In recent years there has been a proliferation of writing on the meaning of home within the disciplines of sociology, anthropology, psychology, human geography, history, architecture and philosophy. Although many researchers now understand home as a multidimensional concept and acknowledge the presence of and need for multidisciplinary research in the field, there has been little sustained reflection and critique of the multidisciplinary field of home research and the diverse, even contradictory meanings of this term. This paper brings together and examines the dominant and recurring ideas about home represented in the relevant theoretical and empirical literature. It raises the question whether or not home is (a) place(s), (a) space(s), feeling(s), practices, and/or an active state of state of being in the world? Home is variously described in the literature as conflated with or related to house, family, haven, self, gender, and journeying. Many authors also consider notions of being-at-home, creating or making home and the ideal home. In an effort to facilitate interdisciplinary conversations about the meaning and experience of home each of these themes are briefly considered in this critical literature review.

Understanding Home: A Critical Review of the Literature:

The central focus of this paper is the notion that the home can provide a locale in which people can work at attaining a sense of ontological security in a world that at times is experienced as threatening and uncontrollable. The paper builds on and develops the ideas of Giddens and Saunders on ontological security and seeks to break down and operationalise the concept and explore it through a set of empirical data drawn from interviews with a group of older New Zealand home owners. The extent to which home and home life meets the conditions for the maintenance of ontological security is assessed through an exploration of home as the site of constancy in the social and material environment; home as a spatial context in which the day to day routines of human existence are performed; home as a site free from the surveillance that is part of the contemporary world which allows for a sense of control that is missing in other locales; and home as a secure base around which identities are constructed. The paper also argues that meanings of home are context specific and thus the data need to be seen in relation to New Zealanders’ long standing pre-occupation with land and home ownership. The paper concludes by speculating on how meanings of home may be changing.

Home, Home Ownership and the Search for Ontological Security:

Placing home in context

There has been a growing interest in connecting production and consumption through the study of commodity chains We identify three distinct approaches to the chain and review debates concerning the merits of a ‘vertical’ rather than a ‘horizontal’ approach Drawing upon the example of the home furnishings commodity chain, the article highlights the importance of including horizontal factors such as gender and place alongside vertical chains We consider geographical contingencies which underpin commodity chain dynamics, the role of space in mediating relationships across the chain and the spatialities of different products

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Spatializing commodity chains

PART ONE: LOCATING MATERIAL CULTURE The Material as Culture Definitions, Perspectives, Approaches Studying Material Culture Origins and Premises PART TWO: THEORETICAL APPROACHES TO STUDYING MATERIAL CULTURE The Deceptive, Suspicious Object Marxist and Critical Approaches The Object as Symbolic Code Structural and Semiotic Approaches The Material Representing the Cultural Universe Objects, Symbols and Cultural Categories PART THREE: OBJECTS IN ACTION Objects and Distinction The Aesthetic Field and Expressive Materiality Material Culture and Identity Objects and the Self Material Culture, Narratives, and Social Performance Objects in Contexts PART FOUR: CONCLUSION Conclusion: Objects and Meaning in Consumer Culture

Understanding Material Culture

Gender and the meaning of the home

In this article we explore alternative meanings and functions of home-directed consumption, in particular those aspects of consumption which have to do with presentation and appearance (fittings, furnishings and decor). Our focus is on popular taste, on those whose needs are met principally by mass marketing rather than the avant garde or the connoisseur. Recent debates have drawn attention to the possibility of pleasure and self-expression through consumption: contrasting the active shaping of cultures of consumption with the notion of consumer as mere passive recipient, manipulated by business interests. Our work suggests that neither view gives a satisfactory account of the complex meanings of consumption in the home. `Home' carries a heavy ideological weight and these meanings permeate interpretation of consumption for the home. Questions of style, design and tastefulness evidently cause anxiety, but they are largely subsumed by familial values (a relaxed, comfortable haven) and also by the desire to ...

`House Beautiful': Style and Consumption in the Home:

This article examines the issue of privacy within the home as a way of exploring the contradiction between feminist views that women and men experience the home differently ‐ and indeed that women may find the home oppressive ‐ and Saunders’ recent (1990) evidence that men and women express similar and equally strong positive sentiments about their home. We conclude that privacy within the home is negotiated within the wider framework of familial ideology and the ideals of ‘home’ and the companionate marriage’, so that within the home there is typically differential access to privacy for adults and children, and men and women.

Privacy in the private sphere

The Lifetime Homes (LTH) concept initiated in 1989 by the Helen Hamlyn Trust, and subsequently promoted by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, emerged at a point when there was growing awareness of the decline of both private and public sector housing quality, especially in relation to floorspace standards (Karn & Sheridan, 1994). LTH were intended to offset the concerns of first, the house buying public of the appearance and affordability of homes suitable for successive generations, second, the private house building industry of the cost and marketability of incorporating ‘inclusive’ design features, and third, Registered Social Landlords (RSLs), who had to balance cost constraints with addressing the needs of a growing number of households with older and/or disabled people. Approved Document Part M of the building regulations was extended in 1999, from public buildings to private dwellings, and currently requires that all new housing meet minimal ‘visitability’ criteria. Indeed, although the signs are that...

Regulation and innovation: rethinking ‘inclusive’ housing design

Recent work has argued that analysis based on the household obscures the fact that women and men experience housing differently in at least four respects. First, women predominate in some low-income household types (particularly single parents and single elderly) and further, even in ostensibly similar household forms (e.g. as single people), women’s weak labour market position means that they do not inevitably enjoy equal access to housing transacted in the market (Watson and Austerberry, 1986). Similarly, there may be sufficient discrepancies of power within two-adult households to imply the existence of significant differences over the enjoyment of the benefits of owner-occupation. Work on the feminisation of poverty has shown that women may be kept poor even within relatively affluent households (Glendinning and Millar, 1987). Hence, it would be expected that many women will benefit less, either as households or compared to their partners, both from the potential for wealth accumulation from housing and also the enhanced access to capital markets that are argued to derive from owner-occupation.

Ruth Madigan

Papers

Gender and the meaning of the home

`House Beautiful': Style and Consumption in the Home:

Privacy in the private sphere

Regulation and innovation: rethinking ‘inclusive’ housing design

Gender, House and ‘Home’: Social Meanings and Domestic Architecture in Britain