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Consumer Culture

Applying practice theory to the study of consumption: Theoretical and

methodological considerations
Bente Halkier, Tally Katz-Gerro and Lydia Martens
Journal of Consumer Culture 2011 11: 3
DOI: 10.1177/1469540510391765
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Introduction

Applying practice theory

to the study of
consumption:
Theoretical and
methodological
considerations

Journal of Consumer Culture

11(1) 313
! The Author(s) 2011
Reprints and permissions:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1469540510391765
joc.sagepub.com

Bente Halkier
Roskilde University, Denmark

Tally Katz-Gerro
University of Haifa, Israel

Lydia Martens
Keele University, UK

In the context of continuing debate in social theory and philosophy about the
structure-agency problematic, recent years have seen scholars (re)turn to this theoretical complexity through so-called theories of social practices.1 Practice theories
are a set of cultural and philosophical accounts that focus on the conditions surrounding the practical carrying out of social life. It has roots in the philosophy of
Heidegger and Wittgenstein and social scientic roots in the work of early
Bourdieu, early Giddens, late Foucault and Butler.2 Their insights have recently
become fused in a composite philosophical ontology of practices developed by
Theodore Schatzki (1996, 2002) and colleagues (Schatzki et al., 2001). Together
with the useful theoretical mapping provided by Reckwitz (2002) who sketches
practice theory as an ideal type, drawing out its peculiarities through a contrast
with theoretical narratives in the broader domain of cultural theories it could be
argued that practice theories have come to occupy salient theoretical space across
the social sciences and humanities. When Reckwitz (2002) drafted his overview, the
principles of these perspectives had already made inroads in science studies, gender
studies and organizational studies (p. 257). In recent years, this has spread to
include anthropology, cultural studies, design studies, environment and
Corresponding author:
Bente Halkier, Department of Communication, Business and Information Technologies, Roskilde University,
box 260, DK 4000 Roskilde, Denmark
Email: bha@ruc.dk

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Journal of Consumer Culture 11(1)

sustainability research, geography, health, history, marketing and consumer behaviour, media, social policy and sociology.
Alan Wardes article Consumption and Theories of Practice, published in the
Journal of Consumer Culture in 2005, may be regarded as the rst programmatic
piece oering an examination of the potential of practice theoretical perspectives
for analyses of consumption. One of the inspirations leading up to the development
of this article were ongoing discussions, in the Consumption Research Network of
the European Sociological Association (the ESA network), about shortcomings of
existing foci and theoretical approaches in social and cultural analysis of consumption. During the 1990s, consumption research had come to focus almost entirely on
an analysis of the symbolic meanings of consumption, connected especially with
identity formation and with substantial remaining interest in markets and the conguration of exchange relations. Setting up an agenda for the sociology of consumption in a special issue of Sociology, Warde had argued as early as 1990 that
salient social scientic questions of consumption moved beyond the market place,
to consider the social organization of alternative modes for providing goods and
services, and because there was a need to examine facets of consumption other than
purchase important here were the uses and enjoyment of goods, services and
resources. Such broadening out of consumption sociology made sense to members
of the ESA consumption network partly because of their ongoing interest in mundane and routine aspects of consumption. Research on food and eating was a
salient example of this (e.g. Furst et al., 1991; Holm and Kildevang, 1996;
Warde and Martens, 2000). Publication of the edited collection Ordinary
Consumption in 2001 by Gronow and Warde tells the story of the concerted eorts
made in the late 1990s to develop theoretical insights in which routine and the
mundane stood central. As reiterated some time later:
Ordinary consumption is best understood in terms of concepts like habit, routine,
constraint, and so on and can be summed up as a recognition of the conventional
nature of consumption. (Randles and Warde, 2006: 226)

Absent in this work, however, was any reference to practice theory as such,
though many of the theorists recognised as contributing towards this theoretical
vision are listed in the books bibliography.
It seems, therefore, that Reckwitzs (2002) mapping exercise was pivotal for the
task of visualizing the opportunities oered by this theoretical spectrum. We suggest that there are two salient reasons for this. On the one hand, Reckwitz placed
the routinized character of practice at the forefront of his commentary the concept appears at just about every turn in his description of practices and their central
position as the location of the social. This is for instance evident in the now much
cited denition of practices provided by Reckwitz:
A practice . . . is a routinized type of behaviour which consists of several elements,
interconnected to one another: forms of bodily activities, forms of mental activities,

