People's Everyday Activities Research Articles

All-About Digital Diaries: Opportunities and Challenges

All-about diaries—software platforms that record, in a browsable and machine-processable format, the everyday activities of people, communities, and objects—offer a wealth of application opportunities, but their full-fledge implementation will require overcoming several challenges.

Aging, health and place in residential care facilities in Beijing, China

In recent years, residential care has become an alternative option for elder care in Beijing, China. Little is known, however, about the well-being of elderly residents and the relationship between their health and living in residential care facilities (RCFs). Hence this research aims to understand the well-being of elderly residents in RCFs and how the environment of RCFs affects elderly people's everyday activities and health. The concepts of therapeutic landscapes, active aging, and well-being contribute to understanding the relationships among aging, health, and environment within RCF settings. Qualitative data from 46 in-depth semi-structured interviews with RCF managers, elderly residents, and family members in Beijing were transcribed and analysed using the constant comparative method. The results show that most of the elderly residents are satisfied with their lives in RCFs, but a few of them feel isolated and depressed after their relocation. Each RCF, as a place with its unique physical and social environment, has a significant influence on the elderly residents' physical and psychological well-being. Individual factors such as characteristics of elderly residents, their attitudes on aging and residential care, and family support also play important roles in their adaptation and well-being after relocation from home to RCFs. Although this study focuses on residential care at the local level, it sheds light on future research on geographical and socio-cultural meanings of elder care at local, regional, and national levels in China.

Aid Effectiveness and Women’s Empowerment: Practices of Governance in the Funding of International Development

Although the empowerment of women is a prominent goal in international development, feminist development professionals, activists, and scholars remain deeply dissatisfied with the limited extent to which women's empowerment is actually achieved. Their experiences and analyses raise questions about the connections and disjunctions between discourse, institutional practices, and everyday life. A major effort to reform development aid guided by the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness raises new questions about the place of gender in development practice. Drawing on recently conducted research on women and development in Kyrgyzstan and using a range of institutional texts, we interrogate how development professionals and activists engage with the aid effectiveness discourse. Our analytic approach, institutional ethnography, shares with work on governmentality an empirical focus on practices undertaken by diversely situated people and how these practices constitute a particular field of action. Institutional ethnography directs analytic attention to the operation of texts as local and translocal coordinators of people's everyday activities. The product of this coordinated work is what we call, in this case, the development institution. For those concerned about women and development, we see the usefulness of making visible how global governance is accomplished in both enactments of and resistance to institutional practices, but in ways that do not necessarily benefit women.

¿Una ética biofísica cuantitativa para enfrentar el desafío global?

Philosophical and political discussions often become ends in circles, in which barely scratches occur without creating new structures of thought that would reveal the reality and the ways to solve the serious problems we live. Generally, each person involved in the discussion, consider that it is right in his argument and no mediator to interact in the discussion to help move the points of view, nor an arbitrator may render a verdict. And often the rhetorical skill and the weight of tradition influence the outcome of the discussions, for better or for worse. Is it possible philosophical and political debate based on science universal? In this case, the arguments would have to present diagrams to explain the systems that defend and to quantify energy flows involved, quantitatively simulate the consequences of the alternatives and generate indicators to assess the implications of the proposals. The progress of modern science enables this evolution. This new type of discussion requires training in Biophysics Economics. The science involved would be: General Systems Theory, Systemic Ecology, Thermodynamics of Open Systems and Holistic Psychology. These sciences enable a systemic approach to reality, explaining the complexity and dynamics. We could have a qualitative leap in human work and interaction with nature, whether judges, politicians and ordinary people could make decisions based on the systemic approach. Have you thought of a Systemic Ethic and the implications of this approach to religion? Or to set the price of resources and products? Or to set the value of a coin? Or to measure the sustainability of the production models? Therefore, education on these sciences is a great need and that training should occur in parallel with formal education and everyday activities of people.

Occupational Therapy and the Current Ecological Crisis

It is argued that occupational therapy's focus on activities related to wellbeing puts it in a privileged position to contribute practical measures to stem the social and ecological threats posed by current human impacts on the natural environment. Three areas in which occupational therapy could contribute such measures are summarised briefly. These are (1) help in understanding how people negotiate and adjust their daily activities in situations of ecological and social stress; (2) interventions that link the conservation of biodiversity with the conservation of occupations; and (3) a renewed focus on balance in the everyday activities of people in the industrialised world.

