity and online sustainable consumption through Freecycle
      #3HMP6S Introduction
        #ZJX25E Corresponding author:
  Score: 0.658
  Related excerpt #ZR8W73:
      What makes Freecycling particularly intriguing compared to other recycling practices, such as jumble sales, car boot sales or yard sales, is that members also request items as 'Wanted' and often also thank the donors when the items have been 'Received'. Unlike other forms of disposal to family and friends or, more anonymously, to charity shops (e.g. Gregson and Crewe, 2003), Freecycle members see their generosity legitimated through other members' expressions of desire, demonstrating the circularity of consumption (also Lepawsky and Mather, 2011) and how consumption grades gradually into production, rather than being sharply separated from it or neatly subsequent to it. And some groups also follow up all 'Offerers' automatically to ask whether items have been collected and, by extrapolating, estimate how much has been 'kept out of landfill', for example, '9433 kg reused in last month'(10 February 2014).

3. Source: Blurring the boundaries: Prosumption, circularity and online sustainable consumption through Freecycle (#59QUM6), Sally Eden, p. 10
  Context:
    #5V87AY Blurring the boundaries: Prosumption, circularity and online sustainable consumption through Freecycle
      #R4FPWC Implosion 3: Mainstream/alternative and the sustainability and ethics of divestment
  Score: 0.633
  Related excerpt #73BLCE:
      Despite seeming unattractive, this item was reported online as 'Taken' later the same day. Thus, Freecycling facilitates not merely the donation of goods but also the demand for goods – the explicit 'wish lists' seen online in many review sites like Amazon are in Freecycle often materialised through donation. And this includes 'high-tech' items like printers as well as 'low-tech' items like wooden chairs – there is no clear distinction here. 'Hand-me-downs' are thus actively created, rather than passively received, becoming in this sense more like new goods than old stuff. Perhaps more surprising to those outside Freecycle is how often 'Wanted' posts ask for items that are broken or can be broken:

4. Source: Blurring the boundaries: Prosumption, circularity and online sustainable consumption through Freecycle (#59QUM6), Sally Eden, p. 16
  Context:
    #5V87AY Blurring the boundaries: Prosumption, circularity and online sustainable consumption through Freecycle
      #R7UR8J Discussion
  Score: 0.62
  Related excerpt #JUAMET:
      Thus, Freecycling demonstrates that divisions between digital and material, between consumption and disposal, between mainstream and alternative consumption, between gift and commodity and between wanted and unwanted goods are in

5. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [draft] (#FYG32U), Ieva Lange
  Context:
    #SVS6HK Introduction
  Score: 0.617
  Related paragraph #BNRZRU:
      Freecycling, as viewed in this thesis, is a practice that contains elements that are widely shared and common but are placed and enacted in a new context of non-monetary exchange in a non-domestic site. Thus I argue that Brīvbode offers to practitioners somehow familiar, yet new ways of relating to objects and people (Holmes, 2018).

### 33. Tool result: search_text

Exact matches

1. Source: The (im)possibilities of circular consumption: Producing and performing circular clothing consumption in retail and household settings (#8EVNK8), Réka Tölg, p. 23
  Context:
    #T6KQ92 Introduction
      #E4Z6F8 The interdisciplinary research field of circular consumption
        #PZ5SEK Sociological circular consumption research2
  Matching excerpt #BJDPW8:
      Firstly, sociological studies on circular consumption often draw on a practice theoretical approach to consumption (Shove et al., 2012; Warde, 2005) to study how different circular practices are enacted in everyday lives. As opposed to the behavioural approaches, they show that circular consumption does not simply rely on attitudes, motives or personality traits. Some of these practice theory-informed studies on circular consumption specifically map out what competences, materials and meanings (Shove et al., 2012) are necessary for the performance of the circular practices they investigate. For instance, Camacho-Otero et al. (2020) show how clothes-swapping practices are enabled by the interlinking of different materialities (e.g., the clothes, the venue, tokens), competences (e.g., event organising and establishing rules, selecting and preparing clothes to bring), as well as meanings (e.g., environmental benefits, community-building, but also meanings associated with used clothes). Furthermore, connected to the single-use plastic packaging challenge of the CE, Rabiu and Jaeger-Erben (2024) illustrate the difficulties involved with giving up plastic due to its centrality in mundane everyday doings. According to the authors, to give up plastic packaging, for instance, through package-free shopping, consumers need materials, such as reusable containers and unpackaged products, competencies in weighing and handling the produce, and lastly meanings such as eco-friendly values.

2. Source: Care and circularity: how the enactment of care enables and shapes the circular consumption of clothing (#AVNZLE), Christian Fuentes, Réka Tölg, p. 1
  Context:
    #S6NTVJ Care and circularity: how the enactment of care enables and shapes the circular consumption of clothing
      #QR437R Introduction
  Matching excerpt #A42MYV:
      Circular consumption involves consumer practices that work towards extending product lifetimes and enabling multiple cycles of use and recycling (Mylan et al, 2016; Hobson, 2020; Sutcliffe, 2022). Accordingly, in a circular system, consumers need to acquire, use, look after and part with products in ways that recirculate or reuse materials and minimise waste. Therefore, consumers are asked to care for their belongings (Ackermann, 2018; Jaeger-Erben et al, 2021; Rabiú and Jaeger-Erben, 2022) while at the same time care for the environment and future generations. Although seldom made explicit, consumer care is thus built into the circular economy project. For example, consumers are asked to care for packaging – recycle, wash and fold it – and sort it into the appropriate bins. Consumers are also asked to care for food, plan their food shopping, ‘rescue’ food close to its expiration date and make meals from leftovers to reduce food waste. Furthermore, as this article will explore in more detail, they are urged to repair their clothes, wash them sparingly, and protect them from wear and tear. All these prompts are aimed at not only caring for consumption objects but also at caring for the environment, the welfare of distant others and future generations.

3. Source: Care and circularity: how the enactment of care enables and shapes the circular consumption of clothing (#AVNZLE), Christian Fuentes, Réka Tölg, p. 0
  Context:
    #S6NTVJ Care and circularity: how the enactment of care enables and shapes the circular consumption of clothing
  Matching excerpt #R3BCC8:
      In a circular system, consumers need to acquire, use, look after and part with products in ways that recirculate or reuse materials and minimise waste. Thus, although seldom made explicit, consumer care is built into the circular economy project. In this article, we aim to contribute to the emerging body of sociological work on circular consumption by foregrounding the role of care in the performance of circular clothing practices. Theoretically, we combine previous care literature with theories of practice. The analysis builds on an ethnographically inspired study of 24 households' circular clothing consumption. Our findings suggest that accomplishing circularity in everyday clothing consumption involves developing care awareness and taking on responsibility for the care of clothes as a way of caring for distant others. We also show that multiple care struggles and care dilemmas complicate the accomplishment of care in this context. The article ends by outlining the possible contributions of developing an awareness and understanding of how care and circular consumption are intertwined.

4. Source: Circular Consumption Practices as Matters of Care (#BQ2W57), Elina Närvänen, Malla Mattila, Nina Mesiranta, Outi Koskinen, p. 0
  Context:
    #NLZXGJ Circular Consumption Practices as Matters of Care
      #QC3DNJ Abstract
  Matching excerpt #BWGPV6:
      While a circular economy (CE) paradigm shift has gained significant momentum among academics, practitioners, and policymakers, theory regarding its social aspects remains scant , especially theory based on an ethical, micro-level perspective . Circular consumption, referring to those consumption practices that aim to extend the lifetimes of objects and materials, involves ethical considerations. However, everyday circular consumption and its ethics have not gained a foothold in the CE literature . This article builds on the existing circular consumption literature by drawing insights from the posthuman feminist theorising of care, shifting the focus of care from humans to the complex relations between humans and nonhumans and conceptualising circular consumption practices as matters of care . This conceptualisation, which follows a thinking-with-theory approach, is based on empirical material constructed in two research projects focusing on frontrunner consumers in terms of circular consumption in Finland: food waste reduction and circular clothing consumption. We identify circular consumption as care by introducing three distinct perspectives: care as tinkering, care as affective practices, and care as ethico-political action . We show that approaching circular consumption practices as matters of care, while not always easy or straightforward, is an attempt to make consumption better : more attentive, inclusive, durable, and enjoyable . Our findings emphasise the interconnected nature of circular practices, the constant performativity of circular consumption, and nonhumans as crucial stakeholders in care relations. Consequently, we offer an alternative to technocentric CE perspectives and a way to promote a sustainable world through care.

5. Source: On Materiality and Meaning: Ethnographic Engagements with Reuse, Repair & Care (#CUWPC9), Cindy Isenhour, Joshua Reno, p. 5
  Context:
    #3YJ9P3 On Materiality and Meaning: Ethnographic Engagements with Reuse, Repair &amp; Care
      #N5NAHT Conclusion
  Matching excerpt #Y8TS2B:
      As we hope the contributions to this special issue make clear, reuse and repair are about much more than economic efficiency. The recent emergence of advocacy for reuse marks a significant improvement upon our shockingly wasteful linear production-consumption system and makes a lot of sense in the context of simultaneous economic and environmental crises of modernity. But, we ought not to forget that reuse is also fundamentally about care and the investment of human labor and affective energy in the redefinition of value, not just attached to objects but also to social relations. While these practices are old, contemporary circular economy logics so heavily trained on calculations of energy and materials efficiencies, risk missing this important element of value and, without more reflection, subordinate societal interests to the logic of the market, rather than the inverse.

