Shifting meanings of the everyday in relation to consumption

The rise in the centrality of everyday life in public debate and the social sciences should be viewed alongside other associated concepts such as lifestyle, practices and consumption. Though not a substitute for traditional forms of literature review, patterns in published debates can be mapped visually using ‘n-gram’ analysis of word incidence relative to other words in digitised books over time (see Figure 1).² This confirms that the term ‘everyday’ has become generally more important from the 1980s onwards, but especially from the 1990s to the present (for a longer genealogy and an intellectual history, see Trentmann, 2012; see also reviews in Scott, 2009; Pink, 2012). While the terms everyday and everyday life are growing over the 70-year period, Figure 1 also displays trend lines for consumer and consumption, which both peak between 1975 and 1980, lifestyle, which peaks in around 2012, and practices, which has risen over time in three phases, most rapidly between 1975 and 1980 and subsequently from the early 2000s to the present. The interplay of these concepts is discussed qualitatively in what follows. A scan of the first page results since 2011 confirms that everyday life is salient in titles published in the social sciences but is also playing out in subfields as diverse as early modern material culture, theology, antiracism and education, linguistics, critical geopolitics, architecture, neuropsychology, sexism, sustainability and mathematics. In particular, though, an emphasis on the everyday, and its significance for social transformation, has coincided with increasing attention to consumption and, subsequently, practices.

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N-gram analysis of the percentage of occurrence of everyday, consumption and practices relative to other words used in all digitised books published between 1949 and 2019

Citation: Consumption and Society 1, 1; 10.1332/MBPU6295

Source: Google Books (2022)

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Literature from the mid-1980s, influenced by cultural studies and theoretical perspectives on postmodernism, explored the everyday in the first major wave of sociological work dedicated to the theme of consumption. The primary inspirations were the themes of identity, resistance and transgression, which were studied through rituals, style and music (for example, Hall and Jefferson, 1975). The Birmingham School, especially Dick Hebdige, Stuart Hall and Angela McRobbie, focused on cultural consumption to do this, leading to an important link between consumption, everyday life and identity. The focus on the everyday understandings and practices of working-class subcultures led to interest in the consumption of the wider population, increasingly described as popular culture, or lifestyles. Lifestyle referred to the integration of practices spanning people’s daily lives (Spaargaren and Van Vliet, 2000). Yet the concept and its significance was differently inflected for different authors (Featherstone, 1987). Some were influenced by new cultural emphases present in both ‘Third Way’ politics and postmodernism, seeing lifestyle as expressing an ethos of fluidity, structurelessness, individual self-determination and choice associated with consumer culture; others understood lifestyle as a way of demonstrating the relationship between goods and practices that demarcated social groups from each other. Anthony Giddens (1991), among other theorists beginning to take consumption seriously, was somewhere in-between, and characteristic in connecting the importance of biography to the idea of an assemblage of self-conscious choices about activities. ‘A lifestyle’, he wrote, ‘can be defined as a more or less integrated set of practices which an individual embraces, not only because such practices fulfil utilitarian needs, but because they give material form to a particular narrative of self-identity’ (Giddens, 1991: 81). Style itself was seen by cultural studies as being a form of rebellion for specific generations and racial groups to a dominant society; whereas signs, identities, lifestyles and consumption began to be framed influentially for everyone in society as a domain for creative play, transgression, hedonism and freedom through the construction and combination of various consumer choices (Graeber, 2011). The ‘politics’ of consumption was initially about generation, identity and forms of resistance by those with few resources, then increasingly, individualisation, reflexivity and life choices (McRobbie, 1994; Bauman, 1998).

