Connecting Practices

Connecting Practices develops a distinctive method of conceptualising significant trends and global issues including environmental sustainability and inequalities in wealth and health, arguing that these are outcomes of the ways in which social practices interact and combine across space and time. Engaging with the question of how connections are made between practices and how past and present combinations make some futures more likely than others, this book brings practice theory to bear on large problems in society. Richly illustrated with examples from the spreading of germs to the history of shipping containers, this powerful analysis of how societies hang together and how they change will appeal to scholars and students of sociology and social theory.

Elizabeth Shove is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University, UK, and Visiting Professor at the Centre for Consumer Society Research at the University of Helsinki, Finland. She is co-author of The Dynamics of Social Practice: Everyday Life and How it Changes (SAGE, 2012) and co-editor of The Nexus of Practices: Connections, Constellations, Practitioners (Routledge, 2016). Her other books include Conceptualising Demand: A Distinctive Approach to Consumption and Practice (Routledge, 2020), Energy Fables: Challenging Ideas in the Energy Sector (Routledge, 2019), and Infrastructures in Practice: The Dynamics of Demand in Networked Societies (Routledge, 2018).

1. Introduction Part I: Spreading Out 2. Infusing 3. Circulating Part II: Amalgamating and Adapting 4. Merging and Emerging 5. Cross-referencing 6. Interweaving Part III: Textures of Advantage 7. Accumulating 8. Dividing 9. Joining up the dots