Everyday life as an object of study

Intuitively, everyday life should be fairly easy to perceive, as it does not refer to the ‘hard to grasp’, out of the ordinary, the rare, and the exceptional phenomena of social life. Researchers themselves are practitioners in the everyday life, and hence are familiar with some of the practices they unravel in their empirical efforts. For example, it would be hard to deny that this study doesn’t draw also on our own experiences of wood heating, dwelling in detached houses, moving homes and facing power cuts to complement the other methods of this study.

However, even though the object of study is the ongoing flow of events, everyday scholars tend to emphasise the struggles they are facing. There is even a certain sense of stigma attached to the study of the everyday, suggesting that everyday life is not worthy of study as it is too mundane, and too well known.

Often, the sense of unease arises from the intimate nature of everyday life, as it is commonly seen as a private matter. Moreover, qualitative approaches in general may easily seem too ‘small’ in relation to the dominance of quantitative methods in contemporary sociology.

4.1.1 The challenge of situated language

In studies on everyday life, one of the focal methodological questions is whether to emphasise researcher-induced interpretations of human action or the

accounts of the situated members. How much voice can or should the research subject be allowed to have?

Symbolic interactionism and conversation analysis are premised on accounts of situated members and on meaningmaking in and through the interaction of humans, as they argue that everyday language and interaction is the premise of the social (Blumer, 1986). For example, the role of language, talk and communication in problem solving has become increasingly important for ethnomethodologists and particularly in symbolic interactionism (Emirbayer &

Maynard, 2011). The crucial role of language in problem solving not only suggests that thinking and talking co-exist, but it is also an empirical claim about the nature of human talk. Suchman and colleagues (1999), when summarising the findings of workplace ethnography, go so far as to argue that in workplaces, talk primarily arises when there are problems and the collective resources for solving them. In a similar vein, Engeström and Blackler (2005) argue that organizations exist around objects of shared and recognised usefulness.

According to Schatzki (2002), sayings are a subset of doings: they are doings that say something. So defined, sayings need not involve language but yet the role of language is central in Schatzki’s theorising. On this account, it is worth pointing out that even though Schatzki draws great inspiration from Wittgenstein, his interpretation of his work is not one that contributes to the

‘linguistic turn’. As many point out, Wittgenstein has often been granted the honour of linguistic turn; however, his work does not actually privilege the linguistic, but rather it offers a way of integrating language with reality (Hekman, 2008).

However, materialistic stances of practice theories seem to downplay the role of situated language and talk as an ordering device. For example, for Shove, Pantzar and Watson, (2012) practices as entities are something that can be spoken about, but the practices and their situated linguistic performances are not at the centre of theorising. There are reasons for this. First, as practice theory decentralises the subject, it also calls for methods that decentralise the subject. The trajectories of practices reach beyond certain time and space, and grasping them requires a broader explanation than a situational one (Shove et al., 2012). This has also been noted in everyday life studies, as studying everyday life as the on-going unfolding of the ordinary rejects an individual-centred exposition, and rather produces accounts that matter collectively (see Sheringham, 2006; Crang, 2005). To accomplish the task of grasping practice dynamics, practice theoretical inquiries trace the practice as it occurs rather than produce additional talk and text. This is despite the capability of practitioners to talk about their practices (Hitchings, 2012). As a consequence, these accounts easily stigmatize situated accounts as individualistic. This is, however, not to say that practice theory is mute in terms of language, but nevertheless, accounting for everyday talk and text remains as a challenge for practice theorists.

The second reason for the downplay of language might be that the aim of practice theory is often to account for how environments and technologies

support and accommodate various practices, and describing this does not always come naturally for practitioners themselves (Thévenot, 2001). Considering this, interviews as a methodological choice may be considered as somewhat problematic, as they might disregard the material surroundings and the naturally occurring flow of everyday life. This is interesting, as it seems that the concern is that leaning on language would lead to accounts that do not grasp the element of materiality. This fear may lead to accounts where objects are followed, not human subjects, and where language is not central.

