Dale Southerton
Biographic Data
| ID | 220808 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Dale Southerton |
| GIVEN NAMES | Dale |
| FAMILY NAME | Southerton |
| SIGNATURE | SOUTHERTON D |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Manchester |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1561-5521 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 39 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 972 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 38 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
Activity event connections and life-course transitions
Life-course transitions (major life-events, such as becoming a parent and moving home) have been identified as moments of opportunity to reset automated human activities in ways that foster socially desirable outcomes (such as more sustainable practices). Numerous intervention studies that seek to nudge automaticity into reflexivity have been trialed with mixed empirical results. Social practice theory, by contrast, considers habits (and routines…
Pesquisa em futuros sociodigitais
Susan Halford e Dale Southerton, pesquisadores e professores titulares da Universidade de Bristol, dividem a coordenação do Centro de Pesquisa em Futuros Sociodigitais (CenSoF), criado em 2022, com financiamento de 10 milhões de libras do Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). Trata-se de uma iniciativa que reúne pesquisadores de diferentes áreas do conhecimento de doze universidades do Reino Unido, de outras cinco universidades internacion…
Time use surveys, social practice theory, and activity connections
Social practice theory (SPT) represents a growing body of research that takes the 'doings and sayings' (social practices) of everyday life as its core unit of enquiry. Time use surveys (TUS) represent a substantial source of micro-data regarding how activities are performed across the 24-h day. Given their apparent complementarities, we ask why TUS have not been utilised more extensively within SPT-inspired research. We advance two contentions: (…
What Future for the Sociology of Futures? Visions, Concepts and Methods
Questions about the future, and futurelessness, have attracted wide-ranging attention in recent years. Our article explores what Sociology offers. We reflect on the apparent contradiction that the future was bracketed off from the discipline in its early history, yet also offers rich theoretical, methodological and empirical resources for futures research. We demonstrate this through an analysis of the contributions to this Special Issue, each of…
Past Times
Theories of changing experiences of time rest on sets of assumptions about past lives and past temporal experiences. This chapter analyses ‘day in the life’ diaries from 1937 that are held in the Mass Observation Archive. The striking feature of the narratives provided by diarists from 1937 was the strong collective timings of daily activities that resulted from clearly defined institutionally timed events, particularly the start and end times of…
Socio-Temporal Rhythms, Social Practices and Everyday Life
This chapter begins by observing that much social scientific enquiry into phenomena such as collective timings, synchronization and coordination tend to describe them generically as forms of socio-temporal rhythm. Defined as shared social phenomena related to or of time (socio-temporal), theories of rhythms are reviewed to argue that they take circular (recurrent) and linear (sequential) forms that can be observed in the aggregate patterning of t…
Time Scarcity
This chapter examines the empirical evidence that seeks to reveal whether changes in the amount of time devoted to paid and unpaid work, consumption and leisure, and personal relationships reveal any substantive grounds for time scarcity. It demonstrates that, at best, a focus on more or less activities is inconclusive because no simple correlation between the performance of activities and objective time can be determined, and that on balance the…
Introducing Time, Temporality and Societal Change
The time squeeze, captured in popular and academic debates as an experience of a shortage of time in which to conduct the activities that matter most to people, has become a pervasive concern of contemporary societies. This is sometimes presented as a matter of time scarcity that results from increasing demands on and opportunities for how we use time. Other accounts focus on processes of acceleration—the speeding-up of activities and capacity to…
Temporalities of Harriedness
This chapter reports on empirical studies that consider whether people feel time-squeezed and if so, why they feel this to be the case. The data revealed an overwhelming sense of feeling time-squeezed, which respondents explained as a consequence of different examples of ‘doing more’. However, first-hand experiences of the time squeeze in day-to-day lives revealed it to be a consequence of the challenge of coordinating everyday activities with ot…
The Rise of the Clock
The clock has come to dominate understandings of time. As a mechanism for measuring, planning and coordinating activities, people and the circulation of goods, the clock has come to frame how we understand and experience time. This chapter reviews how clock time became standardized and, in the process, a means of regulating, coordinating, synchronizing and increasing social and economic activity. Presenting time as objective (in the form of hours…
Conclusion
The concluding chapter summarizes the core arguments by reviewing three themes that run throughout the preceding chapters: the dominance of the clock, commodification and acceleration in framing understandings of time; coordination and synchronization of everyday activities and the declining strength of collectively timed events; and, the formation and reproduction of socio-temporal rhythms through the organization of practices. It highlights thr…
Time Pressure
