Object relations in accounts of everyday life

TL;DR: In this article, the authors identify traces of both schools of thought in the ways in which people describe their immediate material environments, and illustrate multi-faceted object relations with reference to the example of keeping warm.

Abstract: Theories of social practice routinely acknowledge the significance of the material world, arguing that objects have a constitutive role in shaping and reproducing the practices of which daily life is made. Objects are also important for those who approach ‘everyday life’ as an ontology, a tradition in which scholarly interest in the material reaches beyond the somewhat pragmatic concerns of practice theory. In this article we identify traces of both schools of thought in the ways in which people describe their immediate material environments. By drawing on an archive of diary material, we illustrate multi-faceted object relations with reference to the example of keeping warm. We conclude that in keeping warm, diarists weave together encounters, tactics and judgements, encountering objects in ways that extend beyond the ‘mere’ enactment of social practice. In analysing these encounters we explore ways of conceptualising the object-world that are especially relevant for studies of everyday life.

Summary

Introduction

• Understanding how things, day-to-day practices and practitioners are mutually coaligned is a core concern for sociologists of everyday life.
• This writing focuses on things in use, recognising that usefulness is always in flux, that it depends on how objects relate to each other, and how they are integrated into one or more practices.
• This has been acknowledged in sociological inquiries.
• In working with the resulting archive of diary entries the authors look for theoretical insight – and not ‘just’ documentary evidence – regarding relations between things, practices and the constitution of everyday life.
• The authors limit their analysis to descriptions of keeping warm on a cold day.

Using Diaries as a Method of Conceptualising and Representing Everyday Life

• Scholarly practices frequently imply and just as frequently reproduce a division between elite intellectuals on the one hand and lay people, who are the objects of study, on the other.
• For instance by Garfinkel (1996), academic researchers claim to have a privileged view of social processes and of social order.
• Whilst the immediacy of daily life might elude researchers in pursuit of stable, rationalist accounts, it is not necessarily immune to all forms of representation.
• Put bluntly, methods of registering the everyday depend on recognising and not resisting these necessarily provisional features (Pink, 2012).
• While diaries have been used to cap- ture the mundane, the taken for granted and the recurrent qualities of day-to-day life, they have not, as far as the authors know, been used as a resource with which to problematise or reveal the role of things.

Using Diaries in Research

• Diaries take many forms, ranging from unstructured personal accounts to more organised texts produced in response to specific ‘directives’.
• In addition, there are established research traditions in which people are invited to keep diaries of travel, of weather or of health, and in which the resulting data are aggregated and analysed for different purposes (Alaszewski, 2006).
• Insofar as the diarist is personally inscribed in the diary, rules of self-presentation affect the text, and probably do so whether there is an intention to publish or not.
• It would be misleading to say that diaries provide authentic access to real life or that they are free from systems and structures of representation (Latham, 2003).
• The quantitative imbalance between the two years reflects the smaller size of the 2009 data set (11,503 compared with 23,500 entries), reflecting the fact that this second round was not as widely publicised.

Materiality and Temporality in the Diary Archive

• In discussing diary entries, the authors distinguish between three co-existing modes of material engagement.
• First, although the diarists write in very different ways, the diary format clearly structures the manner in which materials and object relations are represented.
• Things simply exist – and are simply engaged within the responsive, instantaneous ‘time’ of the everyday (Highmore, 2002).
• In selecting events, observations and ideas that are worth reporting, diarists are actively engaged in positioning practices and their elements in some temporal and spatial frame.
• In what follows the authors use selected excerpts to illustrate these modes and to suggest that each represents a temporally distinct way of relating to objects.

Encountering the Object-World: The Weather, the Heating System, the Firewood

• The wind howls in the corners and in the ventilation pipes ever more loudly.
• In accounts of this nature there is an element of distancing from the practicalities and problems of everyday life, a feature which highlights the point that this mode of material engagement is simply not action oriented.
• The frost has hit minus fourteen degrees, but one has to drag oneself to the wood pile.
• Even though authors refer to things that are merely present-at-hand, they are not entirely indifferent to the objects they describe.
• I glance at the fireplace, put more wood in and enjoy the radiating heat.

