Environmental Agency and Power in the Global Network Society

Over the past two decades, practice theories as developed by Anthony Giddens, Theodore Schatzki and Elizabeth Shove amongst others, moved center stage in the sociology of sustainable consumption and everyday life. Practice theories offer an attractive third way in between individualist (value driven) and determinist (technology driven) models of environmental social change. In this paper, we explore in more detail the two modalities for analyzing the reproduction of social practices as put forward by Giddens (1984) and Shove (2012) in particular. First, when discussing practices as performances or as strategic action, we explore how specific lifestyle groups with particular ‘green’ portfolios or competences participate in the practice in order to make the practice and their lifestyles more sustainable. We show that the environmental dimension of (consumption) practices can be crucial for attracting new practitioners to the practice since they expect gaining emotional energy (Randall Collins, 2004) from participating in the process of simultaneously greening the practice and their lifestyles. Second, when discussing practices as entity and as part of an institutionalized set or nexus of practices, we focus on the process of strengthening or weakening the connections between different practices. We argue that the concepts of power as put forward by Manuel Castells (2009) can be used to illustrate the interrelationships between practices and thereby some of the key dynamics of environmental changes in the global network society.