Home as a pocket of local order: everyday activities and the friction of distance

Discourse on the information society currently highlights issues of networks, flows and mobilities as prime organizers and re‐organisers of time—space relationships. Such discourse promotes notions of the flexible use of time and space, of people's decoupling from place and even of the end of geography — the belief that distance does not matter. Yet, in this article we argue that the roles of geographical stationarity and proximity in everyday life — understood as the creation and maintaining of pockets of local order — indicate the continuing and often neglected importance of the friction of distance. We demonstrate this empirically by focusing on the home as a pocket of local order, investigating the intensity and spatial extension of people's everyday activities, projects and contacts — their corporeal, virtual and medial (media‐related) mobilities — with the world outside. We support our thesis with data from the population, household and individual levels.

The Cognitive Engineering of Everyday Activities

Cognitive engineers study complex systems in context Yet the same phenomena they observe in professional environments are also apparent in the everyday activities of people. In this paper, a case study is used to illustrate how the principles and theories employed to study complex cognitive systems are just as applicable for routine activities. The case study involves four people traveling from three different locations, meeting at an airport, and proceeding to a business meeting with a fifth person. Although the plan failed, the events surrounding the trip provide an opportunity to discuss cognitive engineering concepts such as planning and execution, replanning, coordination, and internal representations, The paper suggests that applying cognitive engineering methods to the study of everyday activities may provide valuable insights into more complex systems.

John Macmurray, Spirituality, Community and Real Schools

This paper suggests that the work of the Scottish philosopher John Macmurray provides a valuable contribution to debates on spirituality, education, and schools as communities. In particular by recognizing the nature of the spiritual in everyday activities of people in communities, by focusing on the overall aims of schooling, and by rejecting dualism, idealism and materialism, Macmurray was able to describe how schools might properly be organized. The paper aims to investigate some of Macmurray's insights, to see how they might help transform one's vision of schooling.

The Patriarchy in China: An Investigation of Public and Private Spheres

This study is a historical and conceptual investigation into how the division of public and private spheres is significant in the development of Chinese patriarchy. The distinctive characteristics of the concepts, public and private, in Confucian traditions are found in the ideal of jiaguo tonggou and the rule of nei/wai (inside/outside). The political ideal of jiaguo tonggou literally means that the family and the state have the same structure. Furthermore, the principle of nei/wai (inside/outside) is a rule that rigorously classified people's everyday activities, roles, and living space according to sex. This inside-outside dichotomy appears to be analogous to the public-private opposition in Western feminist thought. With this dichotomy, the lives of women and men were separated within their families and women were consistently excluded from the public sphere in ancient China. After the Communist revolution, however, China has made remarkable strides. The revolutionary shift, however, had its own limitations insofar as the new democratic patriarchal system that emerged was a mixture of socialist ideas and a deep-rooted traditional patriarchy that it was unable to rid itself of. There is evidence that in the recent social discourse of “women return home,” emerging after the reform eras of the (1980)s, the state has sought to sought to restructure society according to the principles of a socialist market economy and send women back to the domestic sphere. Perhaps the question of the separation between public and private spheres in itself is less important than the questions of whether women are active agents of reform, whether they are empowered enough in the process, and whether they are free to make choices about their activities. However, the current controversy over “women return home” in China is still evolving, and these questions need to be explored further in the future.

Mundane Consumption and the Self: A Social-Identity Perspective

The self—a sense of who and what we are—is suggested as an organizing construct through which people's everyday activities can be understood. Life's mundane tasks and the consumer behaviors necessary to enact them are cast in a perspective of self little used by consumer psychologists—social—identity theory. Two structural modeling studies in support of the perspective are reported. The results of the first one imply that people use products to enact one of their social identities and that products relate only indirectly to the overall or global self. The second study indicates that the frequency with which activities are performed depends on the salience of the identity they represent and that such salience, in turn, depends on several enabling factors. Taken together, the studies provide theoretical support for the common‐sense notion that we are attracted to products that are consistent with, and that enable the enactment of, the various social identities which make up our sense of self; the more important an identity to us, the more attractive its associated products.