Approximate matches

1. Source: Repair for a Broken Economy: Lessons for Circular Economy from an International Interview Study of Repairers (#4YG3VP), Duncan McLaren, Johan Niskanen, Jonas Anshelm, p. 0
  Context:
    #LVPP8A Repair for a Broken Economy: Lessons for Circular Economy from an International Interview Study of Repairers
      #C4SLJ8 1. Introduction
  Score: 0.678
  Related excerpt #T4V82Y:
      The idea of introducing a more circular economy (CE) to meet the current sustainability crisis is gaining traction in policy, industry, and academia globally [1–3]. At its core, the idea of a CE is built on the reuse, recycling, and repair of materials and products through more circular models of production and consumption. Often CE is depicted as a butterfly diagram where the “wings” of the butterfly are made up of and represent biological cycles (e.g., farming and regeneration of biological nutrients) on the one side and technical cycles (e.g., maintain, reuse, refurbish, and recycle) on the other side. The focus in this article is on repair—which is commonly understood in CE as an inner technological circle meaning that repair activities are understood to be integral to increased circularity of materials. Whilst CE is hailed as a transformational model in the way humans produce and consume material and immaterial goods [4,5], we argue that CE discourses reproduce a set of simplified cultural and sociological presumptions about repair that are not only likely to impede the uptake of more circular behaviors, but also to undermine the overall objectives of a CE in terms of supporting sustainability and justice.

2. Source: Critical Review of the role of Repair Cafes (#K52UPR), Mette Alberg Mosgaard, Rikke Marie Moalem, p. 15
  Context:
    #2LH93T A Critical Review of the Role of Repair Cafés in a Sustainable Circular Transition
      #S485GL 4. Content Results and Analysis
        #LDAEN2 4.2. Actors: Who, and Why (Not) Do They Engage in Repair at Repair Cafés
          #K389GH 4.2.4. Purpose(s)
            #ALDVYT Service Aspects
  Score: 0.692
  Related excerpt #MTBRMD:
      repair services' [31] with 'professional assistance' [54], and workshops with experts [31]. In addition, repair cafés provide materials and tools [46], and a 'space', which together provide a valuable service to the community and the public [46,68]. In line with the service aspect, one article addressed repair cafés as a 'sharing platform' in line with, e.g., a Library of Things, Retroy and the Fixit clinic [46]. However, the article stresses that the service provided can, and should be, distinguished from other types of sharing platforms. Finally, repair cafés are addressed as 'third party service providers' and 'autonomous loop operators' in relation to CE [69] (p. 1263), particularly in relation to slowing and closing product and related material loops, as those require service operations, such as repair. However, due to the informal character of the relationship among actors in this laissez-faire architecture, a central coordinator fails to receive this feedback. This is noted as a 'lost opportunity' [69], as valuable knowledge is being lost.

3. Source: Critical Review of the role of Repair Cafes (#K52UPR), Mette Alberg Mosgaard, Rikke Marie Moalem, p. 1
  Context:
    #2LH93T A Critical Review of the Role of Repair Cafés in a Sustainable Circular Transition
  Score: 0.684
  Related excerpt #BVX8RW:
      Keywords: repair café; actors; product repair; sustainability; circular economy

4. Source: The Political Economy of Circular Economies: Lessons from Future Repair Scenario Deliberations in Sweden (#LB5ACW), Duncan McLaren, Johan Niskanen, p. 0
  Context:
    #PA8RHN The Political Economy of Circular Economies: Lessons from Future Repair Scenario Deliberations in Sweden
      #7H49AG Abstract
  Score: 0.684
  Related excerpt #HAFB8W:
      Keywords Circular economy · Sociology of repair · Political economy; Scenario workshop

5. Source: Material culture and the circular economy (#R69WZQ), Elizabeth Shove, Jenny Rinkinen, p. 0
  Context:
    #J8TDC3 Material culture and the circular economy
      #7H9E6C KEYWORDS
  Score: 0.701
  Related excerpt #EUZWN7:
      circular economy, material culture, object relations, repair, sharing, re-use, material flow

### 34. Tool result: search_text

Exact matches

1. Source: Gift or commodity: what changes hands in the U.S. garage sale? (#4UEQN8), Gretchen M. Herrmann, p. 16
  Context:
    #QF9LBR gift or commodity: what changes hands in the U.S. garage sale?
      #VH6RAE conclusions
  Matching excerpt #CLGEQQ:
      The phenomenon of garage sale goods has many levels and exhibits much complexity; it embodies rationalized exchange and expressive interpersonal ties. Giving money as a gift (Zelizer 1994) is similarly complex. Money is the medium of market exchange and yet, as a gift, it effects a tie of more intimate social relationship; thus, the boundaries of using money as a gift must be carefully constructed. In the same vein, the boundaries of each garage sale exchange must be carefully examined to determine the degree of gift giving involved. Garage sale goods may be either gifts or commodities, readily shifting between the two poles, or may embody some features of both categories at the same time. The tremendous flexibility in attaching prices to objects in the garage sale allows for great variability in the construction of commodity-like or giftlike exchange between transactors. This malleability is further complicated by the ability of shoppers to influence prices through bargaining and through the sharing of an array of personal information and sentiments with sellers, sometimes in the place of money. In each transaction, buyer and seller actively construct meanings about the exchange that are carried by the objects, rendering them at times hybrid varieties of "inalienable commodity." This form of trade consequently serves to counter the characterization of gift and commodity as mutually exclusive. In addressing exchange theory, Valeri finds it helpful to provide "some space for the mutual determination and modification of commodity and non-commodity forms in their concrete historical entanglements" (1994:20), which the garage sale example amply provides.

2. Source: Gift or commodity: what changes hands in the U.S. garage sale? (#4UEQN8), Gretchen M. Herrmann, p. 0
  Context:
    #QF9LBR gift or commodity: what changes hands in the U.S. garage sale?
  Matching excerpt #FJBD6X:
      The U.S. garage sale incorporates elements of both gift and commodity exchange in a dynamic tension, one that complicates traditional characterizations of gift and commodity as oppositional and mutually exclusive. Despite its apparently marketlike mechanisms, much of garage sale exchange also partakes of the character of gift giving. The elasticity in pricing in this home-based exchange allows sellers to take social relations into account, so that objects that change hands become hybrid varieties of "inalienable commodities." [gift, commodity, informal exchange, garage sales, United States]

3. Source: Gift or commodity: what changes hands in the U.S. garage sale? (#4UEQN8), Gretchen M. Herrmann, p. 8
  Context:
    #QF9LBR gift or commodity: what changes hands in the U.S. garage sale?
      #DJAM35 garage sale goods as gifts
  Matching excerpt #DDLPMJ:
      There are several ways in which things that change hands in the garage sale more closely resemble gifts than commodities. The primary giftlike characteristic—that goods, having been used, carry something of their original owners—colors all aspects of garage sale exchange, so that even the most alienated of commercial exchanges is tempered by this element of inalienability. Because garage sale goods are possessions and as such are imbued with the identities of their owners, all garage sale exchange to some extent complicates mutually exclusive notions of gift and commodity by generating a more or less "inalienable commodity." The inalienability is enhanced when sellers transmit personal sentiments and memories along with the goods they sell. Yet other elements of garage sale exchange are also giftlike in the Maussian sense. The second giftlike element of garage sale goods I will address is their giveaway prices. The token payment, one that can be influenced by bargaining, renders many of these goods "semigifts." Finally, there is the aspect of outright giving, which occurs not only on the part of the sellers but also on that of shoppers when they give their garage sale purchases away as gifts. Sellers may also make gifts of the proceeds from their sales to various worthy causes. In all the several combinations and inflections of these aspects of garage sale exchange, the social relations are more binding among the participants than those typically generated in commodity exchange. Furthermore, in many exchanges, both the buyer and seller actively construct new meanings and sentiments about objects, rendering them inalienable at the very moment of monetary exchange, an obvious complication of oppositional gift-commodity models.

4. Source: Gift or commodity: what changes hands in the U.S. garage sale? (#4UEQN8), Gretchen M. Herrmann, p. 2
  Context:
    #QF9LBR gift or commodity: what changes hands in the U.S. garage sale?
      #FJYHT6 gift and commodity
  Matching excerpt #K8Y4TL:
      Appadurai attempts to mute the tension between gift and market exchange through the construction of what he terms the “politics of value,” focusing on how exchange creates value. The garage sale case is a good illustration of his thesis that “it is the things-in-motion that illuminate their human and social context” (1986:5), and his observation that objects go in and out of commodity status is most apt in the garage sale context. The relative emphasis of his essay on status relations, political concerns, and objects themselves, however, does less to elucidate the garage sale situation, and Appadurai’s theory of the social life of things also obscures the distinction between gift and commodity. Although Nicholas Thomas (1991) acknowledges that the gift-commodity distinction has become exaggerated and polarized and is struck by the extent to which objects can be decontextualized and transformed in differing contexts according to Appadurai’s formulation, he takes Appadurai to task for relinquishing the gift-commodity distinction: “To abandon the distinction altogether seems to obscure precisely the factors which mark the biographies of objects and sometimes break them apart through recontextualization and transgression” (1991:29). Like Thomas, I find the distinction a fruitful way of elucidating the social relations of particular exchanges, especially in the West where garage sale actors construct their experience of exchange within the context of these general templates.

