Through these routes, theories of practice entered the vocabulary of social scientific enquiry. Although notions of practice figure in different strands of social science through the 1980s and 1990s, they gained fresh theoretical impetus towards the close of the twentieth century, primarily through the work of philosopher Theodore Schatzki. His exposition of a Wittgensteinian theory of practice (Schatzki, 1996) helped bring practices back into the firmament of ideas as the influence of the linguistic turn in social theory began to fade. In retrospect, The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory (Schatzki et al., 2001) did not define a neat manoeuvre in social theory, but it did mark the start of what has become a diffuse movement, the shape and extent of which remains to be seen.

Recent reformulations of theories of practice, associated with what has been called 'the practice turn' in social theory (Schatzki et al 2001), have been adapted

The human-centric practice theory considers materials as enablers of human practices . This approach relies heavily on Schatzki, who posits that 'human coexistence transpires as arrangements of people, artifacts, organisms, and things' (2002: 149). As this approach regards practices as human practices, and agency assigned to humans, with non-human materials playing a significant role in enabling humans to perform these practices, we term this a human-centric approach to practice theory. According to Schatzki (2010), materiality is a part of society, but material things are not part of practices; instead, materials form arrangements co-produced with practices (ibid.: 135). Materiality is defined by Schatzki (2019: 53) as a physical-chemical composition of entities. Material entities are connected to human actions; they are determinants of continuity and longevity in practices, mediating and enabling practices and exerting causal effects (Schatzki, 2010). This means that material arrangements prefigure human practices.

Second-generation practice theories define consumption as happening while everyday practices are performed (Warde 2005). Practices are organized nexuses of actions that are socially shared across space and time and are linked and held together by different elements (Gram-Hanssen 2011; Roepke 2009; Schatzki 2002; Shove, Pantzar, and Watson 2012). In Schatzki's (2002) practice-theory model, these elements consist of practical understandings , meaning abilities or competences required to perform the actions of a practice; rules that instruct people to perform particular actions; teleoaffective structures that describe the ends, tasks, and projects normatively and hierarchically arranged and connected to normativized emotions to varying degrees; and general understandings that span different practices and define the manner in which practices are carried out according to certain convictions or beliefs (Schatzki 2002, 2019). While Schatzki analytically separates materiality from practices, some theorists understand materiality as a constituting element (Gram-Hanssen 2011; Shove and Pantzar 2005; Warde 2005). Within this configuration of elements, practices are produced, reproduced, and changed,

We characterized cumulative forms of integration with terms like “normalization, routinization, habit-formation, practice formation.” Practice innovations (and practices) proceed through various integrations. In this way, practitioners are innovators. Practices figure as something that actual and potential practitioners can participate in or withdraw from. At the same time, practices are constituted through performance. On one side of the coin, practitioners are “captured” by practices that make demands of those who do them. On the other side of the coin, practices are constituted through participation and defined by the activities of those who “do” them. This reminds of general evolutionary dynamics suggesting that systems participate in the building of their own environments. It was especially important to me, as an economist, that practice theory is opposed to any theory arguing for givens such as exogenous preferences or technology (in mainstream economics). Schatzki’s (as well as our) version of practice theory recognized the importance of both performativity and networks. It was also important that practice theory opposes dualistic thinking, which manifests in such dualisms as mind-body, action-structure and human-nonhuman. Contrary to Schatzki, in the spirit of ANT, we suggested that also

Schatzki’s central claim is that social life always goes on as part of a mesh of practices and material arrangements. Practices are “carried on amid and determinative of, while also dependent on and altered by, material arrangements” (Schatzki 2017: 44). A practice is an organised manifold of doings and sayings; a material arrangement is composed of “interconnected human bodies, organisms, artifacts, and things” (Schatzki 2002: 38) through which practices unfold. Practices presuppose arrangements, and arrangements take their character from the practices that incorporate them. Schatzki calls these “practice-arrangement nexuses… sites of the social” (2017: 44). On this view, practices are “not merely ‘sites’ of interaction but… ordering and orchestrating entities in their own right” (Shove and Walker 2010: 471, characterising Schatzki).

