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In this short and deliberately provocative paper I reflect on what seems to be a yawning gulf between the potential contribution of the social sciences and the typically restricted models and concepts of social change embedded in contemporary environmental policy in the UK, and in other countries too. As well as making a strong case for going beyond what I refer to as the dominant paradigm of 'ABC'—attitude, behaviour, and choice—I discuss the attractions of this model, the blind spots it creates, and the forms of governance it sustains. This exercise provides some insight into why so much relevant social theory remains so marginalised, and helps identify opportunities for making better use of existing intellectual resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 organisa- tion of kitchen and bathroom technologies and practices. Many households have responded to such spatial pressures by extending or reformulating their domestic spaces: such that kitchens are becom- ing increasingly multifunctional spaces and bathrooms are multiplying. It is argued that these trends are not simply driven by an unstoppable tide of material possession but reflect context-specific arrangements related to the temporal and ideological structuring of domestic practices. Technologies and practices coevolve with the result that new demands are made on homes-the commodities and objects with which we live our lives influence our experience of space and the value placed on different physical configurations. Domestic technologies are therefore implicated in the structure and reproduction of practice and hence in the choreography of things and people in time and space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the UK, the majority of households have a freezer and by most criteria it would be fair to say that home freezing and frozen food provisioning reached sociotechnical 'closure' some 20 years ago or more. Detailed examination of how people actually live with freezers suggests, by contrastt, that associated consumption practices and processes are varied, unstable and subject to change. Interviews with representatives of 40 households provide new insight into the ways in which discursive, material and temporal aspects of daily life condense around the freezer. In analysing these experiences we suggest that freezing is persistently dynamic because the freezer figures as an orchestrating node around which multiple aspect of consumption and provision converge. We show how different ways of living with a freezer are negotiated and maintained and we discuss the relation between household practices and the systems of provision with which they intersect. We suggest that concepts like those of 'domestication' and normalization' fail to capture the persistently dynamic status of material objects in daily life, or their constitutive role in systems of social order. In response, we argue for an interpretation of freezing as a surprisingly performative process involving the active integration of materials, ideologies and skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Research programmes appear to represent one of the more powerful instruments through which research funders (principals) steer and shape what researchers (agents) do. The fact that agents navigate between different sources and styles of programme funding and that they use programmes to their own ends is readily accommodated within principal-agent theory with the help of concepts such as shirking and defection. Taking a different route, I use three examples of research programming (by the UK, the European Union and the European Science Foundation) to argue that principal-agent theory cannot capture the cumulative and collective consequences of the relationships it seeks to describe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 redefini-tion of the primary benefits of freezing in terms of convenience. Cast in their new role as 'time machines', freezers are sold as a means of managing contemporary pressures associated with the scheduling and co-ordination of domestic life. At one level, this is a story of the gradual acceptance of a rela-tively standardized object. Yet this narrative suggests that the freezer's promised benefits and functions change along the way. Developing this point, we argue that the normalization of the chameleon-like freezer can only be understood in the context of similarly changing systems of food provisioning, patterns of domestic practice and allied technological devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Although an intrinsic part of our everyday routines, the dustbin's rote as a mediator of changing waste practices has rarely been considered. As bins become reconfigured as environmental technologies for contemporary recycling programmes, is argued that they provide a revealing indicator of new waste relationships in society. These emerging relationships are explored by tracing through a number of past and present bin technologies, showing how they represent changing waste meanings, practices and responsibilities. The future of the bin and how adopting a bin-centred approach can help researchers and planners reconceptualize waste 'problems' and so reconsider waste management strategies are speculated upon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article highlights the increasing popularity of showering in Great Britain. There is evidence that people in Great Britain are showering more than ever before and that they are using more powerful showers. Industry forecasts currently anticipate a five fold increase in the number of litres used for showering between 1991 and 2021, accompanied by an equally dramatic decline in the use of the bath. More tangibly, demand for separate shower cubicles has increased at an average of twenty per cent per year since 1999, a figure that suggests the composition of Great Britain bathrooms is on the move and that showering is being positioned as a normal everyday activity. Faced with these trends, environmental policy makers have sought to contain consumption through a series of technical fixes, for example, by promoting water metering, advocating low flow shower-heads and labeling appliances. While not irrelevant, these initiatives take future demand and consumption as foregone conclusions. Focusing on resources rather than on changing habits, such measures suppose that patterns of unsustainable consumption are the result of information deficit, inappropriate technology or inadequate regulation.