Popular science books diagnose a chronic speeding-up of more or less all aspects of social lives. This chapter explores contentions that life is getting faster and in so doing leads to experiences of time pressure. The idea that societies are accelerating as a consequence of technological innovations has been popular throughout the modern period. Acceleration in the nineteenth century was associated with technological advances in transport and co…
Time, Consumption and the Coordination of Everyday Life
The Social Ordering of an Everyday Practice
Sociological contributions to debates surrounding sustainable consumption have presented strong critiques of methodological individualism and technological determinism. Drawing from a range of sociological insights from the fields of consumption, everyday life and science and technology studies, these critiques emphasize the recursivity between (a) everyday performances and object use, and (b) how those performances are socially ordered. Empirica…
Consumption policies within different theoretical frameworks
This chapter examines consumption-oriented policies with reference to the theoretical frameworks upon which they are founded. It explores the relationship between theoretical understandings of consumption and how they frame policy approaches and discusses &s;orthodox&s; framings of consumption policies, which privilege the consumer as a &s;sovereign&s; market actor. Core theoretical approaches are examined with examples of how they have been appl…
Consumption, Provisioning and
Provisioning refers to the social and economic organization of the delivery and consumption of goods and services. There are two principle conceptual applications. The first refers to modes of provision – recognizing the many “modes” through which goods and services are provisioned (e.g., state, household, communal) and correcting for overemphasis on just one mode (markets); each mode has significant implications for how consumption is accessed, …
A critical appraisal of Sustainable Consumption and Production research
This conceptual review article provides a critical appraisal of Sustainable Consumption and Production research, which is currently framed by two generic positions. First, the 'reformist' position, which focuses on firms pursuing green eco-innovations and consumers buying eco-efficient products, represents the political and academic orthodoxy. Second, the 'revolutionary' position, which is a radical critique of the mainstream, advocates the aboli…
The design of an environmental index of sustainable food consumption
Habits, routines and temporalities of consumption
The terms habit and routine have come to be used with increasing frequency in debates about 'behaviour' change and sustainable consumption, where dominant approaches, dubbed as 'portfolio models of action' by their critics, employ these terms to capture human deficiencies in the translation of pro-environmental values into corresponding actions (the 'value-action' gap). Alternative approaches present habits and routines as the observable performa…
Sustainability transitions and final consumption
This article examines the significance of final consumption processes for understandings of prospective transitions towards more sustainable societies. It argues that most existing conceptualisations either place too much emphasis on technology or on ‘consumer behaviour’, ignoring the deeply intertwined relationships between the two. After briefly reviewing recent contributions to the technology-oriented multi-level perspective (MLP) and to socia…
Practices and trajectories
Using time diary data to examine practices of reading, this article examines trajectories of change within five countries in the last quarter of the 20th century. It employs a conceptual framework derived from theories of practice to illustrate their application in a quantitative and comparative analysis of change in patterns of consumption. Analysing recruitment and defection, the multiplication and diversification of reading-related practices, …
Sociology of Personal Life
Encyclopedia of Consumer Culture
This title covers consuming societies around the world, from the age of enlightenment to the present, and shows how consumption has become intrinsic to the world's social, economic, political and cultural landscapes
Multisited Ethnography
Re-ordering Temporal Rhythms
Introduction: The Paradox of Time Pressure Time pressure is a contemporary malady for which a range of prescriptions have been spawned to alleviate the problem, including: self-help time management advice; convenience technologies and services; voluntary simplicity; and work–life balance policies. T
Squeezing Time
The `time squeeze', notions of `rush' and `harried' are popular concerns in contemporary society. This article reports on interviews with 20 suburban households who all suggested that people feel increasingly harried. Respondents were quick to suggest a set of generic narratives to explain the causes of `harriedness', notably that people `work more' and `consume more' - the same explanation offered by prominent academic analyses. However, such ex…
Habits, routines and temporalities of consumption
The terms habit and routine have come to be used with increasing frequency in debates about 'behaviour' change and sustainable consumption, where dominant approaches, dubbed as 'portfolio models of action' by their critics, employ these terms to capture human deficiencies in the translation of pro-environmental values into corresponding actions (the 'value-action' gap). Alternative approaches present habits and routines as the observable performa…
Changes in the Practice of Eating
This article examines changes in aspects of the eating habits of the populations of five countries between the early 1970s and the end of the 1990s. Time-use diary data provide the main evidence, which is subjected to techniques of statistical description and regression analysis. The study of France, UK, USA, Norway and the Netherlands shows considerable national variation in patterns of food preparation, eating at home and eating out. Each of th…