Practice theories can be traced back to philosophers such as Wittgenstein, and more prominently the interpretations of his work by Schatzki, as well as to sociologists Bourdieu and Giddens. They are the result of the endeavour to overcome the structure–agency dualism, which for a long time characterised and divided social theory. With this, practice theories marked a departure from individualist, structuralist and poststructuralist approaches, as well as from the opposition between constructivism and essentialism [21]. Practice theory overcomes this traditional duality of

Schatzki (2019) is one of the theorists who stands out in the discussion of practices as components of the social. Its approach is based on the assumption that all social phenomena are rooted in practical. A practice is defined as “an open and temporary set of actions and sayings, linked by practical understandings, rules, tele-affective structure and general understanding” (Schatzki, 2002, p. 8). The concept of material arrangements, which includes humans, artifacts, organisms and things of nature (Schatzki, 2005, 2012) is useful in recognizing a range of more extensive material relationships between which practices take place. Reckwitz (2002) provides more details, stating that a practice presupposes the interconnection of elements with each other: “forms of bodily activities, forms of mental activities, ‘things’ and their use, know-how, states of emotion and motivational knowledge” (Reckwitz, 2002, p. 249). As the social is the field of practices, they are, inevitably, imbricated in material arrangements that they corroborate to create, in which they are realized and through which they (practices) exist (Schatzki, 2005). Practices and arrangements are thus always linked in one or more ways, forming an inseparable amalgam (Schatzki, 2002, 2012), a set of practices results in a constellation of practices (Schatzki, 2019).

Central to the further development of theories of practice for sustainable consumption has been the work of Schatzki (especially 1996, 2002). Schatzki has rigorously elaborated a social ontology of practice, in critical dialogue with the practice theories of Bourdieu, Foucault and Giddens, by way of the philosophies of Wittgenstein and Heidegger. This ontology establishes a 'strong' version of practice theory in which both social order and individuality result from practices. It asserts that there is no macro level beyond the realm of social practices, which are 'not merely "sites" of interaction but are, instead, ordering and orchestrating entities in their own right' (Shove and Walker 2010, p. 471).

Here, Schatzki's (2005) illustration of educational practices, which can be seen as a form of interpersonal practice, gains relevance. Schatzki (2005, 472) notes that such interpersonal practices contain chains of actions and reactions:

1962:412, Heidegger 's emphasis). 7 Our practices for coping with the available are significantly different from our practices for dealing with the occurrent. Thus, Heidegger understands this changeover from dealing with things as available to dealing with them as occurrent as discontinuous. This changeover is crucial for Heidegger 's answer to deflationary realism.

Like Davidson, Heidegger answers the skeptic by showing that our practices and the everyday world are inextricably intertwined. Indeed, he argues at length that 'Dasein is the world existingly' ( Heidegger 1962:416). 4 Moreover, Heidegger seems to agree with the deflationary realists that, while entities show up as independent of us, the being or intelligibility of entities depends on our practices. So any talk of things in themselves must be put in scare quotes. Thus, Heidegger says of natural entities:

The first two phenomena Heidegger calls to our attention are two different ways of being. He points out that normally we deal with things as equipment. Equipment gets its intelligibility from its relation to other equipment, human roles, and social goals. Heidegger calls the equipmental way of being availability ( Zuhandenheit ). But Heidegger also points to another equally important phenomenon; we sometimes experience entities as independent of our instrumental coping practices. This happens in cases of equipmental breakdown.

Joseph Rouse, in his book Knowledge and Power (1987), sees the parallel between Heidegger 's and Davidson's holistic answer to the skeptic and wonders why I fail to see that Heidegger must therefore be a deflationary realist. But, as I will now seek to show, in Being and Time Heidegger describes phenomena that enable him to distinguish between the everyday world and the universe and so claim to be a robust realist about the entities discovered by natural science. Moreover, he has the conceptual resources to turn his description of these phenomena into a persuasive defense of robust realism.

