Transition and Social Practices

Abstract

Against the background of environmental problems arising from the growing extraction of natural resources and resource depletion, achieving a sustainable development is an indispensable challenge in the twenty-first century. In this article we want to show how socio-technical and product-service innovations can change social practices -the routine doings in everyday life -and, thus, support transition of socio-technical systems. We introduce theoretical considerations on how social practice theories and the framework of the Multi-Level Perspective in transition research can be linked to better understand transition processes from a micro-macro-link perspective. We then present cases based on desk research in the field of practices in bathing, heating and nutrition to show how these have changed over the past decades. Building on this, examples of concepts for sustainable product-service-design in these areas are introduced as leverage points to change social practices in everyday life. These have been developed in research projects or design student seminar works, respectively. We argue that this implies sustainable product-service-systems should be developed in a user-and actor-integrated framework, such as Sustainable LivingLabs. The integration of users and other stakeholders into participatory co-creation processes enables tailored solutions that take actual routines and dependencies seriously into account.

Sustainability as Practice: Reflections on the Creation of an Institutional Logic

“…Their studies are related to organisational ecology [11], innovation [53], supply chain management [12,54], and social entrepreneurship [9]. Several PBS have been done on sustainability, especially on the transition to sustainability, which is an emerging area of research [3,55,56]; there are also those that examine sustainability within the field of strategy studies [2,38]. However, these studies are limited.…”

“…It could be examined as a practice built of agents' daily actions in the course of historical processes and as a cause and a consequence of cultural changes in a given context. For instance, Liedtke et al [3] claim that in the transition to sustainability, changes in practices are possible through a sustainable product-service-design. To explain this the authors cite bathing and nutrition practices that have caused massive changes regarding skills and habits in society.…”

“…Within sustainability studies, the idea of sustainability relating to institutional, organisational and individual practices has been elaborated upon in several recent discussions [2,3]. However, they adhere to a broad idea of practices instead of contextualising it within social theory.…”

Practices in transitions: Review, reflections, and research directions for a Practice Innovation System PIS approach

“…Developments in business models and platform technologies contribute to incumbents changing in the existing regime of automobility. This implies that providers play a role in changes both in regime-and niche-practices, adding to research that suggests including providers, and regime-and niche-practices in integrated frameworks of social practice theories and transitions theories [36,39,[92][93][94][95][96].…”

Practice-based Studies on Sustainable Consumption: a methodological proposal.

“…al. (2019), studies have proposed adopting the practice-based approach to sustainability in consumer studies, and others that address this relationship more broadly (Liedtke, Hasselkuß, Speck & Baedeker, 2017;Silva & Figueiredo, 2017). The first discusses the role of sociotechnical and product/service innovations in the transition of sociotechnical systems, emphasizing the multilevel perspective in broadening the understanding of the phenomenon.…”