‘A bigger living room required a bigger TV’ : doing and negotiating necessity in well-to-do households
Publiceringsår
2020
Upphovspersoner
Aro, Riikka
Abstrakt
This article investigates how necessity is ‘done’ and ‘negotiated’ in Finnish well-to-do households’ domestic practices and asks whether and how households are engaged in sustainable practices. The main research material consists of 14 in-depth interviews. In this study, necessities are viewed as something that householders perceive they ‘cannot manage without’ in their normal domestic daily life. At collective level, necessity is considered to construct ‘expectation horizons’: what is considered normal for people to have and to desire and how to live their lives normally within a certain socio-economic frame. With a novel theoretical approach, this article views necessity through three kinds of agentic capacities: distributed agency in the material world, socio-cultural surroundings and mental and bodily dispositions. This article contributes to the ongoing discussion on the problematics of rising living standards and household sustainability efforts. The findings show that in carrying out daily life, the leeway provided by higher income and education collides with the internalised ethos of ‘not wasting’ (habitus), lack of seeing real possibilities and often blurred views of responsibilities and power to pursue sustainability. Sustainability is seen as distant to daily life and as an inconvenience that requires familiarisation, time and/or money. It also lacks practical meaning. Instead, domestic necessity contributes to personal and family well-being and effortlessness and straightforwardness in daily life. This article provides three key conclusions. First, any vision or innovation for pursuing sustainability is inadequate if it does not carry meaning in everyday functionality. Second, it is important to critically account for the ‘stickiness’ (capacities for resisting change) of non-negotiable parts of domestic practices with embedded consumption of materials, water and electricity; third, based on the previous two, research and policy should take seriously the difficulty of thinking or seeing outside of the ‘expectation horizons’ that incorporate the co-evolving aspirations and conventions.
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Publikationstyp
Publikationsform
Artikel
Moderpublikationens typ
Tidning
Artikelstyp
En originalartikel
Målgrupp
VetenskapligKollegialt utvärderad
Kollegialt utvärderadUKM:s publikationstyp
A1 Originalartikel i en vetenskaplig tidskriftPublikationskanalens uppgifter
Journal
Förläggare
Volym
20
Nummer
4
Sidor
498-520
ISSN
Publikationsforum
Publikationsforumsnivå
1
Öppen tillgång
Öppen tillgänglighet i förläggarens tjänst
Nej
Parallellsparad
Nej
Övriga uppgifter
Vetenskapsområden
Sociologi
Nyckelord
[object Object],[object Object],[object Object],[object Object],[object Object],[object Object],[object Object],[object Object]
Publiceringsland
Förenade kungariket
Förlagets internationalitet
Internationell
Språk
engelska
Internationell sampublikation
Nej
Sampublikation med ett företag
Nej
DOI
10.1177/1469540517745706
Publikationen ingår i undervisnings- och kulturministeriets datainsamling
Ja