In addition, when Heidegger later investigates how scientific research as an institution works, he claims that research is based on what he calls the projection of a total ground-plan ( Heidegger 1977b). Research, he claims, is a modern way of studying nature that proceeds by setting up a total theory of how nature works and then dealing with the anomalies that show up when the theory is assumed to cover all phenomena. Thus, normal science has, for Heidegger , the ongoing job of trying to account for anomalies, while revolutionary advances in science occur when resistant anomalies lead scientists to propose a new ground-plan. 12

The philosopher Martin Heidegger expressed the very same point through an exploration of the notions of building and dwelling (see Chapter Ten, pp. 185–6). Opposing the modernist convention that dwelling is an activity that goes on within, and is structured by, an environment that is already built, Heidegger argued that we cannot engage in any kind of building activity unless we already dwell within our surroundings. 'Only

Heidegger tackles the issue through an exercise in etymology. The current German word for the verb ‘to build’, bauen , comes from the Old English and High German buan , meaning ‘to dwell’. Though this original meaning has been lost, it is preserved in such compounds as the English ‘neighbour’, meaning one who dwells nearby. Moreover, this sense of dwelling was not limited to one sphere of activity among many – to domestic life, say, as opposed to work or travel. Rather it encompassed the whole manner in which one lives one’s life on the earth; thus ‘I dwell, you dwell’ is identical to ‘I am, you are’. Yet bauen has another sense: to preserve, to care for, or more specifically to cultivate or to till the soil. And then there is the third sense: to construct, to make something, to raise up an edifice. Both these modern senses of building – as cultivation and as construction – are thus shown to be encompassed within the more fundamental sense of dwelling. In the course of time, however, this underlying sense has fallen into disuse, such that bauen has come to be reserved exclusively for cultivation and construction. Having forgotten how the latter activities are grounded in dwelling, modern thought then redis-covers dwelling as the occupation of a world already built.

entities – to render them intelligible – by categorising them, and assigning to them meanings or functions, before they can be made available for use. Heidegger , however, reverses this order of priority. For a being whose primary condition of existence is that of dwelling in the world, things are initially encountered in their availability, as already integrated into a set of practices for 'coping' or getting by. To reveal their occurrent properties, things have to be rendered unintelligible by stripping away the significance they derive from contexts of ordinary use. This, of course, is the explicit project of natural science, which seeks to describe and explain a world which the rest of us are preoccupied with living in. Yet the scientist, like everyone else, is a being-in-the-world, and scientific practice, as any other skilled activity, draws unselfconsciously upon the available. Thus even science, however detached and theoretical it may be, takes place against a background of involved activity. The total disengagement of the subject from the world, from which Cartesianism charts a process of building up from the occurrent to the available, is therefore a pure fiction which can only be reached by extrapolating to the point of absurdity a progressive reduction from the available to the occurrent.

Like Davidson, Heidegger answers the skeptic by showing that our practices and the everyday world are inextricably intertwined. Indeed, he argues at length that 'Dasein is the world existingly' ( Heidegger 1962:416). 4 Moreover, Heidegger seems to agree with the deflationary realists that, while entities show up as independent of us, the being or intelligibility of entities depends on our practices. So any talk of things in themselves must be put in scare quotes. Thus, Heidegger says of natural entities:

1962:412, Heidegger 's emphasis). 7 Our practices for coping with the available are significantly different from our practices for dealing with the occurrent. Thus, Heidegger understands this changeover from dealing with things as available to dealing with them as occurrent as discontinuous. This changeover is crucial for Heidegger 's answer to deflationary realism.