5. Source: Gift or commodity: what changes hands in the U.S. garage sale? (#4UEQN8), Gretchen M. Herrmann, p. 16
  Context:
    #QF9LBR gift or commodity: what changes hands in the U.S. garage sale?
      #VH6RAE conclusions
  Matching excerpt #TBP2K2:
      In this article I have offered a contribution to understanding the complexity and differentiation of exchange and its social relations in the United States. The case of the garage sale shows that the contours and meanings of exchange are more nuanced than those permitted when the models of gift and market exchange are essentialized (see, e.g., Carrier 1992a, 1992b). It also counters the view of the West as solely a commodity system, one where autonomous actors attempt to maximize their positions with no regard to social ties or personal sentiments. While some of this behavior does occur in the garage sale, much of it is socially engaged and highly personal. The analysis also maintains the utility of the dichotomy between gift and commodity, which some—such as Appadurai (1986) and Davis (1992)—would prefer to reformulate. Parry (1986) reminds us that the distinction between gift and commodity is actually an invention of the West, one that, I argue, remains an appropriate model for American ethnography, providing an insightful paradigm for analyzing social relations. This dichotomy also underpins the discourse of garage sale participants about the meanings and value of their transactions. In other words, the gift-commodity distinction is an emic contrast, part of contemporary American culture, as well as an analytic one.

Approximate matches

1. Source: Gift or commodity: what changes hands in the U.S. garage sale? (#4UEQN8), Gretchen M. Herrmann, p. 0
  Context:
    #QF9LBR gift or commodity: what changes hands in the U.S. garage sale?
  Score: 0.667
  Related excerpt #FJBD6X:
      The U.S. garage sale incorporates elements of both gift and commodity exchange in a dynamic tension, one that complicates traditional characterizations of gift and commodity as oppositional and mutually exclusive. Despite its apparently marketlike mechanisms, much of garage sale exchange also partakes of the character of gift giving. The elasticity in pricing in this home-based exchange allows sellers to take social relations into account, so that objects that change hands become hybrid varieties of "inalienable commodities." [gift, commodity, informal exchange, garage sales, United States]

2. Source: Gift or commodity: what changes hands in the U.S. garage sale? (#4UEQN8), Gretchen M. Herrmann, p. 15
  Context:
    #QF9LBR gift or commodity: what changes hands in the U.S. garage sale?
      #VH6RAE conclusions
  Score: 0.647
  Related excerpt #KQJAZS:
      It would be a mistake, however, to overemphasize the giftlike elements or to essentialize garage sale exchange as gift exchange. Shoppers and sellers operate with varying degrees of economic rationalization and many exchanges are quite commercial. Some sellers operate mini-garage sale businesses and other, more casual sellers try to maximize their profits; transactions in these cases may be little different from those in anonymous commercial establishments. In fact, sellers who try to extract as much money as possible from their goods appear more distasteful, even "slimy" in the language of one informant, than do proprietors of regular commercial establishments, in part because of the more intimate and noncommercial setting of the home and in part because of the convention of low garage sale prices. The garage sale, however, does provide the potential, coming as it does from the home, for more personalized social relations. In the final analysis, it is to the degree to which the garage sale is about connecting people, instead of solely about exchanging goods, that it acquires a gift-exchange

3. Source: Gift or commodity: what changes hands in the U.S. garage sale? (#4UEQN8), Gretchen M. Herrmann, p. 15
  Context:
    #QF9LBR gift or commodity: what changes hands in the U.S. garage sale?
      #VH6RAE conclusions
  Score: 0.643
  Related excerpt #BEVCC6:
      The garage sale can be seen as an alternate economic form embedded in the prevailing market system of advanced American capitalism. Following the market template, the garage sale involves the payment of money and the display and merchandising of goods. Given the current ascendancy of the market model, it is hard to envision a form of exchange that does not, at least superficially, conform to its dictates. Yet the market model also obscures the degree to which a more socially engaged style of exchange has developed in the garage sale. What appears on the surface to be the shopkeeper's self-interested activity and entrepreneurial spirit actually covers a range of exchange styles, from the saliently commercial and individualistic to a concern with the needs of others. Contrary to the market model, the garage sale encompasses acts of outright giving, partial giving, and the connection of people through the spirit of the gift in which something of the original owner is passed along. Garage sale goods are used as gifts, and the proceeds from sales are often donated to worthy causes. Yet, insofar as the garage sale does not take place within a face-to-face small society, these acts of giving are usually bestowed on strangers and do not automatically oblige countergifts. Thus the predominant style of reciprocity in the garage sale is generalized though balanced; even negative reciprocity may best characterize some exchanges nearer the commercial end of the spectrum. In many of these instances, garage sale exchange has identifiable giftlike characteristics.

4. Source: Gift or commodity: what changes hands in the U.S. garage sale? (#4UEQN8), Gretchen M. Herrmann, p. 10
  Context:
    #QF9LBR gift or commodity: what changes hands in the U.S. garage sale?
      #6GFCQW giveaway prices
  Score: 0.641
  Related excerpt #H6R39D:
      The tension between the commodity- and giftlike aspects of garage sale goods is clearly apparent in pricing practices. Insofar as there are going rates or a loosely defined garage sale market, sellers who price at the high end of those levels and above operate more closely to the logic of the marketplace and their goods are largely commodified. Other sellers, who for a variety of reasons "just want to get rid of things," price their possessions low, even for garage sale rates. At one sale I attended, everything—from sweaters to jewelry—went for ten cents. We could speak of such prices as being giftlike, even though money changes hands, because of what we would indeed call their giveaway amounts. Akerlof (1984), an economist, similarly explores the notion of partial gifts in U.S. economic exchange, with the difference that he focuses exclusively on labor exchanged for specific wagers.

5. Source: Gift or commodity: what changes hands in the U.S. garage sale? (#4UEQN8), Gretchen M. Herrmann, p. 7
  Context:
    #QF9LBR gift or commodity: what changes hands in the U.S. garage sale?
      #X9D8XP the garage sale setting
  Score: 0.636
  Related excerpt #MB8TKM:
      To a large extent, garage sale trade models market exchange (Gell 1992), masking the degree to which it is socially engaged or giftlike. It would be surprising if the garage sale, embedded in a market economy, did not reflect elements of the dominant system, as do other redistributive mechanisms such as church rummage sales, the Salvation Army store, and barter networks. 16 The market style of the garage sale facilitates the flow of goods in a society already characterized by a fragmented sense of community. As one seller notes about generosity in the garage sale: "It is a little bit stingier than giving. Giving you would say everything in a garage sale is for free. Come and take what you want. And actually, I don't think it would work." Her point is that, in an advanced capitalist context, some payment is needed to bring it into conformity with the

### 35. Tool result: search_text

Exact matches

1. Source: Household Recycling and Consumption Work (#4LST57), Kathryn Wheeler, Miriam Glucksmann, p. 144
  Context:
    #3SXB7F The Three Stages of Recycling Consumption Work
      #BRWHQV Conclusion
  Matching excerpt #KCKDVU:
      This chapter has offered useful insights into the difficulties that some consumers face when sorting their waste for recycling, with uncertainties about what can be recycled and how it ought to be distributed relating back to the wider system in which these decisions are shaped. Different household members can have quite different understandings and levels of competence when it comes to sorting their waste. Thus, we have identified some key practical barriers to recycling at home which may be of interest to those with responsibility for promoting recycling within society. Our research further shows that recycling consumption work tasks are differentiated by gender within the household, with women typically taking responsibility for sorting materials and men usually taking responsibility for their distribution to the kerbside/recycling centre. This finding challenges existing research which has claimed that women tend to carry the burden of sustainability policies within the household – although women are likely to spend more total time sorting and storing waste, with men's contribution related to the less regular task of distribution.

2. Source: The (im)possibilities of circular consumption: Producing and performing circular clothing consumption in retail and household settings (#8EVNK8), Réka Tölg, p. 41
  Context:
    #T6KQ92 Introduction
      #BDRQSR A practice theories approach to producing and performing circular consumption
        #SBM22B Circular consumption and the sociology of consumption
  Matching excerpt #XRXFBJ:
      involves “all work necessary for the purchase, use, re-use and disposal of consumption goods and services” (Wheeler and Glucksmann, 2015a: 37). This form of work undertaken by consumers is necessary for the completion as well as complementation of economic processes (Glucksmann, 2016). For instance, self-assembling furniture or installation of different software is necessary before some goods can be appropriated and appreciated. While consumption work is also part of linear economies, in a circular system, previous consumption work activities need to be scaled, and new practices need to be adopted (Hobson et al., 2021). For instance, even if a household already practised waste sorting and recycling according to circularity principles, they also need to enact further practices such as repairing broken belongings or sharing household tools. These increased levels of consumption work in the CE can further contribute to an unequal distribution of labour in terms of gender, class and employment forms (Hobson et al., 2021). Furthermore, it can be challenging to manage the time required for this increased work due to other personal or professional commitments, as the study of Sutcliffe (2022) demonstrates.