Acting in a Materially Constituted World: Coping with the Cold

• Accounts of practical, on-going and responsive problem-solving represent a second mode of material engagement.
• Heating systems are needed   9 to make other things possible (getting the car started) or to make people comfortable (particularly the baby).
• I clean out the ashes from last night, get a basket full of logs from the cellar, and stack the fireplace ready for the next fire.
• In writing about what they do, diarists mobilise understandings of competent action within pre-existing material and social conditions.
• Practice-theoretical studies of how daily life is reproduced and enacted in an alwayschanging environment refer to dynamic processes that characterise on-going sequences and chains of action (Southerton, 2006).

Evaluating the Material World: How Heating Should be Done

• While some diary entries are full of confidence others are riddled with uncertainty, also reporting on strains, tensions and outright conflict about how things should be done.
• Instead, accounts are infused with normative evaluation, affirming or challenging the worth of specific practical-material arrangements or of entire ways of living.
• Evaluative reflexivity implies critical distancing from one’s own action: in the diary material, judgements reflect a variety of distant concerns including family traditions, the wider society or animal welfare.
• In winter time like this the fixed electric radiator (from 1972) takes care of the heating of the kitchen.
• I move to the dining room of their 110-year-old house, and make a fire out of logs in the original ‘pönttöuuni’ [a type of stove].

Object Relations: Insights and Conclusions

• The authors started with the idea that accounts of everyday life might provide insights and understandings of how materials, practices and practitioners intersect.
• Finally, in writing about encountering, acting in and evaluating the object-world, diarists inadvertently draw attention to the different temporalities of material engagement.
• This is a theme that deserves more explicit attention within social theories of practice, and within studies of everyday life.
• In addition, it provides an account of how object relations evolve and of how things simultaneously exist as elements in a flat ‘background’, as dynamic components of ongoing action, and as sites and vectors of judgement and evaluation.
• For us, the very unstructured nature of the diarywriting process proved crucial.

Full text

Object Relations in Accounts of Everyday Life
Jenny Rinkinen
Aalto University School of Business, Finland
Mikko Jalas
Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture, Finland
Elizabeth Shove
Lancaster University, UK
Abstract
Theories of social practice routinely acknowledge the significance of the material world,
arguing that objects have a constitutive role in shaping and reproducing the practices of
which daily life is made. Objects are also important for those who approach ‘everyday
life’ as an ontology, a tradition in which scholarly interest in the material reaches beyond
the somewhat pragmatic concerns of practice theory. In this paper we identify traces of
both schools of thought in the ways in which people describe their immediate material
environments. By drawing on an archive of diary material, we illustrate multi-faceted
object relations with reference to the example of keeping warm. We conclude that in
keeping warm, diarists weave together encounters, tactics and judgements, encountering
objects in ways that extend beyond the ‘mere’ enactment of social practice. In analysing
these encounters we explore ways of conceptualising the object-world that are especially
relevant for studies of everyday life.
Keywords
diary archives, materiality, object relations, social practice
ACCEPTED VERSION – SUBJECT TO PROOFS
Forthcoming in Sociology – Special issue on Sociologies of Everyday Life
Sociology 1–16 © The Author(s) 2015 DOI: 10.1177/0038038515577910 soc.sagepub.com