Nowhere is the ambivalence surrounding attitudes to vision and hearing more evident than in Western ideas about language, and above all about the distinction between speech and writing. The distrust of writing is a recurrent theme throughout the history of Western thought. Ever since Plato and Aristotle , philosophers have tended to regard writing as an exterior, visible facade for the inner sonic reality of spoken words. Plato, in the Phaedrus (274–7), has Socrates declare that writing provides no more than 'the appearance and not the reality of wisdom' (Plato 1973). For Aristotle , only the spoken word truly represents mental experience, while the written word stands for the spoken one ( Aristotle 1938: 115). Rousseau, for whom writing was 'nothing but the representation of speech', complained bitterly (in writing of course) about the prestige and attention accorded by his contemporaries to writing when it was no more than a contrived and inauthentic cover for the real thing (Derrida 1974: 36). And two of the giants of twentieth-century linguistics held to much the same opinion. For Bloomfield (1933: 21) writing was 'merely a way of recording language by visible marks', while according to Saussure (1959: 23), 'language and writing are two distinct systems of signs; the second exists for the sole purpose of representing the first'. In a famous image (Figure 14.1), Saussure located language at the interface between thought and sound, as though human consciousness – the realm of ideas – hovered over an ocean of sound like air over water (1959: 112).

Here Heidegger is obviously trying to counter the claim that Galileo has refuted Aristotle . But he is not doing so, as Kuhn does in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions , by holding that neither theory is true of nature, but rather by holding that both are true. This could be the innocuous observation that both are 'illuminating,' but in the context of another of Heidegger's remarks, namely, 'that what is represented by physics is indeed nature itself, but undeniably it is only nature as the object-area, whose objectness is first defined and determined through the refining that is characteristic of physics' (Heidegger 1977c: 173-4), it must be the stronger claim that different theories can reveal different aspects of nature. Of course, if one thinks of Aristotle 's theory of natural place as an account of physical causality meant to explain, for example, why rocks fall, in the same sense that modern physics claims to explain that phenomenon, his position is untenable. The law-like gravitational account given by modern physics, as far as we know, is right and Aristotle is simply wrong. It may well be, however, as Heidegger holds, that Aristotle and Galileo were asking different kinds of questions , and so each could be right about a different kind of causality.

The more normative cultural-historical accounts (Hulme 2019a; Yates and Davison Hunter 2011; and Yarrow 2014) usefully highlight two distinct meanings of thrift. In its premodern appearances it was coterminous with its cognate "thriving," not in the etiolated sense of economic wealth but, as Alison Hulme nicely suggests (2019a), more akin to Aristotle 's eudaimonia : human flourishing ( Aristotle 2004; see also Fischer 2014: 2). This sense echoes through Thoreau's commitment to simplicity and heightened awareness of being-in-the-world, as well as twentieth-century anti-capitalist movements that emphasized steady state economies (Daly 1973) degrowth and ecological sustainability (Kallis, Kerschner, and Martinez-Alier 2012). Such thriving chimes with Gudeman and Rivera's idea of household replenishment (1990). There is more to this premodern thrift, however. It was a condition rather than a virtue or trait, appearing in this form as late as 1679 when John Bunyan used it to refer to "a state of being ... of blessedness" (Yates and Hunter 2011: 11). Chaucer uses thrift variously to mean "luck" in Troilus and Criseyde , Book III (1957: 434, line 1249), "skill" in The Reeve's Tale ( ibid. : 57, line 4049), "suitability" in The Man of Law's Tale ( ibid. : 62, line 46), and "prosperity" in The Canon Yeoman's Tale ( ibid. : 215, line 739). Thrift qua profit appears once, alongside these other meanings (Cady 2019: 137). Chaucer's fourteenth century marked the start of the early modern period when an urban, merchant, middle class became established and thrift in the service of profit emerged as a quintessentially bourgeois virtue (McCloskey 2006a; 2006b) and has largely occluded, but not

oeconomia ( Aristotle ), 209

Thrift does not appear in Aristotle 's seminal text Politics . He focuses on the management of the household and its internal relationships, such as the relation of master to slave, husband to wife, and parents to children: "the business of household management is concerned more with human beings than it is with inanimate property" (1946: 33). Household economy is not directed to acquisition but to securing necessities, and household life is not a means to an end but a complete action ( praxis ). Aristotle is aware that