Concepts such as lifestyle, ecological modernisation and Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus and praxis circulated as potential answers to these challenges (Spaargraen and Van Vliet, 2000; Wilk, 2002). Increasingly, practices became the main object of study for studying everyday consumption. The rationales for this were complex and multifaceted. Focusing too directly on consumption can obscure the way that it is simply part of everyday life – the tacit, unremarkable and routine ways in which activity is understood by its practitioners and treated and governed by society (Warde, 2005; Røpke, 2009; Spaargaren, 2011). Dealing with consumption required dealing with the totality of social organisation, in order to understand and properly contextualise consumption as a ‘moment in every practice’ (Warde, 2005). A much wider body of social scientific work also addressed the normative, political and economic challenges and consequences of everyday consumption drawing on additional themes relating to (for example) work, growth economies and material culture (for example, Jackson, 2009; Schor, 2005; Miller, 2012). Yet theories of practice proposed an object of analysis and epistemology for examining everyday life, and increasingly, developed a theoretical framework for making sense of how it changes.

How do practice theories conceptualise social change?

Although few authors working with practice theories explicitly offer theories of social transformation, many are concerned with how practices coordinate different elements making up social organisation. These perspectives suggest that social change can be seen in terms of the reconfiguration of practices. Some major perspectives include Bourdieusian, Actor Network Theory (ANT) and Schatzkian (for example, Schatzki, 2002) approaches. Each has had consequences for the way that transformation is theorised. Bourdieu’s emphasis on taste has become important in measuring shifts in the expression of sociocultural inequalities around appreciation, and his concept of field has become important in a number of subdisciplines. ANT has reconfigured understanding of the material and poses generative questions about agency and causality. Many of these insights have become important for consumption scholarship in conjunction with other practice approaches, especially those influenced by Theodore Schatzki.

Scholars working on consumption and practices have mainly drawn on Schatzki (for example, 1996; 2002), alongside science and technology studies, material culture, and the sociology of time. An important contribution has been Shove et al’s (2012) The Dynamics of Social Practice: Everyday Life and How it Changes. The book draws on and elaborates a number of studies which have examined shifts around the use of environmentally consequential and widely distributed domestic technologies. The book frames social change through the questions: ‘How do practices emerge, exist and die?’ and ‘How do bundles and complexes of practice form, persist and disappear?’ Shove and colleagues explain change through the idea that ‘social practices consist of elements that are integrated when practices are enacted … [and] that practices emerge, persist and disappear as links between their defining elements are made and broken’ (Shove et al, 2012: 21). These elements are meanings (cognition, emotion and motivation) materials (objects, infrastructures and the body) and competences (skills, knowledge and understandings). Explanations of change, of the consequences of everyday life, remain focused at a relatively granular level around what people do. Everyday life is equated both to this granular level of activity, as with Scott (2009) and others writing on the topic. ‘Everyday’ practices also means the things that everyone does routinely. This universality suggests that differences in people’s resources, or differences in the resources they consume, are less important than the resources expended in particular practices.

The emergence, persistence or decline of a practice – the form in which social change is understood – is explained by changes in the combination of different elements, enacted through performances of practices. This means that the entities we understand as practices, and the correct way to carry them out, are always subtly shifting. A second form of social change emerges from the competition between practices to ‘recruit’ practitioners and conversely their ‘defection’. For example, the 20th century saw the rapid decline of cycling in most industrialised countries as more and more ‘practitioners’ were ‘recruited’ to driving due to increased space offered to cars in cities, and growing distances between homes and workplaces. Shove et al (2012) propose, in less detail, other mechanisms of change too, arising from relations between practices, through which practices form ‘bundles’, ‘complexes’ and ‘constellations’. These terms have the function of translating phenomena such as norms, collectives and institutions into the practice ontology, but work according to the same logic of connecting, disconnecting and reconnecting elements of practice (see also Blue and Spurling, 2016; Schatzki, 2016). Transformation and consequences of everyday life take place through many people doing practices differently, adding up to change in aggregate.

Yet in producing powerful counter-narratives to conventional actor-based accounts, this and a number of other practice-based accounts of change can neglect the topic of political projects, social struggles and collective agency (Welch and Yates, 2018). Practices are shaped by companies that want to sell products and services, states that want to govern activity, social movements which want recognition or resources, but these actors’ practices and goals are scarcely mentioned. Their absence is a surprising feature of this iteration of the practice theoretical approach, and it is also unnecessary (Sahakian and Wilhite, 2014; Schatzki, 2016; Welch and Yates, 2018). The book’s use of the examples of Nordic walking and freezers, for instance, are drawn from secondary literature where the roles of collective actors, which include marketers of Nordic walking sticks and freezer manufacturers, are acknowledged. Such arguments and exceptions show that a practice theoretical account need not de-centre agency, the actor or strategic action. This is obvious even in Shove et al (2012), where in the final chapter the role of states seems pivotal for envisioning interventions.

