Social Practice Theory Analysis

Social practice theory analysis explains consumption and everyday behavior, including energy and resource use, by making the practice rather than the individual the unit of analysis. Andreas Reckwitz's 2002 synthesis defined a practice as a routinized type of behaving that links bodily and mental activities, things, knowledge, and meaning, drawing together strands from Bourdieu, Giddens, and others into a coherent culturalist alternative to choice-based theories. Elizabeth Shove, Mika Pantzar, and Matt Watson's The Dynamics of Social Practice operationalized this for empirical research, proposing that practices are constituted by three elements, materials, competences, and meanings, that must be actively linked in performance. The analytical move is decisive for sustainability: instead of asking how to change attitudes or nudge choices, the approach asks how resource-intensive practices like showering, driving, or heating come to be normal and how they might be reconfigured. It treats people as carriers of practices rather than as sovereign decision-makers. The result reframes environmental problems as problems of how practices are organized and reproduced.