Ever since Plato and Aristotle , it has been customary in the West to envisage the world of nature as made up of a multitude of discrete objects, things, each with its own integrity and essential properties. These things may be grouped into classes of varying degrees of inclusiveness on the basis of selected properties that they are perceived to possess in common. One major class, known as 'animate', comprises all those things that are said to possess the property of life. All remaining things, that do not possess this property, are 'inanimate'. There has been much debate about what it takes for something to be alive: vitalists argued for the existence of some mysterious life-force that they thought was infused into all organisms; mechanists dismissed the idea as unscientific hocus-pocus, but in their enthusiasm to reduce organisms to clockwork they virtually dissolved the animate into the category of the inanimate. The problem was only resolved, after a fashion, by the discovery of the DNA molecule, popularly hailed as the 'secret of life', which seemed to offer a basis for distinguishing living things that satisfied the objective canons of natural science. Throughout all this debate, however, one fundamental idea has remained unquestioned, namely that life is a qualifying attribute of objects. We look for it in a world that already consists of things-in-themselves, whose essential nature is given without regard to their positioning and involvement within wider fields of relations.

[W]e cannot] say that the Galilean doctrine of freely falling bodies is true and that Aristotle 's teaching, that light bodies strive upward, is false; for the Greek understanding of the essence of body and place and of the relation between the two rests upon a different interpretation of entities and hence conditions a correspondingly different kind of seeing and questioning of natural events. No one would presume to maintain that Shakespeare's poetry is more advanced than that of Aeschylus. It is still more impossible to say that the modern understanding of whatever is, is more correct than that of the Greeks (Heidegger 1977b: 117).

Rules, however, only intermittently and never simpliciter determine what people specifically do. A more omnipresent determinant of practical intelligibility is thus called for. I incline toward drawing on Aristotelian/Heideggerian intuitions and identifying this third factor as a mix of teleology and affectivity. Teleology, as noted, is orientations toward ends, while affectivity is how things matter. What makes sense to a person to do largely depends on the matters for the sake of which she is prepared to act, on how she will proceed for the sake of achieving or possessing those matters, and on how things matter to her; thus on her ends, the projects and tasks she will carry out for the sake of those ends given her beliefs, hopes, and expectations, and her emotions and moods. Practical intelligibility is teleologically and affectively determined.

Thrift does not appear in Aristotle 's seminal text Politics . He focuses on the management of the household and its internal relationships, such as the relation of master to slave, husband to wife, and parents to children: "the business of household management is concerned more with human beings than it is with inanimate property" (1946: 33). Household economy is not directed to acquisition but to securing necessities, and household life is not a means to an end but a complete action ( praxis ). Aristotle is aware that

31. Lucretius, De Rerum Natura , (II, 216), in John Gaskin, ed., The Epicurean Philosophers (New York: Everyman, 1995).

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.

The asseveration that practices embrace activity is truisitic. What more is there, however, to a practice than activity? One might propose that actions compose a practice by virtue of causal connections between them. According to this proposal, acts of, for example, negotiation, making an offer, and buying help compose the practice of economic exchange by way of inducing and responding to one another (cf. Habermas's [1987: Chapter 6, Section 2] conception of systems, as opposed to social, integration). 1 set this suggestion aside for a number of reasons, the most relevant being that causal connections between actions are mediated by what I contend organizes practices, namely, mind. Consider, then, the idea that practices are organized mentally. Stephen Turner (1994) has