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Halkier et al.

things and their use, a background knowledge in the form of understanding,

know-how, states of emotion and motivational knowledge. (Reckwitz, 2002: 249)

This also points to the second reason. Presumably because he drew the work of
Bourdieu and Latour into his ideal type, Reckwitz was able to acknowledge the
centrality of things and their use in this denition. In his ontology of practices,
developed in 1996, Schatzki had side-tracked objects as outcomes of practices,
and this posed a problem for those who were interested in the social and cultural
manifestations of consumption, in which the use and enjoyment of objects, services
and resources was so central. Arguing that a practice necessarily depends on the
existence and specic interconnectedness of these elements, and which cannot be
reduced to any one of these single elements (2002: 250), Reckwitz made it clear
that objects and their use were central to the performance, and thus the reproduction of practices in mundane everyday life. Finally, it may be observed that the
concerted examination of the potential of practice theoretical perspectives in consumption research developed through discussions and debate at the Centre for
Innovation and Competition (Manchester University), of which Warde was a codirector, and which hosted a series of cross-disciplinary workshops on mundane
consumption. These discussions included scholars, like Halkier, Pantzar, Ropke,
Shove and Southerton, who have subsequently become advocates, appliers and
discussants of practice theoretical perspectives in consumption research.
It is the view of the guest editors that it is especially in relation to the empirical
usefulness of practice theory in consumption analyses that new contributions will
be of special interest to the readers of the Journal of Consumer Culture. Before we
introduce the individual articles, we will locate this aim in developments that have
taken place since the publication of Wardes Consumption and Theories of Practice
in 2005. Of interest is that this article is the most frequently cited article in the
journal, serving as a point of reference in commentaries that straddle the social
sciences and humanities. As illustrated by Antonacopoulou (2008), this includes the
domain of organization studies, where practice theory was applied prior to its
inclusion in debate on consumption. Possibly the most vigorous application of
practice theoretical repertoires citing Wardes article may be found in the interstices
between technologies, utilities, resource consumption and the problematic of sustainability. In the UK, this work has without doubt been led by Elizabeth Shove
and colleagues (Hand et al., 2007; Shove et al., 2008) and extended through collaborations with other European scholars. With Mika Pantzar, Shove has developed a series of papers (Shove 2004) that explore questions regarding change and
continuity in practices and their associated objects/resources. Some of their work
has a clear environmental/sustainability focus (e.g. 2004, 2010). Scholars elsewhere
have engaged with the same problematic, including Gram-Hanssen (2010) and
Rpke (2009) (Denmark), Spaargaren (2000) (Netherlands), and Bartiaux (2007)
(Belgium). Of interest in this work and those of some others is the policy-driven
question of the connection between knowledge and practice, or, what is commonly
known as the instigation of behavioural change (see also Colls and Evans, 2008;

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Journal of Consumer Culture 11(1)