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Introduction
Understanding how things, day-to-day practices and practitioners are mutually co-
aligned is a core concern for sociologists of everyday life. Theories of social practice
have recently entered this field, bringing with them a new emphasis on the constitutive
role of objects. Following actor network theory (Latour, 1992), materials and social
arrangements are frequently analysed together on the grounds that both are implicated in
the emergence, the enactment and the reproduction of everyday life (Shove et al., 2012).
In contrast to those who study the culturally and symbolically significant surfaces of
objects, practice theorists contend that the social significance of material objects lies in
the ways in which they are ‘handled’ (Reckwitz, 2002a: 210; Reckwitz, 2002b) in how
they are mobilised in practice and how they combine in practice-arrangement nexuses
(Schatzki, 2010). Ingold (2008, 2012) takes these ideas a step further, suggesting that
analyses of material culture should focus less on the ‘objectness’ of things and more on
the material flows and formative processes through which they come into being. This
writing focuses on things in use, recognising that usefulness is always in flux, that it
depends on how objects relate to each other, and how they are integrated into one or more
practices. In keeping with these ideas, Warde’s proposition that consumption happens not
for its own sake but as part of one or another social practice establishes the ontologi- cal
standing of goods as elements of practice (Warde, 2005). More detailed work high- lights
specific forms of object-engagement such as maintenance (Gregson et al., 2009) or
construction (Watson and Shove, 2008). Relations between objects have also been con-
sidered, as in Hand and Shove’s (2007) analysis of the freezer as an orchestrating node
around which multiple aspects of consumption and provision converge. In combination,
studies like these generate convincing and compelling accounts of the dynamic relation
between practices and materiality but in concentrating on aspects of function and flow
they tend to overlook the many other parts things play in daily life.
As Schatzki notes, the ways in which people discuss and act towards objects are not
exhausted by questions of use: ‘People also observe objects, examine them, measure
them, admire them, draw them, and talk about them in numerous ways that do not pertain
to use’ (1996: 114). These modes of engagement are not somehow apart from the conduct
of practice, nor are they ‘purely’ symbolic. This has been acknowledged in sociological
inquiries. For example, Durkheim (1915) notes that sacred objects have a special role in
religious rituals; Goffman (1967) and later Collins (2004) recognise the social signifi-
cance of objects in more mundane forms of human interaction; and in the field of con-
sumption, writers like Douglas and Isherwood (1980) and Belk (1988) analyse the fluid
status of objects as they are produced, consumed, exchanged, appreciated and catego-
rised in aesthetic, emotional and economic terms (see also Becker, 1974, 1980). Yet, to
date, and with a few exceptions (e.g. Appadurai, 1988; Engeström and Blackler, 2005),
there has been relatively little discussion of how these multiple object relations are
reproduced in everyday practice.
One method of catching sight of the complexity of object relations is to review ordi- nary
people’s accounts of an ordinary day. In this paper we examine co-existing forms of
practice-object relations with the help of a body of solicited diary data created through

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two successive calls in which volunteers were invited to document an ordinary day. This
diary-keeping exercise was organised by the Finnish Literature Society and took place in
1999 and again in 2009. In working with the resulting archive of diary entries we look for
theoretical insight – and not ‘just’ documentary evidence – regarding relations between
things, practices and the constitution of everyday life. In other words, our method is to
treat the diarists as ‘everyday theorists’ and to tap into narratives that reveal complex and
yet distinctive methods of conceptualising the parts things play in the reproduction, the
experience and the reporting of the everyday.
In brief, our ambition is to review empirical accounts of everyday life to see how object
relations are represented. We limit our analysis to descriptions of keeping warm on a cold
day. Within the diary data, the sayings and doings that relate to staying warm stand out as
a broad category not only of practical activity but also of feeling, tradition and evaluation.
Other topics might have worked as well: we do not claim that the prac- tices of staying
warm are in some way unique, nor do we suggest that this case gives us access to all
possible forms of object relations. Rather, we use this theme as a focal point for an
exercise in discerning the multiple, dynamic and co-existing roles of things within and
beyond matters of practicality and use (Ingold, 2012).
In working with the Finnish diary data, and in harking back to the French tradition of
everyday life studies, we hope to enrich social theories of practice and contribute to an
understanding of object relations within the sociology of everyday life. In detail, the
paper is organised as follows: we begin by discussing the use of diaries and their rele-
vance within theoretical traditions that treat the everyday as a particular ontological cat-
egory. We then say more about the texts to which we refer, the modes of material
engagement they represent, and the insights that can be drawn from these lay accounts of
object relations. We conclude by reflecting on the wider implications of our analysis.
Using Diaries as a Method of Conceptualising and Representing
Everyday Life
Scholarly practices frequently imply and just as frequently reproduce a division between
elite intellectuals on the one hand and lay people, who are the objects of study, on the
other. Although this tendency has been noted and deliberately resisted, for instance by
Garfinkel (1996), academic researchers claim to have a privileged view of social pro-
cesses and of social order. The tradition of everyday life studies challenges this para-
digm. It does so in that scholars operating within this field aim to provide methods and
conceptual frameworks that are capable of accounting for the everyday world as that is
seen, understood and enacted by lay people. This is not an easy task. Indeed, some argue
that established research methods are always lagging behind and always too selective to
grasp more than a fraction of the richness, the complexity and the fleeting character of the
everyday (Highmore, 2002; Sheringham, 2006).
Whilst the immediacy of daily life might elude researchers in pursuit of stable, ration-
alist accounts, it is not necessarily immune to all forms of representation. Put bluntly,
methods of registering the everyday depend on recognising and not resisting these neces-
sarily provisional features (Pink, 2012). As Highmore (2002: 171) explains: ‘the singular-