3. Source: Reuse practices and household consumption work (#V9QTJP), David M. Evans, Peter Jackson, Rorie Beswick-Parsons, p. 4
  Context:
    #YDJM7S Prácticas de reutilización y trabajo de consumo doméstico
      #ZZ3Y5X Literature review
  Matching excerpt #8EF7DD:
      Within the context of household waste management practices, economies of consumer recycling remain a predominant focus in household work. Through a variety of recycling tasks and activities including cleaning, squashing, disassembling, sorting, storing, and transporting items, Wheeler and Glucksmann (2015a) highlight the interdependencies of such work within the home, with work tasks conducted by other waste management actors/technologies (see also Chappells & Shove, 1999; Middha & Horne, 2024). Seldom recognized as 'work', but rather portrayed as 'a conscious green act' (Oates & McDonald, 2006, p. 421), recycling activities are often enacted through a moral economy of resource stewardship and environmental citizenship. They are also, however, embedded within relations of familial care, conventions of household order in keeping one's house tidy, norms of cleanliness and hygiene, and conveniences more generally (Pedersen & Manhece, 2020; Wheeler & Glucksmann, 2015b). Contributions such as Lindsay and colleagues on consumption work in low waste households, not only emphasize debates about sustainability and transition to a circular economy failing to recognize the amount of additional labour often required, but also the gender disparity in enacting this (Lindsay et al., 2024). They draw to attention the inclusion of 'sustainability labour' as part of existing household dynamics and gendered practices (see also Wheeler & Glucksmann, 2015a), in attempts to reduce plastic consumption involving new and additional modes of shopping and relying on other domestic activities, such as meal planning. These ideas build on earlier work by Organo, Head and Waitt, who found that women spent more time on sustainable practices than men and did so more often (Organo et al., 2013). Referring to waste management in apartment living, Horne et al. (2022) refer to the temporalities and rhythms of plastic waste being intensified due to space requirements, or lack thereof, with practices of sorting, recycling, and disposing of plastic waste important in maintaining household hygiene, convenience, and emotions of living in apartment spaces.

4. Source:  (#VWPB2S), Kathryn Wheeler, Miriam Glucksmann, p. 15
  Context:
    #DPNN52 ‘It’s kind of saving them a job isn’t it?’ The consumption work of household recycling
      #3PUVKE Recycling consumption work and societal divisions of labour
  Matching excerpt #GR39TD:
      Returning to each dimension of the SEFL framework; we have illustrated how consumers perform three distinct recycling tasks (dimension 1) – of supply, warehouse and distribution – which can have a knock-on effect for the processes of labour that precede/follow it. This technical division of recycling consumption work reveals a historically distinctive and specific division of labour which contrasts with arrangements in many countries, especially in the global south, where consumers do not sort their waste but rather this is done by waste pickers on vast waste dumps (Beecheno, 2013). Our research further shows that within the household, recycling consumption work tasks are differentiated by gender, with women typically taking responsibility for sorting materials and men usually taking responsibility for their distribution to the kerbside/recycling centre. This finding challenges existing research which has claimed that women carry the burden of sustainability policies within the household – although, women are likely to spend more total time sorting and storing waste, with men's contribution related to the less regular task of distribution.

5. Source:  (#VWPB2S), Kathryn Wheeler, Miriam Glucksmann, p. 1
  Context:
    #DPNN52 ‘It’s kind of saving them a job isn’t it?’ The consumption work of household recycling
      #DH3N7C Introduction
  Matching excerpt #F6HCEE:
      Specifically, this paper investigates the case of household recycling to highlight the importance of 'consumption work' for the organization of the waste management industry in England. By sorting their waste, consumers initiate a new economic process, providing feedstock (such as metals, plastics and paper) which in turn creates jobs/profits within the recycling, processing and manufacturing industries. Consumers also reconfigure public and private sector responsibilities when they sort their recyclable materials from general household waste, revealing the interdependency of consumption work with labour conducted under different socio-economic relations and across differing socio-economic domains. In illustrating the additional work consumers increasingly undertake in respect of recycling, we aim to open up 'consumption work' more generally as an important new empirical terrain for investigation within debates about the division of labour.

Approximate matches

1. Source: Reuse practices and household consumption work (#V9QTJP), David M. Evans, Peter Jackson, Rorie Beswick-Parsons, p. 4
  Context:
    #YDJM7S Prácticas de reutilización y trabajo de consumo doméstico
      #ZZ3Y5X Literature review
  Score: 0.758
  Related excerpt #8EF7DD:
      Within the context of household waste management practices, economies of consumer recycling remain a predominant focus in household work. Through a variety of recycling tasks and activities including cleaning, squashing, disassembling, sorting, storing, and transporting items, Wheeler and Glucksmann (2015a) highlight the interdependencies of such work within the home, with work tasks conducted by other waste management actors/technologies (see also Chappells & Shove, 1999; Middha & Horne, 2024). Seldom recognized as 'work', but rather portrayed as 'a conscious green act' (Oates & McDonald, 2006, p. 421), recycling activities are often enacted through a moral economy of resource stewardship and environmental citizenship. They are also, however, embedded within relations of familial care, conventions of household order in keeping one's house tidy, norms of cleanliness and hygiene, and conveniences more generally (Pedersen & Manhece, 2020; Wheeler & Glucksmann, 2015b). Contributions such as Lindsay and colleagues on consumption work in low waste households, not only emphasize debates about sustainability and transition to a circular economy failing to recognize the amount of additional labour often required, but also the gender disparity in enacting this (Lindsay et al., 2024). They draw to attention the inclusion of 'sustainability labour' as part of existing household dynamics and gendered practices (see also Wheeler & Glucksmann, 2015a), in attempts to reduce plastic consumption involving new and additional modes of shopping and relying on other domestic activities, such as meal planning. These ideas build on earlier work by Organo, Head and Waitt, who found that women spent more time on sustainable practices than men and did so more often (Organo et al., 2013). Referring to waste management in apartment living, Horne et al. (2022) refer to the temporalities and rhythms of plastic waste being intensified due to space requirements, or lack thereof, with practices of sorting, recycling, and disposing of plastic waste important in maintaining household hygiene, convenience, and emotions of living in apartment spaces.

2. Source:  (#VWPB2S), Kathryn Wheeler, Miriam Glucksmann, p. 0
  Context:
    #DPNN52 ‘It’s kind of saving them a job isn’t it?’ The consumption work of household recycling
      #RYEF8N Abstract
  Score: 0.811
  Related excerpt #8E67DA:
      Keywords: consumption work, division of labour, gender, recycling, waste

3. Source:  (#VWPB2S), Kathryn Wheeler, Miriam Glucksmann, p. 15
  Context:
    #DPNN52 ‘It’s kind of saving them a job isn’t it?’ The consumption work of household recycling
      #3PUVKE Recycling consumption work and societal divisions of labour
  Score: 0.79
  Related excerpt #GR39TD:
      Returning to each dimension of the SEFL framework; we have illustrated how consumers perform three distinct recycling tasks (dimension 1) – of supply, warehouse and distribution – which can have a knock-on effect for the processes of labour that precede/follow it. This technical division of recycling consumption work reveals a historically distinctive and specific division of labour which contrasts with arrangements in many countries, especially in the global south, where consumers do not sort their waste but rather this is done by waste pickers on vast waste dumps (Beecheno, 2013). Our research further shows that within the household, recycling consumption work tasks are differentiated by gender, with women typically taking responsibility for sorting materials and men usually taking responsibility for their distribution to the kerbside/recycling centre. This finding challenges existing research which has claimed that women carry the burden of sustainability policies within the household – although, women are likely to spend more total time sorting and storing waste, with men's contribution related to the less regular task of distribution.

4. Source:  (#VWPB2S), Kathryn Wheeler, Miriam Glucksmann, p. 9
  Context:
    #DPNN52 ‘It’s kind of saving them a job isn’t it?’ The consumption work of household recycling
      #ZWPCHP Socio-economic formation of household recycling labour
        #XQL9HF Technical division of labour
          #3Z2AVL The consumer as supplier
  Score: 0.758
  Related excerpt #HEEQGJ:
      Recycling consumption work requires effort and time, so must be integrated with other activities, such as working long hours and caring for children. Many of our respondents regularly sorted their materials for recycling, but preparation of materials (like washing) was done on a less regular basis, and often depended upon how consumers performed the next key stage of recycling consumption work – the warehousing of materials.

5. Source:  (#VWPB2S), Kathryn Wheeler, Miriam Glucksmann, p. 5
  Context:
    #DPNN52 ‘It’s kind of saving them a job isn’t it?’ The consumption work of household recycling
      #HTNRHE Economies of consumer recycling
  Score: 0.748
  Related excerpt #94G2W7:
      To say that cleaning, sorting and transporting recyclable packaging involves work for consumers may seem obvious. However, as Oates and McDonald (2006: 421) point out, recycling has seldom been recognized as 'work' and instead tends to be portrayed as ' a conscious green act '. Studies of gendered divisions of household recycling have recognized recycling as an additional chore to be integrated into existing domestic routines and found that women tend to carry the day-to-day burden of this work. But recycling is rarely conceptualized as a distinctive form of consumer work, its performance interdependent with wider processes of labour within waste management.

### 36. Assistant

Yes — comparing Brīvbode to other “junction” sites could make this argument really pop. The move is to say: **Brīvbode belongs to a family of sites where objects are reclassified and re-routed, but it has a distinctive configuration of openness, non-price, permanence, and care labour.**

Here are some useful comparators.