The relative absence of politics and power from influential ways of understanding everyday life as it relates to economies is also a feature in the analysis of politicised forms of consumption, as the next sub-section describes. These absences suggest the potential usefulness of engaging with theories about everyday power and politics, which highlight some concepts and ways in which similar ordinary processes can be seen as part of struggles, domination and subjectivation, a task which the final two sections take up.

Politicised consumption and change

The implications of everyday consumption for social transformation are covered in literature beyond work on practices and sustainability. Most obviously, the implications of everyday consumption for change are also important in the politicisation of consumption and lifestyle in consumer movements and in boycotting and ‘buycotting’ (Micheletti, 2003; Lorenzen, 2012; Dubuisson-Quellier, 2013; Wahlen and Laamanen, 2015). The argument of this sub-section, however, is that theories about political consumerism, like some theories of practice, also suffer from a model of social transformation that neglects power relations.

Early arguments suggested that political consumerism might dramatically shift the way that societies work, consumption representing a ‘consumer vote’ with which global challenges might be resolved (Beck, 1997; Micheletti, 2003). The classic mode of transformation associated with political consumerism was of the accumulated effect of the politicised decisions of individuals shifting patterns of consumption. Gradually, the economy would come to reflect the ethical individual choices of ‘critical citizens’ (Norris, 1999). Like some ‘strong’ theories of practice, this literature neglected some important questions of power and politics. A concern is that the literature reproduces narratives from companies, states, non-governmental organisations and commentators which have contributed towards ‘responsibilising’ individuals for the global environmental crisis, as opposed to states and corporations (Jacobsen and Dulsrud, 2007; Barnett et al, 2010; Sassatelli and Davolio, 2010). Rebecca Solnit (2021) argues, along these lines, that focusing on practices or individuals presents what she calls an ‘additive’ as opposed to ‘multiplicative’ logic of social change, whereby environmental crisis and its solution is seen as a problem of billions of everyday lives, and is addressed through those individuals or their practices changing. Transformations lie in individuals taking responsibility and changing the world by embodying change in individual economic decisions. In its crudest form, everyday life matters in the original political consumerism cosmology – and in strong social practice theory – because the aggregation of the wrong consumer practices sustain environmental crises and various forms of inequality. It follows that policy interventions ought to focus on making people change their everyday practices, either by giving them the information to decide to do so through virtuous consumer choices, or by nudging them to do so by strategic interventions in the elements composing practices.

Yet as more recent work on political consumerism explicitly recognises, transformation related to political consumerism tends to take place when boycotts or buycotting are part of wider political campaigns which draw in many other political repertoires, modes of leverage, influence and interaction which normally work together with alternative consumption habits to achieve goals (see section 4.5; Harrison et al, 2005; Halkier and Holm, 2008; Dubuisson-Quellier, 2013). Collectives and alternative economic initiatives turn conflictual issues into everyday consumer politics. Although boycotting and buycotting are themselves relatively weak repertoires of collective action, they can be ways of framing and popularising issues, recruiting activists to a position, and solidifying a sense of togetherness that can be oppositional. There is an ambivalence here. Although people may be ‘responsibilised’ by political consumerism, it may also play a part in repertoires of collective action that are directed at those with the power to make interventions to change the way that practices are provisioned or are coordinated.

The argument is that emphasis on everyday consumption practices and on politicised practices such as boycotting can obscure the power relations which help in understanding how transformation works. There are complementary literatures on everyday power and politics that offer ideas about processes of transformation that are relevant to consumption beyond practices ‘adding up’ to problems or ‘adding up’ to change. Theories of everyday power and politics present additional ways through which everyday life matters – with respect to resistance, collective identities and collective action. This, it is argued, positions everyday life as a useful point of inflection between different types of phenomena, and its study and associated concepts as a way of negotiating dualisms between (for example) micro and macro, the ordinary and extraordinary, and between personal and public. A key way of demonstrating this, and important because of its relative neglect in the literatures described here, is to discuss the relationships between everyday life, theories of power and the literature on everyday politics, themes which the remainder of this article addresses.