Recently Nicolini (2012) has surveyed in magisterial fashion the full and wide range of practice theories now in circulation. He distinguishes between: the praxeological theories of Giddens (1984) and Bourdieu (1977); practice as tradition and community (Wenger 1998; MacIntyre 1981); practice as activity (Vygotsky and cultural and historical activity theory); practice as accomplishment, in the manner of ethnomethodology; practice as the locus of the social (as in Schatzki's 1996, 2002 reworking of Heidegger and Wittgenstein); and practice as discourse, which he elaborates via conversation analysis and a review of Foucault. It is difficult to specify what these theories have in common. Nicolini (2012) concurs with Schatzki (2001) that there is no unified practice approach. Nevertheless he notes 'a number of family resemblances' among theories from which he isolates some suggestions for how to undertake empirical studies (Schatzki 2001, p. 11). Reckwitz (2002) helpfully observes that while all cultural theories oppose both the utilitarian or rational-choice models of social action and order, and the classical sociological norm-orientated model of social action and order (that is, Durkheim and Parsons), what unites the heterogeneity of practice theories is the contention that social order and action is a feature of, and established through, the field of human practices. Practice theories' central claim is to move beyond problematic dualisms like structure and agency, methodological individualism and holism, determinism and voluntarism, and subject and object. Moreover, as Schatzki (2001, p. 14) suggests, 'these accounts all undermine the traditional individual-nonindividual divide by availing themselves of features of both sides'. Social practices, then, rather than individuals (and their attitudes and preferences), norms, cultural codes, discourses, macro-level trends or social structures become the central unit of analysis; and in policy-oriented accounts of sustainable consumption, they become the central unit of intervention (Shove 2010; Shove and Walker 2010; Spurling et al. 2013).

In exploring the nexus of practices, contributors address a wide range of issues. However, the approaches they take do not represent all possible strategies. 'Practice' is a rich polysemic word that, in addition to denoting organised arrays of action, also highlights the necessary embeddedness of human activity in social and material contexts and the relentlessly unfolding character of action and sequences of performances. Given these different meanings, it is perhaps not surprising that the range of 'practice approaches' has expanded and diversified over the past 30 years (Nicolini, 2012). This wider field encompasses not just the first and second generation practice theories mentioned above, but also so-called 'practice-based studies' that emphasise the concept of situated action (e.g. Gherardi, 2008), MacIntyrian conceptions that attribute internal goods to practices (MacIntyre, 1981), forms of discourse theory that focus on practices (e.g. Chouliaraki and Fairclough, 1999; Scollon, 2001) and traditions such as ethnomethodology that underline the processional quality of human social activity. Further afield, but not unrelated, lie endeavours such as

colleagues (Kemmis, 2005; 2010; Kemmis and Mutton, 2012; Kemmis et al. , 2014). In a number of works spanning a decade, these authors have developed a sophisticated grammar and set of methodological principles to understand and represent practices and their ecologies. Kemmis and colleagues conceive of practices as socially established cooperative human activities composed of the hanging together of saying, doings and social relations. These activities are organised around projects and by virtue of being reproduced in time, they assume the character of practice traditions. When participants engage in activities in the pursuit of projects, they do the things and they speak the language that are characteristic of the practice and enter relationships building on the 'memory' provided by the practice tradition. Critically, however, doings, saying and relating only become intelligible within the pre-existing set of cultural-discursive, material-economic and social-political conditions. Such conditions both enable the unfolding of a practice (the practice memory, for example, is sedimented in the physical arrangements, language spoken, discourse used, etc.) and constrain them (they establish what can be said and done). Kemmis and colleagues call this intersubjective space, 'the architecture of practice' in effect, Kemmis' Habermasian reinterpretation of Schatzki's 'orders'. To paraphrase Marx, people bring practices into being, but not under conditions of their own choosing. However, in contrast to the traditional Marxian interpretation, the relationship between practices and architectures is two-way (Schatzki (2002) calls this a contextual relationship). When practices happen, they become part of the happening: they take up available doings, sayings and relations; they modify them; and they leave behind traces that in turn become part of the practice architecture of future activities. Activities and the architectures within which they unfold are therefore shaped by other practices and their architectures, and in turn shape them. Practices thus 'feed upon each other' (Kemmis et al. , 2014: 47) and in so doing constitute ecologies understood as 'distinctive interconnected webs of human social activities that are mutually necessary to order and sustain a practice as a practice of a particular kind and complexity (for example, a progressive educational practice)' (Kemmis and Mutton, 2012: 15).