## 1. Thrift store / charity shop: the closest cousin

A thrift store is very similar to Brīvbode in that it receives divested household things and turns them into available goods again. Larsen describes thrift stores as receivers of divested household objects and sites for thrifty consumption, but his key move is to study the thrift store **as a place of work**, where thrift shapes marketing, pricing, sorting and organisational practice (Larsen, #XQQB38, #YWFYNY).

This is very close to your “labour of practice” point. The thrift store is not a passive channel: workers sort, value, price, display and decide what can circulate. Larsen says the ambition is often to move things out quickly rather than maximise value per item, and that staff invest time in sorting and using donations even when it may not be economically rational (#WG92ZK). That resonates strongly with Brīvbode’s fast-flow logic and open sorting (#SUZYLN).

**Difference:** thrift stores usually stabilise value through **price**. Brīvbode removes price, so valuation does not disappear; it becomes moral, relational and practical labour (#U7QJHT, #A2APRY). This is your key contrast.

> Thrift store: re-commodifies discards.  
> Brīvbode: decommodifies/revalues discards without price.

## 2. Online Freecycle: same non-monetary circulation, different visibility

Sally Eden’s Freecycle article is a great comparator because she explicitly says Freecycling blurs binaries: consumption/production, digital/material, mainstream/alternative (#8SBVHD). She also argues Freecycling is not simply “gift economy”; objects can circulate like quasi-commodities, in relatively impersonal and anonymous networks (#8A6B4Q).

This helps position Brīvbode: it shares Freecycle’s non-monetary logic, but unlike online Freecycle it puts bodies, objects, sorting, hesitation and overflow in the same room. Eden notes that Freecycle “Wanted” posts actively create hand-me-downs rather than passively receiving them (#73BLCE), and Brīvbode does something similar materially: it creates the conditions in which objects can become wanted.

**Difference:** Freecycle makes desire visible through posts; Brīvbode makes sorting, touching, judging, display and moral discomfort visible. Freecycle is a digital-material nexus; Brīvbode is a co-present moral-material nexus.

> Online Freecycle: desire is textualised.  
> Brīvbode: value is performed in the room.

## 3. Garage sale: gift/commodity hybridity, but still priced

Herrmann’s garage sale article is useful because it shows that even apparently market-like exchange can contain gift elements. Garage sale goods can be both gifts and commodities, shifting between the two; pricing is flexible and social relations can affect value (#FJBD6X, #CLGEQQ). She argues that buyers and sellers actively construct meanings about exchange, producing hybrid “inalienable commodities” (#CLGEQQ).

This is very relevant to Brīvbode because Brīvbode also destabilises the gift/commodity binary. But it does so by removing price almost completely. The garage sale uses **low and negotiable prices** to mediate between gift and commodity; Brīvbode uses **rules, restraint, care, and relational judgement**.

**Difference:** garage sale happens at the threshold of the household and market; Brīvbode happens at the threshold of household, charity, waste, retail, activism and care.

> Garage sale: commodity form softened by gift relations.  
> Brīvbode: gift/free form disciplined by exchange norms and care labour.

## 4. Repair café: another “practice with the lid off”

Repair cafés are a strong comparison because they also make competences visible. In repair cafés, broken objects, tools, experts, owners, repair skills, ecological meanings and community interaction gather in one place. One review describes repair cafés as providing tools, materials, expert assistance and “space,” functioning as a community service and as “autonomous loop operators” in circular economy terms (#MTBRMD).

Repair cafés are also sites where circularity depends on human skill and time, not just “closing loops.” Isenhour and Reno make the broader point beautifully: reuse and repair are not just economic efficiency but involve care, human labour and affective energy in redefining value (#Y8TS2B).

**Difference:** repair cafés centre repair competence around brokenness. Brīvbode centres valuation/circulation competence around surplus. In repair cafés, the question is “can this be fixed?” In Brīvbode, the question is “can this still be wanted, by someone, somehow?”

> Repair café: damaged object + repair competence + care.  
> Brīvbode: surplus object + valuation competence + care.

## 5. Household recycling: hidden consumption work made public

Wheeler and Glucksmann are useful because they show recycling as consumption work: cleaning, sorting, storing and transporting materials, often gendered and integrated into domestic routines. They find women typically take responsibility for sorting and men for distribution (#KCKDVU, #GR39TD). Recycling is often treated as a “conscious green act” rather than recognised as work (#94G2W7).

This is a very direct bridge to Brīvbode. Household recycling is usually hidden in kitchens, balconies, cupboards and bins. Brīvbode externalises a related kind of work: sorting, storing, evaluating, routing. But instead of sorting materials into municipal categories, volunteers sort things into possible futures.

**Difference:** recycling simplifies objects into material categories; Brīvbode keeps objects socially thick. A shirt is not only textile; it is gendered, sized, stained/not stained, stylish/outdated, useful for work/costume/child/relative, possible gift, possible shame.

> Recycling centre: separates material streams.  
> Brīvbode: negotiates object futures.

## 6. Clothing swap: structured exchange, event temporality

Clothing swaps are another obvious comparator. Tölg notes that circular clothing practices require interlinking materials, competences and meanings — clothes, venue, tokens, rules, selecting and preparing clothes, environmental meanings, community meanings and meanings attached to used clothes (#BJDPW8). This maps neatly onto Brīvbode.

But many clothing swaps are event-based and often more curated, sometimes using tokens or rules to maintain equivalence. Brīvbode is permanent, porous and uneven. Its exchange is not symmetrical; your note on terms already says “swapshop” overstates one-to-one exchange (#8S9QR2). That is very important.

**Difference:** clothing swap often tries to organise fairness; Brīvbode tolerates asymmetry.

> Clothing swap: event of regulated exchange.  
> Brīvbode: ongoing infrastructure of asymmetrical circulation.

## 7. Textile container / waste infrastructure: the anti-site

Textile containers are also a comparator, but as a negative case. They move things out of homes, but they hide almost all the practice elements. There is no public negotiation of value, no visible sorting, no face-to-face care, no visible recipient. Brīvbode depends on these infrastructures for overflow (#WW8YUW), but it also differs from them by refusing the fantasy of “away”: the things become visible in the shop (#SFAYYS).

**Difference:** textile containers black-box circulation; Brīvbode opens it.

> Textile container: moral relief through invisibility.  
> Brīvbode: moral relief through visible re-placement.

## A useful comparative frame

You could make a small analytical typology:

| Site | What it links | What stabilises value | What is hidden/visible |
|---|---|---|---|
| Thrift store | household surplus + charity + market | price, sorting, display | labour partly backstage |
| Online Freecycle | household surplus + local online publics | posts, requests, moderation | desire visible, sorting hidden |
| Garage sale | household surplus + market + gift | negotiable price, face-to-face talk | domestic stories visible |
| Repair café | broken objects + expertise + care | repair skill, tools, community | competence highly visible |
| Recycling system | household waste + municipal/material systems | categories, bins, schedules | labour hidden in household |
| Brīvbode | household surplus + retail + charity + waste + care + activism | norms, restraint, volunteer judgement, display | sorting, overflow, moral negotiation visible |

## The thesis-level claim

This comparison helps you say:

> Brīvbode belongs to a wider ecology of reuse sites, including thrift stores, Freecycle groups, garage sales, clothing swaps, repair cafés and recycling systems. What distinguishes it is the particular way it gathers and recombines elements from several of these sites without fully becoming any one of them. Like thrift stores, it sorts and revalues household surplus; like Freecycle, it enables non-monetary circulation; like garage sales, it troubles the gift/commodity divide; like repair cafés, it makes competence and care visible; like recycling, it depends on household sorting and routing labour. Yet Brīvbode’s permanence, co-presence and absence of price make the interaction of these elements unusually observable. It is therefore best understood not as a clearinghouse for things, but as a messy inter-practice node where materials, meanings and competences are detached, tested, re-linked and sent onward.

That is strong enough to anchor a conclusion subsection.

### 37. User

nice! i feel like the informant stuff i find most interesting is the stuff where the two kinda main leaders show these quite nuanced, pragmatic, non-ideological or even kind of maybe non-moral or something....

### 38. Assistant tool calls

#### Tool call: `search_text`

```json
{
  "document_id": "4V8VH7",
  "limit": 10,
  "query": "Rasa Viesturs pragmatic ideology moral practical overflow dirty space tolerance things"
}
```

### 39. Tool result: search_text

Exact matches

1. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange
  Context:
    #9XAKTW Keeping Things Moving: Brīvbode as a Practice of Circulation
      #PBFQ5E Where It Begins: The Site as Active Flow
  Matching paragraph #2TPNCM:
      The physical experience of overflow is a constant of volunteering, and bags often arrive faster than they can be processed. Often my task during shifts was to sort and put out children’s items. The boxes were already full, with piles forming, when I asked Rasa: 'Don't you feel like the things are just pouring down on you?' 'Yes, that's why I no longer have any tolerance for things. I realise I feel relief that these clothes are dirty, because there simply isn't any more space."

2. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange
  Context:
    #9XAKTW Keeping Things Moving: Brīvbode as a Practice of Circulation
      #PZH45P Not a Charity: The Moral Economy of Exchange
  Matching paragraph #7FPBUS:
      The imperative to keep things flowing to avoid overflow creates a certain tolerance in case of suspicion for such practices that formally fall outside Brīvbode’s rules. Reselling is not allowed, yet resellers are a suspected presence in Brīvbode. Volunteers mentioned situations when other visitors in Brīvbode have told them they have recognized their divested items at the Āgenskalns flea market the following weekend, which Rasa acknowledges as straightforwardly unpleasant. Yet because it is not always possible to prove, there is also a working accommodation, and Rasa’s position is one of pragmatic acceptance: “At the same time it seems – if he'll find the next user for the thing anyway, the function is fulfilled. Better they make a little money and the thing finds its person, than some hoarder takes it and the things end up in a container." She laughs: "Well, what choice do I have but to believe… We support small businesses."

3. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange
  Context:
    #9XAKTW Keeping Things Moving: Brīvbode as a Practice of Circulation
      #PZH45P Not a Charity: The Moral Economy of Exchange
  Matching paragraph #ERMRTL:
      Viesturs frames this ecologically: "Well, I could see them now as forest sanitarians." Without moral approval, the resellers, the hoarders and heavy-takers are reframed as functional elements as they clear out the accumulation of materials that would otherwise clog the space. Viesturs response to this is tactical curatorial competency: if a person he suspects is present at the shop, he often doesn’t put new items out on the shelves until they leave. This is his practical judgement and competency to “read the room” enacted situationally.

4. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange
  Context:
    #9XAKTW Keeping Things Moving: Brīvbode as a Practice of Circulation
      #A3X9XX Conclusion: Holding Together Incompatible Orientations
  Matching paragraph #M3VCHH:
      Freecycling in Brīvbode is sustained by a plurality of meanings that are compatible enough to coexist within the same space. Givers come to resolve the moral weight of unwanted things, the site’s permanence and visibility offer a trusted route for it. Takers come for dignity, experimentation, craft materials, social contact or simple convenience. The moral economy of exchange holds these heterogenous orientations together, as it is actively maintained against the pressure of resellers, heavy takers and people looking for charity, yet flexible enough to accommodate them when the alternative is overflow.

5. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange
  Context:
    #9XAKTW Keeping Things Moving: Brīvbode as a Practice of Circulation
      #2JEZWG Incoming Flow: Divestment From Home
  Matching paragraph #9CFEH4:
      Divestment is normalised and sought after. As Brīvbode manager Rasa observed: "Often we're simply a place to dump it all and go buy new things." In this view, Brīvbode appears as evidence of the structural conditions it aspires to address rather than a solution to them. There is tension present in Brīvbode between the swapshop as an alternative caring system and as a low-threshold overflow channel, and this tension does not resolve easily.

6. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange
  Context:
    #9XAKTW Keeping Things Moving: Brīvbode as a Practice of Circulation
      #2JEZWG Incoming Flow: Divestment From Home
  Matching paragraph #CWZ4L2:
      The ideal of a decluttered home functions both as cultural script and as embodied relief. Gundega puts on tidying consultant TV shows when she sorts at home, though the volume of advice tends to produce anxiety rather than clarity – no one person can remember it all. Viesturs is more pragmatic about decluttering methods: "I sense there are all sorts of methods and things, but it all seems like a luxury problem to me. Although maybe we should promote something like that – users of those methods would definitely supply us with better quality content."

7. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange
  Context:
    #9XAKTW Keeping Things Moving: Brīvbode as a Practice of Circulation
      #PBFQ5E Where It Begins: The Site as Active Flow
  Matching paragraph #WW8YUW:
      Within the material realm, Brīvbode is also embedded in and dependent upon broader infrastructural arrangements in order to manage the overflow it cannot absorb. The swapshop passes leftover textiles – in some estimates up to 30 % of the received flow (Akule et al. 2023) – to textile collection containers. The shop would not be viable if it had to cover the costs of regular unsorted waste collection. Also, off-season clothing such as winter coats that take a lot of space are stored in collaboration with charity organisations that have access to larger storage premises. Brīvbode can sustain – in a pragmatic, improvised manner – because of this material entanglement instead of trying to resolve the full material cycle on its own.

8. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange
  Context:
    #9XAKTW Keeping Things Moving: Brīvbode as a Practice of Circulation
      #W2WRDC What People Find Here: Plural Meanings of Acquisition
  Matching paragraph #Z4WUR2:
      A related strong negative meaning for second hand acquisition holds that these items carry the energy of previous – often deceased – owners. Several participants mentioned this trope but adjusted it to their practice. Viesturs, half-laughing, keeps the spiritual language but reframes it institutionally: "Others say that things have some kind of energy, or the aura of previous owners... We're able to transform that. In a way, Brīvbode is also like a kind of purgatory for things." With this adjusted meaning Brīvbode can function as a threshold space in the object biographies where the weight of previous owners can be released.

9. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange
  Context:
    #9XAKTW Keeping Things Moving: Brīvbode as a Practice of Circulation
      #PBFQ5E Where It Begins: The Site as Active Flow
  Matching paragraph #KMD7AJ:
      The space in Brīvbode is organised and decorated to resemble a retail environment with a DIY aesthetic – with hangers and shelves, and garments sometimes arranged by colour in the manner of the formerly operating secondhand chain Degas. The aesthetic is not fixed, however, as curatorial disagreements exist over the best presentation and each shift can leave its own curatorial mark. Rasa describes the tension between celebrating volunteer initiative and an aesthetic that, in her view, would communicate more value through similarity to a retail environment, leaving more space between things, signifying that quality items can be found in Brīvbode. "The emptier the shelves, the more people find," she notes. A different aesthetic displaying abundance of things on offer and decorating with plushies appeals to another volunteer. These mundane disagreements hold competing views about which meanings the practice of freecycling should enact. Material and meaning elements of the practice are not settled but are actively contested through performance.

10. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange
  Context:
    #9XAKTW Keeping Things Moving: Brīvbode as a Practice of Circulation
      #7Z8WUY Letting Go: Attachment Without Price
  Matching paragraph #Q9UXGA:
      The anchor of monetary investment is absent from acquisition in Brīvbode, and some participants articulate the shift in their own relationship to objects directly. Rasa describes how price normally operates as a binding force which Brīvbode alleviates: “You no longer have that heaviness around a thing – I bought it for €40, how can I now throw it out or give it away, not wear it. Now it's simply: if it doesn't suit, bring it back. Try it – it works, or it doesn't. It's much more free." She is pragmatic about this beyond Brīvbode too: “No matter where the garment comes from, there is that percentage of things I take or buy or acquire for myself that I always know won't get worn regardless of whether I've paid money for them or not. So the safest thing to do is to invest as little as possible, so that afterwards there are fewer regrets." This is a recalibration of what kinds of commitment acquisition is.

Approximate matches

1. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange
  Context:
    #9XAKTW Keeping Things Moving: Brīvbode as a Practice of Circulation
      #GTJY22 Quiet or Reflected Sustainability?
  Score: 0.514
  Related paragraph #M9983A:
      Rasa answers similarly when I enquire about the environmental and sustainability aspects of Brīvbode: “Everything else is so intense… It has remained somehow, in a way, a little secondary." While the sustainability framing remains present – and is foregrounded e.g. when writing project funding applications or designing info materials – it does not need to be actively held by every practitioner in every performance. For both Viesturs and Rasa philosophical meaning-making has receded. This is what Smith and Jehlička (2013) describe as quiet sustainability: practices that produce sustainable outcomes without requiring their practitioners to hold or articulate sustainability as a motivation.

2. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange
  Context:
    #9XAKTW Keeping Things Moving: Brīvbode as a Practice of Circulation
      #PZH45P Not a Charity: The Moral Economy of Exchange
  Score: 0.506
  Related paragraph #ERMRTL:
      Viesturs frames this ecologically: "Well, I could see them now as forest sanitarians." Without moral approval, the resellers, the hoarders and heavy-takers are reframed as functional elements as they clear out the accumulation of materials that would otherwise clog the space. Viesturs response to this is tactical curatorial competency: if a person he suspects is present at the shop, he often doesn’t put new items out on the shelves until they leave. This is his practical judgement and competency to “read the room” enacted situationally.

3. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange
  Context:
    #9XAKTW Keeping Things Moving: Brīvbode as a Practice of Circulation
      #7Z8WUY Letting Go: Attachment Without Price
  Score: 0.482
  Related paragraph #LG8X4N:
      "Pieķeršanās jautājums tiek risināts. Viņš ir procesā." [The question of attachment is being worked on. It's in process.] "Brīvbode palīdz, tā teikt, šim procesam attīstīties." [Brīvbode helps, so to speak, this process to develop.] "Šobrīd jau ir uz robežas, tāpēc es saku, ka ir jāatvadās jau no tā, kas jau ir atrasts." [I'm already at the edge now, that's why I say one has to start saying goodbye even to what one has already found.] Māra is explicitly working on her attachment to things – she names it as a problem and frames it as ongoing work. Brīvbode as a tool for developing the capacity to let go. This is the freeshop as infrastructure for a personal practice of detachment. It is a positive framing of the same phenomenon that Rasa describes as generating excess – from Māra's perspective, having a route makes it easier to release.

4. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange
  Context:
    #9XAKTW Keeping Things Moving: Brīvbode as a Practice of Circulation
      #2JEZWG Incoming Flow: Divestment From Home
  Score: 0.482
  Related paragraph #YNY54V:
      The threshold of acceptability in Brīvbode is negotiated situationally, and this uncertainty can become a source of tension. Aiga described how she continues wearing clothing that is slightly pilled and normally uses dry food items past their expiry date – her own standards of what remains usable are linked to the meaning of genuine need but she cannot know in advance whether the items she brings to Brīvbode will be acknowledged as suitable. After receiving comments once about the quality of something she brought to Brīvbode, she prefers to not linger and leave her things quickly. The imagined receiver who accepts everything gives way to the real social encounter where standards are negotiated by someone else.

5. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange
  Context:
    #9XAKTW Keeping Things Moving: Brīvbode as a Practice of Circulation
      #GTJY22 Quiet or Reflected Sustainability?
  Score: 0.48
  Related paragraph #P6X2DJ:
      Also, as I argue, most participants come to Brīvbode for practical and social reasons instead of self-professed environmental conviction. This resonates with Smith and Jehlička’s (2013) concept of quiet sustainability, developed through their research on Czech urban gardeners: sustainable practices that can be widespread and effective but are not articulated in terms of sustainability by their practitioners. Smith and Jehlička contend that quiet sustainability is defined by practices “that result in beneficial environmental or social outcomes, that do not relate directly or indirectly to market transactions, and that are not represented by the practitioners as relating directly to environmental or sustainability goals. Cultures of sharing, repairing, gifting and bartering characterise quiet sustainability” (2013: 155). Latvia provides a productive context for this concept – several participants trace their orientations towards reuse and frugality to generational experience rather than sustainability aspiration. [..]

6. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange
  Context:
    #9XAKTW Keeping Things Moving: Brīvbode as a Practice of Circulation
      #GTJY22 Quiet or Reflected Sustainability?
  Score: 0.476
  Related paragraph #T6FW9N:
      In our conversation, Viesturs also positions Brīvbode against charity but from a different angle than Rasa: "Our goal is not to do good for people, I think. Our goal is to do good for the planet… Charity is always related to the meaning of poverty. I think that we need to emphasize the fun factor, the joy factor – swapping, changing clothes. That it's cool, fun, that it's joyful." He is not only describing the meanings that sustain his own participation, but also making a claim about which meanings should be foregrounded to recruit and retain more practitioners. This orientation is present in Brīvbode and practically expressed through organising photo shoots and parties, encouraging playfulness with clothing.

7. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange
  Context:
    #9XAKTW Keeping Things Moving: Brīvbode as a Practice of Circulation
      #A3X9XX Conclusion: Holding Together Incompatible Orientations
  Score: 0.475
  Related paragraph #M3VCHH:
      Freecycling in Brīvbode is sustained by a plurality of meanings that are compatible enough to coexist within the same space. Givers come to resolve the moral weight of unwanted things, the site’s permanence and visibility offer a trusted route for it. Takers come for dignity, experimentation, craft materials, social contact or simple convenience. The moral economy of exchange holds these heterogenous orientations together, as it is actively maintained against the pressure of resellers, heavy takers and people looking for charity, yet flexible enough to accommodate them when the alternative is overflow.

8. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange
  Context:
    #9XAKTW Keeping Things Moving: Brīvbode as a Practice of Circulation
      #PZH45P Not a Charity: The Moral Economy of Exchange
  Score: 0.465
  Related paragraph #7FPBUS:
      The imperative to keep things flowing to avoid overflow creates a certain tolerance in case of suspicion for such practices that formally fall outside Brīvbode’s rules. Reselling is not allowed, yet resellers are a suspected presence in Brīvbode. Volunteers mentioned situations when other visitors in Brīvbode have told them they have recognized their divested items at the Āgenskalns flea market the following weekend, which Rasa acknowledges as straightforwardly unpleasant. Yet because it is not always possible to prove, there is also a working accommodation, and Rasa’s position is one of pragmatic acceptance: “At the same time it seems – if he'll find the next user for the thing anyway, the function is fulfilled. Better they make a little money and the thing finds its person, than some hoarder takes it and the things end up in a container." She laughs: "Well, what choice do I have but to believe… We support small businesses."

9. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange
  Context:
    #9XAKTW Keeping Things Moving: Brīvbode as a Practice of Circulation
      #PBFQ5E Where It Begins: The Site as Active Flow
  Score: 0.463
  Related paragraph #KMD7AJ:
      The space in Brīvbode is organised and decorated to resemble a retail environment with a DIY aesthetic – with hangers and shelves, and garments sometimes arranged by colour in the manner of the formerly operating secondhand chain Degas. The aesthetic is not fixed, however, as curatorial disagreements exist over the best presentation and each shift can leave its own curatorial mark. Rasa describes the tension between celebrating volunteer initiative and an aesthetic that, in her view, would communicate more value through similarity to a retail environment, leaving more space between things, signifying that quality items can be found in Brīvbode. "The emptier the shelves, the more people find," she notes. A different aesthetic displaying abundance of things on offer and decorating with plushies appeals to another volunteer. These mundane disagreements hold competing views about which meanings the practice of freecycling should enact. Material and meaning elements of the practice are not settled but are actively contested through performance.

10. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange
  Context:
    #9XAKTW Keeping Things Moving: Brīvbode as a Practice of Circulation
      #QP7HMF Reading the Room: Norms and Competencies of Circulation
  Score: 0.456
  Related paragraph #CUBS5Q:
      "Man kaut kā mazāka vēlme ņemt visu, ko es redzu, par spīti tam, ka tas it kā ir tas 'brīv'... es kaut kā vairāk cienu to visu, kas tur ir izlikts." [I somehow feel less desire to take everything I see, despite the fact that it's all "free" – I somehow have more respect for everything that's laid out there.] Madara explicitly contrasts her response to freeness with others' – she imagines the hoarder who grabs because it's free, and positions herself as someone for whom freeness activates restraint rather than acquisition. This is the moral economy of freeshopping from the perspective of someone still in the early stages of learning the practice's norms. "Kādam varbūt tas 'brīv' rada vēlmi, ka viss ir bez maksas, tagad ņemam, ņemam, ņemam. Man tas nospēlē kaut kā tieši otrādāk." [For some, maybe "free" creates the urge that everything is free, so now we take, take, take. For me it works the opposite way.] "Es to uztveru kā apmaiņu. To vārdu 'brīvu' kaut kā izslēdzu... Sākumā tas tā bišķiņ mulsināja, ka esmu kā apzagusies." [I see it as exchange. I somehow switch off the word "free"… At first it was a bit confusing, as if I had stolen something.] This is competency acquisition: Madara is learning how to understand and inhabit the value regime of Brīvbode, and she narrates the process explicitly.

### 40. Assistant

Yes — and I think this is *very* important. The leaders are not interesting because they perfectly embody “the ideology” of Brīvbode. They are interesting because they **keep the thing working while constantly compromising with reality**.

I would not call it non-moral exactly. It is more like **anti-purist morality**, or **pragmatic ethics**, or **situated moral maintenance**. They clearly have values, but they do not apply them as rigid doctrine. They are not saying: “Brīvbode is morally pure, therefore X must happen.” They are saying: “Given this pile of stuff, this room, these people, these limits, what keeps things moving without betraying the point too much?”

That is gold.

## The leaders as “pragmatic operators” rather than ideologues

Rasa and Viesturs seem to function as people who translate ideals into workable practice. They hold the moral frame, but they also constantly bend it because material flow is unforgiving.

For example, reselling is formally against Brīvbode’s rules. A more ideological analysis would stop there: resellers violate the moral economy. But Rasa’s response is much more interesting. She says that if the reseller finds the next user, then “the function is fulfilled”; better that someone makes a little money and the item finds its person than that a hoarder takes it and it ends up in a container. Then she jokes: “We support small businesses” (#7FPBUS). This is not moral approval, but practical accommodation.

Viesturs does something similar when he calls resellers/hoarders/heavy-takers “forest sanitarians” — not because they are morally good, but because they clear accumulation that would otherwise clog the space (#ERMRTL). That is such a good phrase because it reframes “problem participants” as part of the ecology of the site.

So: **they are not suspending morality; they are subordinating moral judgement to the practical problem of circulation.**

## This is different from participant moralism

Some participants seem to narrate Brīvbode through moral self-positioning: restraint, respect, not being greedy, not taking everything because it is free (#CUBS5Q). That is important — it shows how people learn the moral economy.

But the leaders have a different register. They are not only asking, “Is this right?” They are asking:

- Will this keep things moving?
- Will it prevent overflow?
- Will it maintain the atmosphere?
- Will it avoid humiliating donors?
- Will it preserve enough trust?
- Will it stop one person from draining the best things?
- Will it make people want to come back?
- Will it make the space workable next Thursday?

That is not less moral; it is **operational morality**.

## The material flow forces pragmatism

The thing that makes this pragmatism necessary is overflow. Rasa’s line about feeling relief when clothes are dirty because then she can throw them out is incredibly revealing (#2TPNCM). It shows the limit of moral attachment to reuse. In theory, everything should be saved. In practice, dirt becomes mercy. Academic sentence of the day: dirt is an infrastructural permission to discard.

This matters because it prevents the thesis from romanticising Brīvbode. The leaders know Brīvbode can become a dumping place. Rasa explicitly says: “Often we’re simply a place to dump it all and go buy new things” (#9CFEH4). That is a very clear, non-idealised diagnosis. Brīvbode is both alternative infrastructure and overflow valve.