Everyday political action: change, variation and alternative angles

The concept of everyday life has been important in work on consumption and power, in ways where different objects of study, themes, levels of resources, and forms of consequence and transformation, are being discussed and described. In relation to political action, too, a range of terminology relating to everyday life has been coined to describe either: new or newly identified forms of participation; more diverse forms of participation than were previously recognised; or the practices which underpin, hold together or otherwise help explain political action. The terms include everyday politics, lifestyle politics, identity politics, micropolitics, life politics, subpolitics, infra-politics, lifestyle movement, everyday resistance, personal politics, cultural movements, individualised collective action, quiet activism, prefigurative politics, political consumerism, and many more.

Although they are linked semantically and by some of the kinds of claims made, these concepts emerge from very diverse traditions and disciplines, including development studies, sociology, anthropology, geography, political science, women’s studies and social theory, and are very rarely brought into dialogue. Table 1 presents a selection of these terms, indicating the scope of each concept. It highlights the variation across apparently similar concepts. Many of the tensions in the study of everyday life that have been identified so far are also visible, for example in the relative politicisation or depoliticisation of different concepts and in the different models of social transformation implicit in the texts.

The literature’s diversity can be plotted and mapped in various ways. Everyday politics literature discusses a range of contexts across the global North and South, capitalist and communist political economic contexts, repressive regimes such as dictatorships as well as pluralist democracies, and societies with significant variation over welfare and services, levels of political repression, and political cultures. Because the kinds of claims made in these contexts varies, this invites questions about whether these are contextual specificities or whether these reflect research gaps and biases. The different terms also have wider or narrower focuses. Some frame everyday politics as an epochal shift away from the political culture that preceded it; others suggest everyday politics is a separate set of repertoires that perhaps always existed; while others suggest that there is a relationship between everyday politics and non-everyday politics in which each resources the other in some way. And the forms of politics identified are either contrasted with another category of traditional politics, or are seen to fall between categories; for example between the political and economic, between lifestyles and movements, and between private and public. A single typology would gloss over these differences, ambiguities and gaps. The following subsections draw these elements out through the wider question of ‘how everyday life matters’ but also in relation to literature on everyday politics, around issues, resources, objects of study and consequences. The final sections of the article therefore outline where debate is with respect to each of these questions, alongside some illustrative contributions, some hypotheses and some future research questions.

Issues and themes: what claims and controversies animate everyday life and everyday politics?

The first half of the article covered some of the themes and issues of everyday life in the wider literature on consumption and power. Everyday life themes have included identity, class and generation, lifestyle, ordinary resource consumption, and forms of power such as patriarchy which shape everyday lives in tangible and intangible ways. There is great variation in these issues, but at the same time a sense that certain things are not everyday. Susie Scott’s (2009) important book on everyday life sociology, for example, discusses connecting up agency and structure, individuals and society, and other dichotomies, but her book’s focus on emotions, home, time, eating and drinking, shopping and leisure – and the absence of citizenship, economy or conflict, for example – is typical in seeing everyday life as rather narrowly circumscribed, directly or ethnographically observed, and local (see also Back, 2015). The danger of this is that the everyday elements of many phenomena are not appreciated, and the connections between them are not analysed.

Many contributions on everyday politics also suggest that everyday politics might be about the politics of very specific issues. For many authors, everyday ‘political’ claims are considered distinctive and historically speaking ‘new’, relating not or no longer to subsistence, survival or resources, but to culture, identity and recognition, the natural environment, and ideas about the ‘good life’ (for example, Offe, 1985; Beck, 1997; Haenfler, 2019). This suggests that, in Beveridge and Koch’s (2019: 9) terms, ‘the everyday is not only the stage but also the object of political struggle’, suggesting that politics now takes a more tangible and quotidian form, around issues that are similarly that are ubiquitous, common and non-spectacular. But in fact, empirical examples suggest that there is a mix of types of claims at play in everyday politics, only some of which are cultural or relate to sustainability.