However, it can be asked whether privileging materiality also privileges the role of the researcher in making interpretations. Martens (2012) has noted that interviews yield more understanding on the organization of the practice (or entity) than the activity dimension of practice (or practice-as-performance). This is partly because of the utilization of imprecise language in interviews, the inconsistency between talk and doings, and that the interview context encourages performance-related silences. When practice is verbalised, it starts to resemble an entity rather than doing, as Warde (2005) has also suggested in terms of guidebooks. Another notion by Martens (2012) is that the interaction between humans and materials is not prominently discussed in interview situations. Taken together, these notions suggest that to account for materiality in research is to induce talk about performances and doings (Schiølin, 2012). However, practice as entity may be more easily represented, unlike performance, which does not actualise and document in language as effortlessly (Shove et al., 2012).

It may be suitable that ethnography is frequently considered to be the proper way to account for everyday life as it accounts for both the environments and doings – but there is also a need to bring in the practitioners with their own encounters as opposed to the accounts of privileged researchers. It has been argued, for example, that the overwhelming emphasis on ethnography blocks the consideration of more subtle reflexivity (Markham & Couldry, 2007).

Practice members’ accounts of their everyday life, such as diaries, interestingly seem to fall in the middle ground of ethnography and participant-focused methods such as interviews.

4.1.2 Registering everyday practices

The ambiguous everyday might even seem evasive and unachievable by rationalist thought, but it should not be taken to suggest that it is unyielding to forms of representation. As already pointed out, sensitivity to everyday life has been increasingly tested and called for, especially in sociology and material culture studies, as well as in geography and anthropology. The spirit of critical thinkers such as Lefebvre is that everydayness needs to be appreciated in its own terms, and this calls for methods that match the sur- or ultrarealism claimed for in studies on everyday life (Highmore, 2002). Attempts to capture and register everyday life require that we find ways to take it as a fore-grounded voice instead of a background voice through methodological inventiveness:

[…] the singularity, 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. (Highmore, 2002: 171)

[…] once it is understood how many entities there are in the world, of which we are able to name but a few, then capturing the traces of these entities, even for a brief moment, will clearly involve unconventional means, a kind of poetics of the release of energy that might be thought to resemble play. (Thrift, 2008: 12).

Both these quotes suggest that capturing the essence of everyday life should point towards an appreciative understanding and methods. If the repetitious, the boring and the mundane are facets of everyday aesthetics, there may also be brute and apt ways of describing it.

One recent development is the massive rise online data such as forums and blogs as sites filled with characteristics of everydayness. These are generally public documents filled with quotidian and mundane text, photos and videos – logs of everyday activity. Blogs are primarily sites for active relational online networking (Marres, 2009), but as they are structured around ‘I’ narratives, they can have an ethos of immediacy, similar to diary writing (Hookway, 2008). In addition, many posts are written around certain objects, and they are done to express opinions.

The analysis of such sites contributes to a new ethnomethodological approach to observation in which researchers seek to use the conventional notions of discourse and conversational analysis to “focus on ordinary, mundane, naturally occurring talk” (Mann & Stewart, 2000: 86). Beyond Reed’s (2005) notion that a blog is a constitution of the self – ‘my blog is me’ – blogs can constitute more, such as the everyday environment. For example, climate forums as sites of discursive practice have been used to analyse the social construction of large phenomena such as climate change (Barr, 2011). Forums and blogs are thus largely welcomed as an extension of the research toolkit (Hookway, 2008).

Many methods indeed move towards such appreciativeness, and can also serve practice-theoretical thinking. For example, human geographers have shown interest in the diary method and its combination with photo-elicitation (Crang, 2005; Latham, 2003). It seems that photography as one of the media of surrealism has found its way into organizational aesthetics and also more broadly into studies on everyday life (Sheringham, 2006). However, methods of public ethnography, mass observation and blatant diaries of the ordinariness have not been exploited in a similar manner (Sheringham, 2006). The methodological approaches of the studies on the domestic domain have largely relied on qualitative interviews, surveys, case studies or a mixture of these (e.g.

Gram-Hansen, 2011; Strengers & Maller, 2012; Martens, 2012). Emphasis on research-induced ethnographic interviews, and observations of daily life has (more or less deliberately) distanced accounts from the analysis of talk and text.

Therefore, there is a call for texts that are representational and significant in organising and shaping everyday lives, which in one way or another capture the ever-changing present (Plummer, 1983; Elliott, 1997). However, the question is not only what kinds of texts are used (and produced), but also how these texts

are used and what kinds of position they are assigned with as enactments of social life (Halkier & Jensen, 2011).