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Tullia Jack.

Tullia Jack

Associate senior lecturer, associate professor

Tullia Jack.

Nobody was Dirty: disrupting inconspicuous consumption in laundry routines

Author

  • Tullia Jack

Summary, in English

Collective conventions play a significant role in resource consumption, in particular habitual, inconspicuous consumption ingrained in daily practices. To embed pro-environmental default practices in everyday life, an understanding of materiality, habits and cultural context is useful. Household rituals consume environmentally critical resources; laundry provides an example of this phenomenon, cleanliness collective conventions leading to inconspicuous routinised consumption of laundry resources (water, energy).

Intervening into cleanliness conventions, 31 people in Melbourne were engaged to wear the same pair of jeans for three months without washing them. Transcripts from interviews about their experience were used to draw insights on how individual courses of actions are shaped by collective conventions. Participants’ experience of materiality, habits and cultural context indicate that to save environmental resources shifting collective conventions may be more effectual than challenging individual routines. This paper explores some of the opportunities in intervening into the inconspicuous consumption of laundry routines and shifting collective conventions towards low wash acceptance, with implications for other mundane resource-consuming lifestyle practices.

Publishing year

2013

Language

English

Pages

406-421

Publication/Series

Journal of Consumer Culture

Volume

13

Issue

3

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

SAGE Publications

Topic

  • Sociology (excluding Social Work, Social Psychology and Social Anthropology)

Keywords

  • collective conventions
  • routine
  • inconspicuous consumption
  • interventions
  • cleanliness

Status

Published

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 1741-2900