Analysing the Temporal Organization of Daily Life
There is a tension in time studies between measuring and accounting for the changing distribution of units of time across social activities, and explaining temporal experiences. By analysing in-depth interviews with 27 people, this article employs a theory of practice to explore the relationship between respondents' 'non-work' practices and five dimensions of time. It hypothesizes that practices which demand a fixed location within daily schedule…
A critical appraisal of Sustainable Consumption and Production research
This conceptual review article provides a critical appraisal of Sustainable Consumption and Production research, which is currently framed by two generic positions. First, the 'reformist' position, which focuses on firms pursuing green eco-innovations and consumers buying eco-efficient products, represents the political and academic orthodoxy. Second, the 'revolutionary' position, which is a radical critique of the mainstream, advocates the aboli…
The changing practice of eating
This paper examines some central themes about change in consumption behaviour through an empirical investigation of the practice of eating. It analyses patterns of food consumption in the UK using time diary data from 1975 and 2000. The practice of eating is decomposed into four component activities which are used to explore systematically the inter-relationships between social processes - such as commodification and temporal fragmentation - and …
Explaining Showering
This article considers the increasing popularity of showering in the UK. We use this case as a means of exploring some of the dimensions and dynamics of everyday practice. Drawing upon a range of documentary evidence, we begin by sketching three possible explanations for the current constitution of showering as a private, increasingly resource-intensive routine. We begin by reviewing the changing infrastructural, technological, rhetorical and mor…
Bringing Children (and Parents) into the Sociology of Consumption
The sociology of consumption pays relatively little detailed and systematic theoretical attention to children, while the sociology of childhood tends to view children’s consumption through what can be called the ‘production of consumption’ approach. This is surprising given the range of empirical and theoretical debate in the sociology of consumption, where ‘mode of consumption’,‘consumption as aesthetics’ and ‘material culture’ represent a furth…
Home Extensions in the United Kingdom
This paper begins with two observations: that UK homes appear to have accumulated increasing numbers of domestic technologies, yet new houses are smaller, on average, than those built before 1980. The spatial pressures placed on homes that result from the accumulation of technologies are explored by drawing upon forty household interviews which enquired into the domestic organisation of kitchen and bathroom technologies and practices. Many househ…
Pressed for Time' - the Differential Impacts of a 'Time Squeeze
The 'time squeeze' is a phrase often used to describe contemporary concerns about a shortage of time and an acceleration of the pace of daily life. This paper reviews analysis of the Health and Lifestyle Survey (HALS), 1985 and 1992, and draws upon in-depth semi-structured interviews conducted with twenty British suburban households, in order to shed light on 'senses' of time squeeze. 75% of HALS respondents felt at least 'somewhat' pressed for t…
Defrosting the Freezer
This article examines the 'normalization' of the British freezer. It defines three phases in this process: an initial period oriented around the utility of preserving home produce; a second stage marked by the development of a frozen food infrastructure and the establishment of the freezer as a part of the efficient domestic economy; and a third subtle but significant redefinition of the primary benefits of freezing in terms of convenience. Cast …
Time, Consumption and the Coordination of Everyday Life
Boundaries of 'Us' and 'Them
Whether social class shapes identification (senses of belonging to specified social groups) is subject to much debate. This article examines the boundaries of identification described by three groups living in a Southern English new town. The three groups systematically differed in their volumes of economic, cultural and social resources, and patterns of geographical mobility. Members identified themselves as belonging within each group through i…
What Future for the Sociology of Futures? Visions, Concepts and Methods
Questions about the future, and futurelessness, have attracted wide-ranging attention in recent years. Our article explores what Sociology offers. We reflect on the apparent contradiction that the future was bracketed off from the discipline in its early history, yet also offers rich theoretical, methodological and empirical resources for futures research. We demonstrate this through an analysis of the contributions to this Special Issue, each of…
Consuming Kitchens
The role that consumption might play in processes of identity formation has been subject to much recent sociological debate. This article explores four principles of kitchen consumption orientations that were described by three groups (differentiated by levels of economic and cultural resources) who live in an English new town. The varying meanings applied to kitchen usage are also explored. It is argued that the similarity of kitchen tastes and …
The Social Ordering of an Everyday Practice
Sociological contributions to debates surrounding sustainable consumption have presented strong critiques of methodological individualism and technological determinism. Drawing from a range of sociological insights from the fields of consumption, everyday life and science and technology studies, these critiques emphasize the recursivity between (a) everyday performances and object use, and (b) how those performances are socially ordered. Empirica…