Halkier, 2010; Nye and Hargreaves, 2010; Sulkunen, 2009). Related work may be
found in human geography, where Clarke, Barnett and colleagues (e.g. Barnett
et al., 2005, 2008; Clarke et al., 2007, 2008) have theorized ethical and political
consumerism through a Foucauldian perspective, dovetailing at the same time with
some more general ideas derived from practice theory. Other human geographers
have focused on disposal and waste practices (Bulkeley and Gregson, 2009;
Gregson et al., 2007a,b) and trust relations in food retailing settings (Evert and
Jackson, 2009). Finally, in marketing and consumer behaviour, practice theory is
investigated for its promises in relation to the theorization of markets and market
practices (Araujo et al., 2008), green consumers (Connolly and Prothero, 2008),
value creation (Schau et al., 2009), resource theory (Arnould, 2008), and the popularization of veil wearing (Sandikci and Ger, 2009), amongst others, showing
interesting initiatives linking diverse preoccupations in consumer research with
practice theoretical input.
We note that only some of this work engages with practice theory in a primary
way, and that only some of those which do, oer work grounded in empirical
reection. This includes most of the articles that have appeared in the journal
since 2005, citing Wardes article (including Connolly and Prothero, 2008;
Dwyer, 2009; Laughey, 2010; Trentmann, 2009). Similarly, there has been little
reection on the methodological implications of adopting a practice theoretical
perspective in research. As such, by oering a set of articles which do just that,
this special issue follows in the footsteps of Reckwitzs (2002: 259) parting comments: Practice theory should develop more philosophical perseverance and at the
same time not give up its embeddedness in empirical social and cultural analysis.
Then, in future the hitherto loose network of praxeological thinking might yield
some interesting surprises.
The authors invited to contribute to the special issue have all presented articles
at meetings of the Consumption Research Network of the ESA in the recent years;
a forum that has provided a setting for ongoing discussions on the development
and application of practice theory. Their work, as it is presented here, promises to
move debate forwards by showing applications of practice theory to diverse empirical terrains, by making suggestions for methodological consequences in using
practice theory and by fusing practice theoretical perspectives with other theoretical inputs. The applications of practice theory presented in this volume extend
from the most mundane aspects of everyday life (e.g. cooking), to structured activities in institutional settings (workplace environmental behaviour), with attention
given to both momentary actions and long term pursuits. The main common
thread that links the articles is that individuals are seen as practitioners engaged
in the practice of everyday life. The authors view the material environment
objects, tools, devices and apparatus and the implicit and explicit practical
knowledge stored in them, as central in the process of creating interaction, continuity and reality.
The article by Paolo Maggaudda, Dematerialization, technology and listening
experience in musical consumption practices is an example of the application of

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Halkier et al.

practice theory to the eld of cultural consumption, with an empirical qualitative

study on changes in musical consumption in Italy that accompany the growing
digitalization of music. The specic practice theoretical discussion taken up in the
article is the debate about the role of materiality in relation to practices and
the question whether music consumption practices have indeed been dematerialized
following the digitalization of music. In analysis of the adoption of new music
listening technologies, this article shows how digitalization of music does not
necessarily mean dematerialization of music listening habits. Materiality does
not disappear but is rather articulated in new ways. Although digital music
les, which replaced the material albums (cassettes, vinyl, CDs), have eliminated
the tangible part of music consumption, it seems that objects such as iPods
and their accessories have signicant social roles, produce social meanings and
maintain a crucial place in mediating what people do, feel and love when listening
to music.
The article Cooking with Bimby in a moment of recruitment by Monica
Truninger advances a suggestion for combining practice theory with conventions
theory to allow a more comprehensive understanding of personalized technology
appropriation, moral engagements with technology and technology alliances.
Building on a qualitative study of Portuguese consumers ways of becoming
users of a particular kitchen appliance the Thermomix in their cooking practices, this article argues that the combination with conventions theory promises to
overcome some of the weaknesses of practice theory in empirically operationalizing
practices. The article especially highlights the importance of specifying conceptualizations of scope and scale of practices, dierent types of agency of practitioners
and trajectories of practices. The conclusion is that the theoretical framework that
combines practice theory with conventions theory oers a new emphasis on issues
such as the sequencing of tasks, the tension between instituted and personalized
practices, and the linkage between images, objects and competences.
Kirsten Gram-Hanssens article Understanding change and continuity in residential energy consumption delves into the question of change in everyday life
habits, and oers conceptual clarications of the concept of practice itself and how
practices are organized. Based on three case studies on household energy consumption in Denmark, Gram-Hanssen deals with two discussions in using a practice
theoretical approach for consumption research that focuses on the relation between
stability and change. The rst discussion is the question of how processes of routinization and reexivity are related and played out in consumption practices,
where she concludes that changes in practices can come both from engagement
and conscious reection, but also from naturalizing new habits into routines. The
second discussion is about the conceptualization of practices, the relations to other
intersecting practices, the possible varying performances of a practice and the
developments of new practices. Here the suggestion is to recognise that a majority
of mundane consumer practices are not delimited but highly integrated with each
other, so the connections between and across dierent practices and their technologies are important to include in empirical analysis.