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.

Adam Smith declared self-restraint, that classic attribute of thrift, along with respectability and decorum, to be the great and "awful" virtues compared with the "amiable virtues" of compassion and humanity (1976[1759]: 41). Smith, of course, was a theorist of the bourgeoisie with its morally cleft spheres of public and domestic concerns (Davidoff and Hall 1987). By contrast, the thrift, and indeed necessary respectability of low-income, urban households appears as a quintessentially compassionate virtue, expressed through relations of care (The Care Collective 2020) but also profoundly susceptible to dislocation and the careless virtue of austerity.

For Diprose ethics are not about universal principles and transcendent moral positions. They are about modes of being in the world, or the relations between being and the world; this grounds ethics in a constitutive relation between one's habitat and embodied character, or ethos. But it is not only habitat that is implicated in embodiment, it is also relations with others. These force us to take a position, to establish an identity in and through relations of differentiation with others. And, if the recognition of difference from others is implicated in the constitution of an ethos and identity, so too is the recognition of difference from objects. Through habits we manage the circulation of objects into and out of our lives and reestablish the boundaries of the self, and this is how the cultivation of particular habits of waste removal becomes the cultivation of a particular self.

This article combines practice theory with Michel Foucault's theory of ethical self-cultivation (1988) to ascertain the role of socially constituted environmental ethics in changing everyday practices and

substance of ethics includes not only people's habits and competences, but also their sensorial dispositions. To embody practices and make habits stick requires both learning how to perform them and reshaping one's sensory dispositions so the bodymind experiences the new practices and habits as normal, acceptable, comfortable, and satisfactory.

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.

We may imagine, then, that holding the internal circulation of goods and labor within a group of households may be protecting them from the necessity of buying goods and taking part in market exchange (“holding the savings may negate market functioning,” writes Gudeman in this vol.). But, in fact, at some point the house economy, through the act of “economizing,” gives way to accumulation in terms of cosmoeconomic growth, which enables a kind of economic “liquidity,” which does not necessarily represent only a form of “coping mechanism” or “resilience.” This is especially important: this chapter goes deeper into the above, quite surprising transfiguration by setting up a social perspective on thrift in order to move beyond the notions of both a continuum and an opposition between the house (the prudent, “closed” unit) and the market economy (the capital-

Documents indicate that knowledge of waste—its amount, its kinds, its potential uses, and the potential savings of its reuse—was more important than making sure that wastes were economically reused, or at least that the goods thus produced were fulfilling real human needs, and it was even more important than ensuring that they were properly distributed. What an official complained about in an internal report was not the actual uses or squandering of wastes but about the lack of sufficient knowledge.

From an individualistic perspective (Belliotti & Mora, 2016), the literature identifies the need for exclusivity (internal) and conscious consumption (external), as determinants of those who adhere to slow fashion (Liu et al., 2018; Erketing & Atik, 2015). Regarding the consumption of second-hand garments, four motivators are identified in hierarchical order: desire for exclusivity, possibility of high-value goods at more affordable prices; the sense of nostalgia that clothes from other times provide (vintage pieces), and sustainability (Roux & Korchia, 2006). It is worth noting that slow fashion proposes the use/sharing of second-hand pieces, in order to prolong their useful life and avoid disposal (Fletcher & Grose, 2012).

