Habitus can therefore be seen as embodied history. The habitus engages with the “presence of the past” (1998, p. These dispositions constitute a form of knowledge which influences or predisposes practices. Practices, bodies and habitsģSocial practice theory has its roots in the work of Bourdieu (1977 1998) and his concept of habitus, defined as a domain of dispositions for action, created and perpetuated through performance of a practice in a given social-cultural space. I will give special attention to how practices form and change, as well as the relationship between practice transformations and experience-grounded learning. This paper will lay out promising theoretical insights from social practice theory and give examples of new categories of policies for stimulating low-energy practices. Such policies are ‘distanced from experience’, in the words of Lave, and ‘divide the mind from the world’ (1993, p. Policies grounded in this approach divest consumers of the practical knowledge pre-disposed through experience and routine.
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This conceptualization of the consumer contrasts dramatically with the dominating conceptualization which poses individual consumers as free agents whose intentions and actions are hegemonic in making consumption happen. This theory has promise for renewing energy consumption theory and providing a basis for new directions in energy savings policy.
Nevertheless, the conceptual vacuum has yet to be filled, at least in the main body of theory that informs energy savings policy.ĢOver the past decade, a number of social scientists from differing academic disciplines have contributed to the development and application of social practice theory to an understanding of everyday energy consumption (Shove, 2003 Warde, 2005 Wilhite, 2008 Røpke, 2009). Based on academic critiques and the now 40 years of evidence on the ineffectiveness of policies based on this theory to deliver significant reductions in energy use anywhere in the world, there is a strong consensus that something new is needed. Debates on the efficacy of these assumptions began as early as the mid-1980s as evidence from empirical studies led to serious questions about individual-centered, utility maximizing models of consumption. These fully agentive consumers are expected to make rational energy saving purchases (Shove and Wilhite, 1999 Wilhite et alii, 2000 Wilhite and Norgard, 2004). In the dominating theory that informs policy, consumption is theorized as an exercise done by sovereign individuals who deploy cognitive knowledge in economically rational ways in order to achieve instrumental ends. 1The research domain aimed at theorizing a transformation to low energy use has suffered from weak representations of the social and material contributors to energy consumption.