Walking as a social practice: dispersed walking and the organisation of everyday practices.

Tim Harries,Ruth Rettie

doi:10.1111/1467-9566.12406

Abstract

This paper uses social practice theory to study the interweaving of walking into everyday practices and considers how greater awareness of everyday walking can influence its position within the organisation and scheduling of everyday life. Walking is of policy interest because of its perceived benefits for health. This paper asserts that increased awareness of everyday walking allows users to become more active without having to reschedule existing activities. Using Schatzki's distinction between dispersed and integrative practices, it argues that increasing awareness of dispersed walking can enlist walking into the teleoaffective organisation of some social practices and prompt the performance of new 'health practices' within everyday domains of life such as shopping and employment. While this analysis offers useful insights for the design of behaviour change strategies, it also points to some unintended consequences of using digital feedback to increase walking awareness. In directing the gaze of participants at one particular element of their daily practices, the paper suggests, digital walking feedback provides a 'partial' view of practices: by highlighting the exercise value of walking at the expense of other values it can prompt feedback recipients to pass moral judgements on themselves based on this partial view. A Virtual Abstract of this paper can be found at: https://youtu.be/WV7DUnKD5Mw.

Highlights

The limited success of public health initiatives in increasing walking (Killoran et al 2006, Nettleton and Green 2014) is attributed, in part, to the insufficient inclusion of sociological perspectives in their design (e.g. Darker et al 2007, Green 2009, Nettleton and Green 2014)
Most previous empirical work on social practices has focussed on integrative practices but this study looks at dispersed walking practices; this distinction is of particular importance to this paper
We argue below that the measurement of steps changed this for some, making visible the incidental walking embedded within integrative practices and thereby providing participants with a means to increase their walking that did not involve difficult changes to complex daily schedules

Summary

Introduction

The limited success of public health initiatives in increasing walking (Killoran et al 2006, Nettleton and Green 2014) is attributed, in part, to the insufficient inclusion of sociological perspectives in their design (e.g. Darker et al 2007, Green 2009, Nettleton and Green 2014). This view is echoed by critics of the ‘health behaviour’ paradigm (e.g. Cohn 2014) and, recently, within the public health discourse itself (NPRI 2015). Widely accessible form of exercise, walking has obvious appeal to policymakers seeking to promote healthier lifestyles – in the present neo-liberal environment, in which self-determination and responsibilisation are given more prominence than structural influences on health (Lupton 2013)

Methods

Results

Conclusion