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Journal of Consumer Culture 11(1)

Practice-ing behaviour change by Tom Hargreaves continues on the theme of

practice change through a qualitative study of pro-environmental consumption
change. One of the aims of the article is to develop a more sophisticated understanding of practical social change than found in attitude and value approaches in
the eld of behaviour change. However, Hargreaves article moves the focus away
from the consumption in everyday life towards job-related consumption routines
and explores the challenges of these for environmental campaigns. On the basis of
an analysis of the details of the processes in a pro-environmental initiative at a
workplace, he concludes that practice theory oers a more holistic approach where
campaigns for behaviour change can be seen as interventions in the organization of
multiple intersecting social practices, rather than communications with the motives
and values of individual consumers. Hargreaves, however, also suggests that practice theoretical approaches to consumption changes need to focus on a broader
arena of multiple intersecting practices instead of focusing on single practices.
Furthermore, the necessity of conceptualizing socialization and social interaction
in practice theory is stressed.
Bente Halkier and Iben Jensens article, Methodological challenges in using
practice theory in consumption research picks up on the methodological side of
the potential usefulness of practice theoretical approaches for consumption studies.
The authors argue that practice theory enables a conceptualization of consumption
as processes of practical and social accomplishment and an empirical focus on ways
of consuming, rather than to focus on, for example, individual consumer choice.
The possible methodological implications and diculties from operationalizing this
version of practice theory are discussed on the basis of empirical examples from
a Danish qualitative study of handling nutritionally contested food consumption
among Pakistani Danes. Halkier and Jensen contend that two important implications is rst to see all types of qualitative data as enactments (social action), and
second, to enable construction of analytical generalizations that are not based on
methodological individualism. However, they also conclude that there are operational diculties, and that more analytical translation between applied practice
theoretical concepts and operative methodological procedures are necessary.
One of the interesting features of a collection of articles that demonstrates the
application of practice theoretical perspectives in dierent settings, and for the
purpose of exploring dierent social questions, is the variety of data collection
methods that the authors employed. Magaudda conducted in depth interviews;
Truninger conducted participant observations, a lmed observation and interviews;
Halkier and Jensen used individual, family and group in-depth interviews, autophotography and participant observation; Hargreaves used intensive participant
observation in meetings and events, a series of voluntary internships, and 38 interviews; and Gram-Hanssen used historical case studies, interviews and documentation of households ICT behaviour. This adds credibility to the aggregate
knowledge created here and enriches future research and debates on the strengths
and weaknesses of the marriage between practice theory and various
methodologies.

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Halkier et al.

Pulling all these contributions together, we wish to highlight some of the theoretical advances that they oer. First, the papers illustrate dierent aspects of
change in social behaviour, showing (not for the rst time, see Shoves work, e.g.
Shove 2004) that practice theory is not only useful for studying stability in practices
(Schatzki, 2002) but also for gaining insight into how social change occurs.
Magaudda proposes the term circuit of practice a heuristic device to map
routes of transformation linking objects, meanings and doing to emphasize the
way practices are created, stabilized and transformed. This term depicts the way
changes in the digitalization of music consumption aect meanings and ways of
doings. While practice theory tends to emphasize the way individuals embrace and
stabilize existing practices, the term circuit of practice is specically useful for
understanding how individuals change practices when transforming or abandoning
patterns of activity. For example, the introduction of a new object such as the iPod
produces new values (meanings), which in turn evolve into new habits, which produce yet new meanings (Magaudda). Gram-Hanssen also studies the role of new
technology in introducing change in consumer practices, and the way transformation in one practice aects other practices as well. She maintains that we should
consider changes in the dierent elements holding practices together, for example,
through innovations in the socio-technical network or evolutions in knowledge.
Halkier and Jensen propose to look at the directive for healthier lifestyle patterns in
Danish culture not through the eectiveness of public health information campaigns in changing cooking practices among ethnic minorities (Pakistani Danes),
but rather through considering how food is embedded in the social practices and
relations of everyday life. Hargreaves challenges existing approaches to behaviour
change, such as the theory of planned behaviour, and suggests that practice theory
can be more useful in studying pro-environmental behavioural transformation.
While the theory of planned behaviour works on the basis of methodological individualism, Hargreaves maintains that we should understand how behaviour change
is embedded in social relations and social processes. Behaviour change is analyzed
as a result of intervention in the organization of social practices, and thus it is captured as conditioned by the intersecting of multiple social processes. Truninger
also touches upon behaviour change, in focusing on a moment of recruitment
of new practitioners. She studies the way potential users of the Thermomix
(also known as Bimby) are instructed to adopt new cooking practices and
change old habits. This particular example is drawn from the realm of marketing
strategies and as such demonstrates the dialogue between economic, social
and cultural market forces on the one hand and domestic conventions on the
other hand.
We nd a second collective theoretical advancement in the excellent illustrations
provided by the articles of the subtle dance between practices as individual performances and practices as embedded in a cultural structure. In addition to analyzing
the continuous adoption and reproduction of practices in particular cultural contexts, the articles show how culture and social structure may constitute a site of
resistance and challenge. Put dierently, practices are reproduced through

