Abstract
Drawing on Alfred Schütz’s thought, as well as on a number of modern pragmatists and practice theorists, we theorize incomegetting—referring to practices of getting income, typically salaried work—as the paramount structurer of everyday life and, therefore, also the chief mediator of the human–nature metabolism. Even though the pragmatics of everyday life as an aggregate underlie the bulk of environmental impacts, these insidious impacts impose little immediate influence on everyday life, in particular in the urban Global North. In other words, the pragmatic dimension of everyday activities—principally, work—that takes place within a vastly complex and globally interlinked productive world system, has most often no immediate connection to the “natural” environment. While parts of the populations are directly dependent in terms of livelihoods on the “natural” environment, these populations are typically pushed to the margins of the global productive system. The understanding formulated in this essay suggests that in environmental social sciences there is a reason to shift the epicenter of the analysis from consumption to everyday life, to the varied practices of incomegetting. Against the backdrop of this paper, universal basic income schemes ought to have radical impacts on the way we relate also to the “natural” environment and such schemes necessitate understanding the essence of money in our contemporary realities.
Highlights
It is an increasingly undeniable and disturbing fact that human induced climate change, as well as various other extensive-scale environmental problems from ecosystem decline to species extinction, are real processes and taking place on planet Earth today, but that such massive processes are accelerating [1]
The understanding formulated in this essay suggests that in environmental social sciences there is a reason to shift the epicenter of the analysis from consumption to everyday life, to the varied practices of incomegetting
This paper has attempted to synthesize some thoughts of Alfred Schütz, Theodore Schatzki, and other like-minded theorists, apply them to the current environmental predicament and contribute to the emerging environmental social theory focusing on work [11,12,13,14] by conceptualizing incomegetting—everyday practices of getting income—as the chief structurer of the life-world
Summary
It is an increasingly undeniable and disturbing fact that human induced climate change, as well as various other extensive-scale environmental problems from ecosystem decline to species extinction, are real processes and taking place on planet Earth today, but that such massive processes are accelerating [1]. Since the dawn of the industrial revolution, waged work has been institutionalized and gained centrality as a chief dimension in the pragmatics of everyday life [11,17] It appears to be the chief mediator, or the very origin of separation [13], between humans and their biophysical—“natural” as well as “built”—environments. In order to understand our current environmental predicament and the central role of incomegetting in that, we need to understand the actual historical social system, not just how people act in theory as a part of the mesh of social practices and material arrangements, as is often exclusively discussed, e.g., in Reference [27]. We conclude by discussing some implications of our argument on universal basic income schemes [28] and money
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