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ity, the here-and-now-ness of everyday life requires invention in a variety of ways [...] for
making the everyday vivid, of rescuing it from an undifferentiating scrutiny’. For this, De
Certeau (1984) suggests a range of techniques: foregrounding and revealing the absence
and occultation of the everyday; recovering textual remains; and recording detail. Diaries
constitute one such method (Lefebvre, 1947), and have been widely used in this role
(Crang, 2005; Sheringham, 2006). Similar to lay utterances, patchy, sporadic diary entries
represent theorising that has its starting point in first-hand experience of the everyday.
Diaries, along with other literary genres, are potentially capable of bringing small details
to life (De Certeau, 1984; Highmore, 2001), uncovering the self-evident and revealing
repetition and sameness (Lejeune, 2009). While diaries have been used to cap- ture the
mundane, the taken for granted and the recurrent qualities of day-to-day life, they have
not, as far as we know, been used as a resource with which to problematise or reveal the
role of things. Before embarking on such an exercise we briefly review the problems and
benefits of working with diary data in this way.
Using Diaries in Research
Diaries take many forms, ranging from unstructured personal accounts to more organised
texts produced in response to specific ‘directives’. In addition, there are established
research traditions in which people are invited to keep diaries of travel, of weather or of
health, and in which the resulting data are aggregated and analysed for different purposes
(Alaszewski, 2006). Diaries also feature in studies of human geography (Meth, 2003;
Morrison, 2012), and in feminist research – a field in which there has been further
discussion of diaries as tools of self-reflection and empowerment (Jokinen, 2004;
Stanley, 1995).
In these, as in other settings, diary writing is governed by a range of conventions, one of
which is the regularity of observations. This stems from the ambition of detecting and
recording longitudinal changes; for example, in one’s health or in the environment
(Oliver, 1958). Although we work with one-day diaries, many entries are informed by
this tradition. A second generic feature of diary keeping is its privacy. Diary writing
provides opportunities for personal reflection and development and for expressing
thoughts which are not for sharing, at least not immediately. Insofar as the diarist is per-
sonally inscribed in the diary, rules of self-presentation affect the text, and probably do so
whether there is an intention to publish or not. A third tendency – which is for diaries to
foreground the materially and emotionally proximal (Lejeune, 2009) – underpins their
emphasis on the familiar, the habitual and the intimate (Highmore, 2001: 15). Finally,
diaries often follow the same narrative structure, typically starting in the morning, some-
times outlining plans for the day, then coming to a close with the evening and with
thoughts that drift on to other topics or to far-off places.
It would be misleading to say that diaries provide authentic access to real life or that they
are free from systems and structures of representation (Latham, 2003). The details that
diarists provide are often inconsistent, patchy, partial and fragmented. This is not
surprising; after all, their lay authors are not bound by scientific conventions, nor are they
(usually) under any obligation to make reliable observations. In addition, and since

