Condensing practices : Ways of living with a freezer

Hand, Martin and Shove, Elizabeth (2007) Condensing practices : Ways of living with a freezer. Journal of Consumer Culture, 7 (1). pp. 79-104. ISSN 1469-5405

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Abstract

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 contrast, 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 aspects 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 analysis of 'normalization' as an ongoing achievement, and for an interpretation of freezing as a surprisingly performative process involving the active integration of materials, ideologies and skills.

Item Type:
Journal Article
Journal or Publication Title:
Journal of Consumer Culture
Uncontrolled Keywords:
/dk/atira/pure/subjectarea/asjc/1400/1403
Subjects:
?? closurecompetencedomesticationfreezingintegrationorderingprovisioningskillsbusiness and international managementsocial psychologyarts and humanities (miscellaneous)sociology and political scienceeconomics and econometricsmarketing ??
ID Code:
145880
Deposited By:
Deposited On:
28 Jul 2020 08:43
Refereed?:
Yes
Published?:
Published
Last Modified:
15 Jul 2024 20:51