In exploring the nexus of practices, contributors address a wide range of issues. However, the approaches they take do not represent all possible strategies. 'Practice' is a rich polysemic word that, in addition to denoting organised arrays of action, also highlights the necessary embeddedness of human activity in social and material contexts and the relentlessly unfolding character of action and sequences of performances. Given these different meanings, it is perhaps not surprising that the range of 'practice approaches' has expanded and diversified over the past 30 years (Nicolini, 2012). This wider field encompasses not just the first and second generation practice theories mentioned above, but also so-called 'practice-based studies' that emphasise the concept of situated action (e.g. Gherardi, 2008), MacIntyrian conceptions that attribute internal goods to practices (MacIntyre, 1981), forms of discourse theory that focus on practices (e.g. Chouliaraki and Fairclough, 1999; Scollon, 2001) and traditions such as ethnomethodology that underline the processional quality of human social activity. Further afield, but not unrelated, lie endeavours such as

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.

Every regime is built on a delineation of the good. This notion is used to evaluate the state of people and things and judge whether they are appropriately engaged. The extension of the good varies according to the regime. When the evaluation has to meet the requirement of public justification, the good has to be a legitimate common good. The good might be significantly more limited and mundane when it appears in the achievement of some regular planned action. It might be even more personal and localized when it involves some kind of usual attunement with well-known and near-by surroundings. The three scenes sketched in the section entitled 'A scenario of pragmatic versatility' illustrated such variations of the scope of the good.

Heidegger calls Ereignis this tendency in the practices to bring things into their own in this way. Thus, the practices for dealing with any thing have a kind of telos; they tend to make the thing connected to the rest of a community's life in such a way that the practices and the personal identities involved are taken as worthy. This telos is relational. It depends upon the rest of the practices in a community, the kinds of identities the community supports, the traditions with which people in the community are familiar, and the kinds of uses that the community holds valuable. Also, this telos is only a tendency, or to put it in Heidegger's terms, it is a gentle law (Heidegger 1971a:128). The tendency can be constrained by all sorts of contingent circumstances. In times of severe economic stress, for instance, practices for sharing wine with friends, perhaps even practices for having friends just could not get off the ground no matter how the wine bottle and past familiarization solicited that kind of behavior. But, normally, practices are best understood when they are seen as tending towards the local stability provided by the telos. Such thinking suggests that, as practices elaborate themselves, a stable end is implicit in their elaborations.

Rules, however, only intermittently and never simpliciter determine what people specifically do. A more omnipresent determinant of practical intelligibility is thus called for. I incline toward drawing on Aristotelian/Heideggerian intuitions and identifying this third factor as a mix of teleology and affectivity. Teleology, as noted, is orientations toward ends, while affectivity is how things matter. What makes sense to a person to do largely depends on the matters for the sake of which she is prepared to act, on how she will proceed for the sake of achieving or possessing those matters, and on how things matter to her; thus on her ends, the projects and tasks she will carry out for the sake of those ends given her beliefs, hopes, and expectations, and her emotions and moods. Practical intelligibility is teleologically and affectively determined.

Oscar wants his actions to have a positive impact, but he also emphasizes doing what is right because it is in and of itself the right thing to do: doing what is right becomes as much a part of the aim as making a positive impact. Imagining looking back on life from an advanced age may be a common visualization regarding one's personal life and goals. Yet for Oscar, however, the ecological crisis introduces a different kind of temporal horizon that has a certain ethical value as the risk of temperatures rising by more than 1.5°C is conceivable, and predictions of the consequences are becoming clearer. This reflects on the personal ethical relationship between self, human society, and the environment, which plays an important role in his actively trying to alter everyday practices. The “telos” or mode of being (Foucault 2020, 265) that he strives toward thus means being in an ethical relationship with the environment, defined as acting in ways that impact as positively as possible. Moving toward what he would consider an ethical and sustainable life means diverting from commonly established practices of consumption, and here his bodily participation plays an essential role in its realization. It is through the enactment of practices and ways of living that reduce environmental impact that he can realize an ethical mode of being.