Routines Disrupted: Reestablishing Security through Practice Alignment

Abstract

Routines are the taken-for-granted practices that form the rhythm of everyday life making people feel secure. How do consumers manage when their routines are disrupted? Practice theorists assert that practices are important to understanding consumption and stress their shared, repetitive, and conventional nature. When practices are stable, they are performed effortlessly producing feelings of ease and trust in a predictable world. People are often unaware of the embodied competencies, or practical understandings, involved in the performance of these practices. However, practical understandings become apparent when elements of practices are misaligned. Our findings advance Gidden's (1984) theorization of ontological security by showing how the interplay between practical and discursive understandings and material configurations works to produce different ontological states that we call embedded security, embedded insecurity, discursive insecurity, acclimating security, and new embedded security. We also show how households subtly rework the underlying constitutive rules that anchor important practices in place within practice alignment.

A Self‐Regulatory Model of Resource Scarcity

“…For example, security can be fulfilled through physical resources, such as money (Rose & Orr, 2007), food (Allen & Wilson, 2005), and brands and material possessions (Rindfleisch, Burroughs, & Wong, 2009). Security can also be found in non-physical resources, such as routines (Phipps & Ozanne, 2017), familiar places (Debenedetti et al, 2014;Fried, 2000), and social support systems (Xu, Zhou, Ye, & Zhou, 2012). Therefore, we use the language of "personal control" to refer to the psychological experience of the actor under low mutability resource scarcity, and the language of "security" to refer to the psychological affordances conferred by external sources, such as products.…”

Theorizing Reactive Reflexivity: Lifestyle Displacement and Discordant Performances of Taste

“…In the normal course of everyday life, these existential threats are generally not a salient aspect of one's reflexive awareness (see Phipps and Ozanne 2017). Rather individuals construct their identities under conditions of ontological security, which Giddens' (1991, 40) likens to a "protective cocoon."…”

Changing emotional engagement with running through communal self‐tracking: the implications of ‘teleoaffective shaping’ for public health

“…In positive terms, self‐tracking is seen as boosting social comparison, emotional support, enjoyment and empowerment and ultimately increases motivation to keep active. In contrast, our analysis foregrounds the recursive nature of practices and practitioner performances, which is a strong theme in recent practice‐oriented consumption studies (Molander and Hartmann , Phipps and Ozanne ) with neither practitioner agency nor socially normative patterns of activity taking centre stage. Rather, practitioners are central in the dynamics of ongoing practice change (Maller 2015).…”