The sustainable transformation of social practices

This paper gives an account of the existing literature about social practices in general and analyses how this literature reflects the potentials, but also possible conflicts of different social practices related to sustainability. Social practice theory understands social life as a web of interconnected activities which hang together to form practice “complexes”, “bundles”, or “nexuses”. Social practices form a network of practices which can be complexes of practices, bundles of practices or nexuses of practices. The network of practices is shaped by a broader context, by socio-economic and socio-political arrangements, global trends, social norms and cultural perspectives. Social practice theory distinguishes between three constitutive elements of practices: social meanings, skills and competences and material elements as main practice “ingredients” (Shove, Pantzar, and Watson 2012). This distinction has proven useful for numerous empirical investigations dealing with those constitutive elements. A lot of the most recent work has been focused on understanding the role of infrastructures in diverse practices and how these change in relation to each other (Shove and Trentmann 2018). The elements of practice exist in different spatial, temporal and social dimensions (Castelo, Schäfer, and Silva 2021). Spaces can be workplaces, people’s homes etc., while the temporal dimension can point to certain segments in ordinary everyday life or the order of the days in a week, the order of seasons etc. And the social dimension is linked to types of social groups which can be classified by social class, gender, ethnicity etc. If we research how certain practices gain or lose importance to support sustainability, we must not only analyse how changing practice configurations may become more or less successful in competing with other practices, but also how these practices hang together with other practices to form “nexuses” or “bundles” of practices (Hui, Schatzki, and Shove 2017). Therefore, we have scrutinized the literature about the interconnectedness of five important social practices: working, dwelling, mobility, eating and recreation practices, especially with regard to achieving a sustainable transformation. Our research question is as following: • How does the interaction between different social practices influence transformational change, by either strengthening or weakening a sustainable transformation?