Multisited Ethnography
Practices and trajectories
Using time diary data to examine practices of reading, this article examines trajectories of change within five countries in the last quarter of the 20th century. It employs a conceptual framework derived from theories of practice to illustrate their application in a quantitative and comparative analysis of change in patterns of consumption. Analysing recruitment and defection, the multiplication and diversification of reading-related practices, …
Time use surveys, social practice theory, and activity connections
Social practice theory (SPT) represents a growing body of research that takes the 'doings and sayings' (social practices) of everyday life as its core unit of enquiry. Time use surveys (TUS) represent a substantial source of micro-data regarding how activities are performed across the 24-h day. Given their apparent complementarities, we ask why TUS have not been utilised more extensively within SPT-inspired research. We advance two contentions: (…
The Social Worlds of Caravaning
This paper is about the part which objects play in scripting the practices and strategies of their users. Goffman uses the concept of script to make sense of the conventional ordering of social interaction and the definition and maintenance of social worlds. As adopted by Latour (1992), Akrich (1992)and others, the term describes the ways in which devices and non-human actors configure their users. Drawing upon a study of caravaning and caravaner…
Defrosting the Freezer
This article examines the 'normalization' of the British freezer. It defines three phases in this process: an initial period oriented around the utility of preserving home produce; a second stage marked by the development of a frozen food infrastructure and the establishment of the freezer as a part of the efficient domestic economy; and a third subtle but significant redefinition of the primary benefits of freezing in terms of convenience. Cast …
Consuming Kitchens
The role that consumption might play in processes of identity formation has been subject to much recent sociological debate. This article explores four principles of kitchen consumption orientations that were described by three groups (differentiated by levels of economic and cultural resources) who live in an English new town. The varying meanings applied to kitchen usage are also explored. It is argued that the similarity of kitchen tastes and …
The Social Worlds of Caravaning
This paper is about the part which objects play in scripting the practices and strategies of their users. Goffman uses the concept of script to make sense of the conventional ordering of social interaction and the definition and maintenance of social worlds. As adopted by Latour (1992), Akrich (1992)and others, the term describes the ways in which devices and non-human actors configure their users. Drawing upon a study of caravaning and caravaner…
Boundaries of 'Us' and 'Them
Whether social class shapes identification (senses of belonging to specified social groups) is subject to much debate. This article examines the boundaries of identification described by three groups living in a Southern English new town. The three groups systematically differed in their volumes of economic, cultural and social resources, and patterns of geographical mobility. Members identified themselves as belonging within each group through i…
Squeezing Time
The `time squeeze', notions of `rush' and `harried' are popular concerns in contemporary society. This article reports on interviews with 20 suburban households who all suggested that people feel increasingly harried. Respondents were quick to suggest a set of generic narratives to explain the causes of `harriedness', notably that people `work more' and `consume more' - the same explanation offered by prominent academic analyses. However, such ex…
Bringing Children (and Parents) into the Sociology of Consumption
The sociology of consumption pays relatively little detailed and systematic theoretical attention to children, while the sociology of childhood tends to view children’s consumption through what can be called the ‘production of consumption’ approach. This is surprising given the range of empirical and theoretical debate in the sociology of consumption, where ‘mode of consumption’,‘consumption as aesthetics’ and ‘material culture’ represent a furth…
Explaining Showering
This article considers the increasing popularity of showering in the UK. We use this case as a means of exploring some of the dimensions and dynamics of everyday practice. Drawing upon a range of documentary evidence, we begin by sketching three possible explanations for the current constitution of showering as a private, increasingly resource-intensive routine. We begin by reviewing the changing infrastructural, technological, rhetorical and mor…
Pressed for Time' - the Differential Impacts of a 'Time Squeeze
The 'time squeeze' is a phrase often used to describe contemporary concerns about a shortage of time and an acceleration of the pace of daily life. This paper reviews analysis of the Health and Lifestyle Survey (HALS), 1985 and 1992, and draws upon in-depth semi-structured interviews conducted with twenty British suburban households, in order to shed light on 'senses' of time squeeze. 75% of HALS respondents felt at least 'somewhat' pressed for t…
The Commodification of Childhood
Analysing the Temporal Organization of Daily Life
There is a tension in time studies between measuring and accounting for the changing distribution of units of time across social activities, and explaining temporal experiences. By analysing in-depth interviews with 27 people, this article employs a theory of practice to explore the relationship between respondents' 'non-work' practices and five dimensions of time. It hypothesizes that practices which demand a fixed location within daily schedule…