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Journal of Consumer Culture 11(1)

imitation but they may also involve adjustment, interpretation and alteration. The
particular contribution of practice theories to consumer culture studies seems to be
the way in which it helps us focus on the performative processes of social life, which
by necessity involve consumption activities, while not diminishing the importance
of either the cultural conditioning of consumption, or the consumption of
practitioners.
Halkier and Jensen show how cultural dierences were not considered in state
attempts to contest cooking and eating practices among ethnic minorities in
Denmark. Their research demonstrates the interplay between the culturallybiased perceptions of proper food practices, taste preferences and nutritional
knowledge, and the initiative to regulate nutritional practices. Truninger argues
that cooking practices should be analyzed within the structural organization and
constraints posed by routines and other practices. These include, for example,
socio-technical systems, social arrangements of time coordination and normative
expectations of appropriate cooking. Magaudda too acknowledges the role played
by specic musical cultures in shaping the emergence of various music media and
technologies. Specic subcultures mould the way new music listening practices
emerge. Gram-Hanssen discusses the way systems of technology co-develop with
social structures to form the context in which individuals interact with, appropriate
and domesticate technologies in everyday life. Thus, she emphasizes the contextual
signicance of economic development, urban expansion and the introduction of
large integrated technologies such as electricity. Hargreaves focuses on the in situ
cultural conditioning of consumption by analysing the practical social destiny of a
behaviour change initiative in a workplace, and he discusses the importance of
social interaction and power in the processes of dealing with such change initiatives
across a range of collectively organized practices.
Other themes that oer broader thinking about how practice theoretical perspectives may be interwoven with questions and considerations on consumption
practices include the role and place of technology in practices and the obvious
connection with policy questions and intervention initiatives. To be sure, the
reader will gain insights other than those sketched by us here. Nevertheless, it is
our hope that this special issue will open up and help develop, if only in a small
way, future debate on how analysis of consumption may benet from the analytical
clarities oered by practice theories, whilst similarly scrutinizing and clarifying the
challenges involved in doing so.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Alan Warde for his support and advice during the initial
stages of the development of this special issue. We also thank the members of the
European Sociological Association Research Network on Consumption for providing
an ongoing intellectual and collegial environment during our annual conferences.
All the articles in this issue were born and raised in these conferences. Finally, we wish
to thank Doug Holt and Amanda Cowan for sharing the work involved in turning this
issue around.

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Halkier et al.

11

Notes
1. We are here opting for the plural expression i.e. practice theories and theories of social
practices, following Reckwitz 2002, and in acknowledgement of the fact that there is not
one such theory, but that these are multiple.
2. Reckwitz extends this list to include Garfinkel and Latour, and notes Taylor and Schatzki
as social philosophers (2002: 2434).

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Bente Halkier is associate professor in the Department of Communication,

Business and Information Technologies, Roskilde University, Denmark. Her
research interests are within the sociology of consumption and user-oriented communication research. She is the author of the recently published book Consumption
Challenged. Food in Medialised Everyday Lives, Ashgate, 2010.
Tally Katz-Gerro is a senior lecturer in Sociology at the University of Haifa, Israel.
Her work focuses on comparative culture consumption research, gender dierences
in cultural consumption, cultural omnivorousness, material consumption, and
environmental concern and behaviour. For more information on her research
please see http://soc.haifa.ac.il/tkatz
Lydia Martens is senior lecturer in Sociology at Keele University, United
Kingdom. She is interested in the ways in which consumption and domestic life
intermingle, and is currently looking at how the senses inform the experience of,
and consumption around, dierent practices (parenting, leisure and kitchen cleaning) and how this may be investigated.

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