So one possible argument:

> The most experienced practitioners are the least ideologically innocent. Their commitment to Brīvbode is expressed not through purity, but through practical judgement about how much impurity the site can absorb while still functioning.

That is very strong.

## Viesturs as tactical curator

Viesturs also seems to embody “reading the room” as a leadership practice. If someone suspected of taking too much is present, he may simply not put new things out until they leave (#ERMRTL). That is not a rule, not a moral lecture, not formal exclusion. It is tactical timing. It is curatorial power exercised situationally.

This is exactly your “competences shown rather than priced” thing. His competence is not just knowing materials. It is knowing when to release value into the room.

You could call this:

- **situational curation**
- **tactical withholding**
- **pragmatic boundary work**
- **flow management**
- **moral triage**

“Moral triage” might be especially useful: deciding what matters most under conditions of overload.

## Rasa as realist of value and attachment

Rasa also seems to have a very grounded, almost de-romanticised understanding of attachment. Her point that Brīvbode removes the heaviness of price — “I bought it for €40, how can I now throw it out” — is not just anti-capitalist rhetoric. It is practical psychology: if you invested less, you regret less; if it does not work, bring it back (#Q9UXGA).

That is not moral purity. It is a pragmatic reconfiguration of commitment. Brīvbode helps people acquire with lower stakes and let go with lower shame.

And her display logic — “the emptier the shelves, the more people find” — is also very practical (#KMD7AJ). It shows she understands that value is not inherent in the object; it is produced through spatial arrangement, perception, and attention. Again: not ideology, but experienced infrastructural intelligence.

## This could become a beautiful section: “Pragmatic moral economy”

You already have “moral economy of exchange,” but the leaders make it more subtle. The moral economy is not a fixed code. It is a **pragmatic moral economy** held together through adjustments, jokes, tactical delays, and tolerated contradictions.

Something like:

> Among the most experienced organisers, Brīvbode’s moral economy is not articulated as a strict ideology. Rasa and Viesturs repeatedly frame problematic practices — reselling, heavy taking, dumping — through pragmatic rather than condemnatory terms. This does not mean that moral distinctions disappear. Rather, they are recalibrated against the material necessity of keeping things moving. What matters is not only whether a participant acts according to the ideal of exchange, but whether their actions help or hinder circulation, overflow management, and the livability of the space.

## “Non-moral” maybe becomes “post-purist”

I’d avoid “non-moral” because their work is saturated with values. But it is definitely not moralistic. Possible terms:

- **non-moralising**
- **pragmatic ethics**
- **post-purist moral economy**
- **situated ethics of circulation**
- **maintenance ethics**
- **moral pragmatism**
- **ethics of keeping-going**
- **care as practical accommodation**
- **improvised moral ecology**

My favourite for your case: **an ethics of keeping things moving**.

It captures the practical and ethical at once.

## The leaders show the limits of “alternative” as a category

This also helps with your larger argument. Brīvbode is not interesting because it perfectly rejects markets, charity, waste, or consumerism. It is interesting because the leaders know it cannot fully reject them.

- It borrows retail aesthetics (#KMD7AJ).
- It depends on waste infrastructure (#WW8YUW).
- It tolerates quasi-market actors when they keep things moving (#7FPBUS).
- It resists charity framing but sometimes accommodates need (#M3VCHH).
- It produces sustainability outcomes while sustainability becomes “secondary” in daily operation (#M9983A).

So the leaders are the people who know the alternative is made from compromised materials. Literally and theoretically.

## Polished paragraph

> The most experienced organisers do not present Brīvbode as a morally pure alternative to markets, charity or waste systems. Their accounts are strikingly pragmatic. Rasa recognises that Brīvbode can function as a place where people “dump it all and go buy new things” (#9CFEH4), and even reselling, formally against the rules, is sometimes accommodated if it keeps objects moving toward another user (#7FPBUS). Viesturs similarly reframes resellers, hoarders and heavy takers as “forest sanitarians” who clear material accumulation, while responding tactically by withholding new items when necessary (#ERMRTL). These are not non-moral positions, but non-moralising ones. They show an ethics of keeping things moving: moral judgement is continually recalibrated in relation to overflow, space, volunteer capacity, and the practical need to maintain circulation. In this sense, Brīvbode’s leaders reveal the swapshop not as a pure moral project, but as a pragmatic moral-material infrastructure held together through compromise.

That paragraph is alive. It has your interesting stuff in it.

### 41. User

i like this keeping things moving...

### 42. Assistant

Yes — **“keeping things moving” is doing a lot of good work for you**. It is concrete, emic-feeling, theoretically expandable, and not too morally shiny. It lets Brīvbode be neither utopia nor dumping ground, but a practice of *ongoing practical mediation*.

I think it can become one of the thesis’s core analytic phrases.

## Why it works

“Keeping things moving” names several layers at once:

1. **Material flow**  
   Bags arrive, shelves fill, objects disappear, overflow threatens. Brīvbode has to keep materials from clogging the site (#2TPNCM, #3USBHB).

2. **Practice-theoretical linking**  
   Materials, meanings and competences have to be repeatedly re-linked. Circulation only happens if someone sorts, displays, evaluates, withholds, accepts, refuses, redirects.

3. **Moral pragmatism**  
   The leaders tolerate imperfect actors if they help movement: resellers may be unpleasant, but if they find the next user, “the function is fulfilled” (#7FPBUS). Viesturs’s “forest sanitarians” phrase captures this beautifully (#ERMRTL).

4. **Anti-purity**  
   It avoids overclaiming that Brīvbode transforms capitalism or solves waste. It says: this place keeps things from settling too quickly into waste, hoard, shame, or commodity.

5. **Care without sentimentality**  
   Care is not only tenderness toward objects. Sometimes care is sorting fast, refusing things, moving them on, letting dirty things become discardable. Rasa’s relief at dirty clothes is a tiny masterpiece of anti-romantic care (#2TPNCM).

## It can be your chapter / conclusion hinge

You already have the chapter title “Keeping Things Moving,” and I’d lean into it harder. It can mean:

> Brīvbode’s central achievement is not that it purifies exchange from market logic, nor that it guarantees sustainable outcomes, but that it keeps objects, meanings and obligations from getting stuck.

Things can get stuck in:

- homes as clutter;
- wardrobes as guilt;
- monetary value as regret;
- sentimental attachment;
- waste categories;
- charity stigma;
- reseller suspicion;
- overflowing shelves;
- moral judgement.

Brīvbode creates routes around stuckness.

## Theoretically, it links Shove + Bohlin/Appelgren + consumption work

Shove: practices persist through repeated linking.  
Bohlin/Appelgren: circulation deserves attention beyond the moment of transaction (#SP2DW4).  
Consumption work: movement requires labour, often hidden and gendered.  
Your ethnography: movement requires pragmatic, situated judgement.

Possible sentence:

> “Keeping things moving” names the practical labour through which Brīvbode prevents household surplus from settling into waste, clutter, hoard, shame or commodity, and instead keeps open the possibility of further use.

That’s very thesis-y, in a good way.

## “Moving” is not innocent

Important: movement is not automatically good. Your leaders know this. Brīvbode can also keep consumerism moving. Rasa’s line that people “dump it all and go buy new things” is the crucial counterpoint (#9CFEH4). So the phrase should carry ambivalence:

> Keeping things moving is both Brīvbode’s ethical promise and its compromise.

Because movement can mean:

- recirculation and extended use;
- relief from attachment;
- avoidance of waste;
- but also enabling more acquisition;
- absorbing surplus from overconsumption;
- outsourcing household disorder to volunteers.

That ambivalence makes the thesis stronger.

## Nice formulation

> Brīvbode’s practical ethic is not purity but movement. Its organisers do not always resolve whether an object is gift, waste, commodity, charity or care; instead, they work to keep it from becoming stuck. This involves sorting, displaying, redirecting, tolerating, refusing and occasionally discarding. “Keeping things moving” is therefore both a material task and a moral-practical orientation: it sustains circulation while exposing the compromises on which circulation depends.

## Another sharper one

> The swapshop works less by enforcing a single moral order than by preventing any one order from fully closing around things. Price does not fix value; charity does not fully define the recipient; waste does not immediately claim the object; attachment does not have to be final. Brīvbode keeps things moving between these possible statuses.

That is *very* good for your “not clearinghouse / not simply practice / messy inter-practice node” argument.

## Possible final-conclusion paragraph

> What Brīvbode ultimately shows is that circularity is not a loop that closes by itself. It has to be kept moving. This movement depends on a semi-public infrastructure where objects can be detached from household routines, reclassified through sorting and display, and made available for new uses. It also depends on pragmatic judgement: knowing when to insist on norms, when to tolerate imperfect circulation, when to withhold desirable things, when to discard, and when to let contradictory meanings coexist. Keeping things moving is therefore not merely a logistical task but the central moral-material practice of Brīvbode. It is also where the limits of circularity become visible: the work is unevenly distributed, often gendered, dependent on care, and continually exposed to the surplus generated by the very consumption patterns it seeks to soften.

This phrase has legs. Small sturdy ethnographic legs. Like a donated coffee table that somehow survives three households.

### 43. User

i guess it's movement and circularity but it's not movement like a conveyor belt nor a loop