Consumption, Provisioning and
Provisioning refers to the social and economic organization of the delivery and consumption of goods and services. Its conceptual application falls within three, not mutually exclusive, areas. First is the relationship between production and consumption, spheres of economic and social life often treated empirically and theoretically as separate from one another. Connections between production and consumption are acknowledged (supply and demand be…
The changing practice of eating
This paper examines some central themes about change in consumption behaviour through an empirical investigation of the practice of eating. It analyses patterns of food consumption in the UK using time diary data from 1975 and 2000. The practice of eating is decomposed into four component activities which are used to explore systematically the inter-relationships between social processes - such as commodification and temporal fragmentation - and …
Home Extensions in the United Kingdom
This paper begins with two observations: that UK homes appear to have accumulated increasing numbers of domestic technologies, yet new houses are smaller, on average, than those built before 1980. The spatial pressures placed on homes that result from the accumulation of technologies are explored by drawing upon forty household interviews which enquired into the domestic organisation of kitchen and bathroom technologies and practices. Many househ…
Changes in the Practice of Eating
This article examines changes in aspects of the eating habits of the populations of five countries between the early 1970s and the end of the 1990s. Time-use diary data provide the main evidence, which is subjected to techniques of statistical description and regression analysis. The study of France, UK, USA, Norway and the Netherlands shows considerable national variation in patterns of food preparation, eating at home and eating out. Each of th…
Re-ordering Temporal Rhythms
Introduction: The Paradox of Time Pressure Time pressure is a contemporary malady for which a range of prescriptions have been spawned to alleviate the problem, including: self-help time management advice; convenience technologies and services; voluntary simplicity; and work–life balance policies. T
Sociology of Personal Life
Encyclopedia of Consumer Culture
This title covers consuming societies around the world, from the age of enlightenment to the present, and shows how consumption has become intrinsic to the world's social, economic, political and cultural landscapes
Multisited Ethnography
Sustainability transitions and final consumption
This article examines the significance of final consumption processes for understandings of prospective transitions towards more sustainable societies. It argues that most existing conceptualisations either place too much emphasis on technology or on ‘consumer behaviour’, ignoring the deeply intertwined relationships between the two. After briefly reviewing recent contributions to the technology-oriented multi-level perspective (MLP) and to socia…
Practices and trajectories
Using time diary data to examine practices of reading, this article examines trajectories of change within five countries in the last quarter of the 20th century. It employs a conceptual framework derived from theories of practice to illustrate their application in a quantitative and comparative analysis of change in patterns of consumption. Analysing recruitment and defection, the multiplication and diversification of reading-related practices, …
The design of an environmental index of sustainable food consumption
Habits, routines and temporalities of consumption
The terms habit and routine have come to be used with increasing frequency in debates about 'behaviour' change and sustainable consumption, where dominant approaches, dubbed as 'portfolio models of action' by their critics, employ these terms to capture human deficiencies in the translation of pro-environmental values into corresponding actions (the 'value-action' gap). Alternative approaches present habits and routines as the observable performa…
A critical appraisal of Sustainable Consumption and Production research
This conceptual review article provides a critical appraisal of Sustainable Consumption and Production research, which is currently framed by two generic positions. First, the 'reformist' position, which focuses on firms pursuing green eco-innovations and consumers buying eco-efficient products, represents the political and academic orthodoxy. Second, the 'revolutionary' position, which is a radical critique of the mainstream, advocates the aboli…
Consumption, Provisioning and
Provisioning refers to the social and economic organization of the delivery and consumption of goods and services. There are two principle conceptual applications. The first refers to modes of provision – recognizing the many “modes” through which goods and services are provisioned (e.g., state, household, communal) and correcting for overemphasis on just one mode (markets); each mode has significant implications for how consumption is accessed, …
Consumption policies within different theoretical frameworks
This chapter examines consumption-oriented policies with reference to the theoretical frameworks upon which they are founded. It explores the relationship between theoretical understandings of consumption and how they frame policy approaches and discusses &s;orthodox&s; framings of consumption policies, which privilege the consumer as a &s;sovereign&s; market actor. Core theoretical approaches are examined with examples of how they have been appl…
Sociology (30 works) · Computer Science (20 works) · Social science (19 works) · Economics (17 works) · Psychology (17 works) · Political science (15 works) · Epistemology (14 works) · Social and Cultural Dynamics (13 works) · Law (10 works) · Social Psychology (10 works)