Indeed, another, sometimes overlapping, set of literature suggests that everyday politics are about economy – usually broadly speaking consumption, but in other cases concerning production. ‘Lifestyle’ politics, for example, a concept exclusively studied in the global North, is framed as about consumption choices or collectives united by their alternative practices (Micheletti, 2003; Wahlen and Laamanen, 2015; de Moor, 2017). The varieties of everyday politics analysed in the context of repressive regimes, meanwhile, also concern access to resources, but are often undertaken in the course of employment (for example, Kerkvliet, 2005). These, incidentally, have similarities to the ‘everyday misbehaviour’ literature which tends to focus on production identities in the global North but which has not been connected to lifestyle politics arguments (see also de Certeau, 1984; Edwards, 2014). Everyday politics, then, is claimed to be associated with distinctive agendas which are actually highly diverse, including consumption, identity claims, environmental concerns and everyday resistance in workplaces, suggesting a hypothesis that everyday politics might be as polyvalent in its themes, claims and grievances as politics that is not ‘everyday’, and that the literature currently attends disproportionately to certain themes and claims. It raises the question of what other political issues are challenged in everyday contexts or lives.

Understanding everyday life as an orientation, a way of seeing, might offer a counter-weight or alternative approach to this trend of understanding everyday politics as about particular themes. It might also draw our attention to the processes around politics, novel forms of political expression, the politicisation of new themes which might emerge initially in the everyday, or which might find their final expression in the everyday through the political outcomes of contention. Everyday politics is often a way of contextualising and better understanding non-everyday political repertoires, making the everyday not only the stage and object of political struggle, but also a perspective on it (Pink, 2012).

Resources: how do inequalities shape changes in everyday life, and who engages in everyday processes and repertoires of politics?

The extant literature on everyday life, as covered in this article, has an interesting and ambivalent relationship to the question of resources. Differential resources were central to early work on subcultural consumption and to the way that feminists saw power in relation to patriarchy – with experiences of daily life and expressions of identity and style being shaped by one’s class or gender. Differences in resources are often missing in the literature on everyday consumption practices, on the other hand, which tends to frame the shift in what is understood as ‘normal’ and escalation of resource consumption in these lifestyles as somehow universal, although Brand and Wissen (2021) offer a useful corrective to this with their understanding of global North everyday consumption as the ‘imperial mode of living’.

Contrasting assumptions about resources also underpin work on the politics of everyday life. James Scott (1987) and other writers working on resistance, and in different ways those working on feminism (for example, Stall and Stoecker, 1998), suggest that less-collective and less-confrontational forms of politics such as those conducted in everyday life are something that people who are socially and politically disadvantaged resort to. Disproportionately, this argument is made about political action in repressive regimes, whether global South or North (Johnston, 1991; Bayat, 2010). Everyday forms of collective action are quite widely understood to be something that is done when the opportunities of political action are constrained. Yet, repression and inequality, as well as inequalities in levels and forms of repression, exist in pluralist democracies too, and there is only mixed evidence suggesting that everyday politics is the main outcome (see, for example, Piven and Cloward, 1977), suggesting that the link between constraint and everyday forms of action should be further investigated.

Indeed, in contrast with the idea that everyday political issues are tied to disempowerment and lack of resources, arguments about postmaterialism and new social movements inspired a range of authors to suggest that everyday life politics they observe are actually a feature of affluent populations (Giddens, 1991; Beck, 1997; Haenfler et al, 2012). Where subsistence demands and labour disputes have subsided, concerns are now based around ‘the politicisation of citizens’ everyday life choices’ (de Moor, 2017). For some new social movement scholars, this also signalled a shift from working-class to middle-class protagonists (for example, Offe, 1985), suggesting that when enough citizens are affluent enough, their political interests also shift too (Streeck, 2012). The extent to which everyday politics in the global North is about post-materialist values remains controversial (Schlosberg and Coles, 2016). Yet the suggestion in much of the literature making claims about everyday politics being ‘new’ is that everyday politics, whether oriented around identity, resource consumption, spirituality or other elements of the ‘good life’, are waged only by those in societies who can afford to have transcended the more fundamental necessities.