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diaries are necessarily singular accounts rooted in the conditions of their production,
much is lost when they are read and interpreted out of context (Meth, 2003).
When viewed from the perspective of the French tradition of everyday life studies, these
are not necessarily negative features. Instead, the fact that diaries are frequently
ambivalent or that they represent events and moments in terms which fall outside domi-
nant discourses and rationalities is something to be valued. In these respects, diaries are
especially useful in revealing experiences that are always emerging and always uncer-
tain (Sheringham, 2006). In addition, and again following De Certeau (1984), various
commentators argue that the purpose of enquiring into the realm of the everyday is not to
preserve it, but rather to (re)invent it: diary writing is thus seen as a generative and
productive endeavour in its own right.
Having commented on the qualities of diary material in general terms, we now intro-
duce the documents on which this paper is based. We make use of an archive of one-day
diaries written by ordinary Finns in response to a call from the Finnish Literature Society
to document a single day, 2 February: first in 1999, and again in 2009. Unlike the UK
Mass-Observation directives, both calls were very open: participants were simply invited
to write about the ‘Ordinary day of the Finn’. There were no further guidelines about
what to describe or to whom the writing should be addressed. The diaries submit- ted in
response exemplify all the conventions outlined above: personal reflections and accounts
of special projects exist alongside detailed reports of the weather, of natural phenomena,
of the respondents’ immediate surroundings and of social issues.
We approached this data set by reading a selection of entries. Our first selection of
approximately 8000 diary pages was guided by an interest in descriptions that were in
some way related to the ambiguous notion of energy. This led us to collect extracts and
vignettes relating to a variety of activities including heating, showering, cooking and
climate-related observations (see Jalas and Rinkinen, 2013). To be more precise, we read
7300 diary pages from the 1999 material, and wrote down 391 vignettes. From the 2009
material we read 1000 pages, and wrote down 160 vignettes. The quantitative imbalance
between the two years reflects the smaller size of the 2009 data set (11,503 compared
with 23,500 entries), reflecting the fact that this second round was not as widely publi-
cised. There were also differences in how diary entries were indexed, meaning that the
1999 call was easier to work with. For purposes of the present discussion, these features
are not significant in that we do not compare the two years. We treat the diarists anony-
mously and refer to the extracts with numbers: the numbering of the diaries in 1999 is
made by the archive, the numbering of the extracts from 2009 is based on our own
records. The preliminary exercise of identifying and recording energy-related vignettes
was followed by a further round of selection and reading in which we concentrated on
entries that dealt with the practices of heating the home (approximately 150 vignettes).
This second step highlighted the significance of materials and of object relations, which
is the topic to which we now turn.

Frequently asked questions

Q1. What have the authors contributed in "Object relations in accounts of everyday life" ?

In this paper the authors identify traces of both schools of thought in the ways in which people describe their immediate material environments. 

Q2. What have the authors stated for future works in "Object relations in accounts of everyday life" ?

Sometimes there are hints that objects have an active life but, for the most part, diarists writing in this mode rarely refer either to the past or to the future ( Beyes and Steyaert, 2011 ). Diary collections such as the one the authors have used effectively turn citizens into ethnographers, valuing and archiving what some might think of as volumes of insignificant detail. 

Q3. What is the purpose of the typology?

Their typology – arising from the diary data and from diarists’ encounters with things in the world – is useful as a means of promoting and provoking developments in theories of social practice and in the sociological understanding of everyday life. 

Q4. What are some of the characteristics of the diary entries?

10While some diary entries are full of confidence others are riddled with uncertainty, also reporting on strains, tensions and outright conflict about how things should be done. 

Q5. What is missing in the diarists’ accounts of material engagement?

What is missing, and what the diarists’ temporally sensitive accounts of material engagement provide, is an understanding of how the hardware of daily life is situated in time, and how that situating is in part defined by the changing roles that objects play before, within and beyond moments of practical action. 

Q6. What is the role of diaries in everyday life?

along with other literary genres, are potentially capable of bringing small details to life (De Certeau, 1984; Highmore, 2001), uncovering the self-evident and revealing repetition and sameness (Lejeune, 2009). 

Q7. What are the main features of diaries?

Diaries also feature in studies of human geography (Meth, 2003; Morrison, 2012), and in feminist research – a field in which there has been further discussion of diaries as tools of self-reflection and empowerment (Jokinen, 2004; Stanley, 1995). 

Q8. What is the purpose of the analysis?

in detailing the various ways in which material elements figure, their analysis gives a sense of how object relations switch between passive and active forms, and provides an important reminder of the extent to which these relations reflect and reproduce forms of judgement and evaluation regarding the conduct of daily life and the social order as a whole. 

Q9. What is the importance of synchronisations in the timespace of practices?

sequences and synchronisations are critical in characterising the timespace of practices (e.g. Jalas and Rinkinen, 2013; Shove et al., 2012; Southerton, 2013), and in accounting for their development (Blue, 2013). 

Q10. What was the motivation behind the selection of diary pages?

Their first selection of approximately 8000 diary pages was guided by an interest in descriptions that were in some way related to the ambiguous notion of energy.