For the first set of authors, everyday politics is what people do when they have insufficient resources or the costs of participation are too high; for the second set of authors, everyday politics is by contrast a feature of affluent people and societies. The apparent paradox suggests that the relationship between the ‘politics of everyday life’ and resources needs further attention. That might mean looking for, and at, forms of contention in contexts of low resources but little direct repression, and everyday forms of political action in the global North that are not elite (see Johannson and Vinthagen, 2014).

Again, using everyday life as an orientation might also suggest that these contradictions might be addressed by dialogue across different academic traditions which focus on different kinds of political action; and asking what latent forms of politics exist both alongside those that are visible, and among groups not being studied. The everyday as a concept might sensitise analysts to the gaps between official and respectable forms of everyday politics, in the same way that examining everyday cultural participation highlights the ‘official’ framework of cultural value and the things that do not fit into it (Miles and Gibson, 2016).

Objects of study: how, when and at what level should everyday life and social change processes be analysed?

The core claims about practice theories, rehearsed in section 2, suggested practices as an alternative social scientific approach to structures or the agency of individuals. In sections 2 and 3 it was suggested that a Schatzkian or Foucauldian approach to power could sharpen perspectives on everyday consumption practices.

Tensions around objects of study are also evident in work on everyday politics. Everyday politics is regularly framed as being non-collective, or somehow less collective than other practices. Michele Micheletti captured this in her original understanding of the consumer activism as ‘individualised collective action’ (2003: 25). Yet although such lifestyles as veganism, zero waste living or ‘straight-edge’ are pursued by individuals, they are also either established practices, or subcultures. This means they are not only shared in the sense of similar practices, but they mostly also have institutional support, distinctive modes of interaction around key practices, and they relate to other processes of social and political expression (Lorenzen, 2012). Practices are not simply important because lots of people do them. Work on resistance regularly explores the same tension. Resistance practices are disparate and often conducted alone, having aggregative effects: ‘their sheer cumulative numbers turn them into an eventual social force’ (Bayat, 2010: 48); but they are also sites of interaction and mutual recognition and identification which may lead to groupings or organisations which subsequently act collectively (Welch and Yates, 2018, and final sub-section). Diana Fu (2017), writing in the context of contemporary China, similarly explores the tensions between individual and collective in her account of ‘micro-collective action’, where workers are coached to ‘frame their individual grievances as part of a broader struggle for worker rights’ (175). Organisers promote wider solidarity and worker confidence through ‘atomised action’ where individuals are helped to claim legal rights through public threats of more dramatic action in order to secure practical pay-offs vis-à-vis local state officials who want to avoid open conflict in order to maintain their own positions.

Even beyond the question of individual or collective activity, objects of study vary. For some authors, everyday politics is another ‘new’ wave of social movements. Schlosberg and Coleman’s (2016) ‘new environmentalism of everyday life’ suggests that farmers markets, DIY and repair shops and sustainable lifestyles are framed as ‘new movements’, and Haenfler et al (2012) suggest that veganism, green living and Christian groups espousing various approaches to family planning are something between contentious politics and lifestyles, ‘lifestyle movements’; while Francesca Forno and Graziano (2014) coin the term ‘sustainable community movements’. Others, especially those looking at prefigurative ‘alternative’ practices or institutions, place the emphasis on projects or initiatives. Finally, the political participation literature emphasises forms of political participation which tend to focus on the individual. Joost de Moor’s (2017) definition of lifestyle politics as ‘the politicisation of citizens’ everyday life choices’ is typical (cf Wahlen and Laamanen, 2015). There are advantages and disadvantages to these different objects of study. Proposing that everyday politics is expressed in movements can reify a group that does not identify collectively, and it may obscure the roles that everyday politics plays in relation to other collectives, for example sustainable lifestyles are often part of and related to environmental movements, through recruitment, resources and exemplification of alternative forms of living. Looking at individual forms of participation may also make it harder to understand relationships between contexts, interactions and performances of everyday politics. If everyday life is viewed as a social scientific orientation, then objects of study might need to depend on the research question. Following Nicolini (2012), it might be that ‘zooming in and out’ to appreciate different types of phenomena may be fruitful.

Finally, studies of social movements suggest some hypotheses for thinking about when everyday politics might ‘matter’. In social movement studies, everyday dynamics are generally considered insignificant except when there is nothing more dramatic happening (Baumgarten et al, 2014). Nevertheless, at least four hypotheses suggest the times in which everyday lives matter. The first is that the important everyday political dynamics alternate with other forms of participation, between protest waves for example, where spaces, scenes and subcultures might sustain movements in abeyance (Staggenborg and Taylor, 2005). Melucci’s (1996) concepts of latency and visibility seems to support this hypothesis where he describes them as ‘phases’ (130). At other times, his argument suggests that latency and visibility are ‘reciprocally correlated’, suggesting that in contrast to the notion of abeyance, everyday political dynamics and open contention rise and fall together (Melucci, 1985: 829). A third claim is that everyday life matters in that it precedes political activity in an important way: the notion of everyday politics or resistance ‘leading to’ other repertoires or recruiting participants to a particular frame (Dubuisson-Quellier, 2013). A fourth is that significant political work takes place after the typical arc of a social movement and in institutions, for example in Frank Dobbin’s (2009) depiction of how human resources departments ‘invented’ equal opportunity in operationalising legislation in firms and institutions. A fifth perspective is that the important dynamics of everyday politics are taking place all the time (for example, Boyte, 2005). More work could be done to test and further explore the temporalities of the everyday in relation to political action (see also Johannson and Vinthagen, 2014; Wagner-Pacifici and Ruggero, 2019). It seems likely that different kinds of everyday political processes are taking place in relation to open or traditional forms of political contention in different places and times.

Consequences and modes of transformation: how does everyday life matter, and how do its consequences play out?

Arguments that everyday politics ‘matters’ take two main forms, which echo the difference highlighted in sections 1 and 2 about whether the everyday matters in itself or through the sheer number of people doing everyday practices; or because of economic and political processes. Arguments through which everyday dynamics are argued to matter directly and in themselves in the area of politics, like with everyday consumption, also take two broad forms.

Sometimes the effects of everyday politics are about numbers of people doing the same thing together and directly affecting a target. Boycotts may be partly successful in changing the direction of a company or even a state (Beck, 1997). Forms of refusal, mass complaining, foot-dragging and non-compliance can make it impossible for a government policy to succeed, and non-cooperation and desertion can alter the course of military conflicts (Scott, 1987; Kerkvliet, 2005; 2009). Work that is done around questions of equality within institutions, following a protest wave, for example in human resources, can have very wide consequences for establishing new societal norms (for example, Dobbin, 2009). These are all arguments about the direct impact of collective activity. In some ways these arguments are similar whether the processes are seen to be political or not – Bayat’s (2010) discussion of the ’quiet encroachment of the ordinary’ echoes processes of change described by studies of consumption practices (Welch and Yates, 2018).

There are also many arguments about everyday politics being significant through political processes and other less direct processes. Many authors discuss how collective everyday activity is important for explaining the processes and circumstances in which overt defiance, political organising, revolution and sustained social movement activity come about. This is Hank Johnston’s (1991) central claim in his account of the ‘subculture of opposition’ in Catalonia during the Spanish dictatorship. Without understanding everyday dynamics, he argues, discussing the collective identities and interactions around cultural activism relating to Catalan literature, songs and dance, hiking clubs, elements of the Catholic Church, and universities, one could not understand the formation of collectives and pressures which led to the transition to democracy. Welch and Yates (2018), using examples from the environmental or political impacts of large numbers engaged in similar practices, suggest that shared practices of ‘dispersed collective activity’ (which usually have some ‘direct’ consequences), might be the basis of collective identities or bureaucratic organisations. Micheletti (2003) suggests that consumption lifestyles might also become significant voting blocs (2003).

Arguments about political or indirect impacts of everyday dynamics, despite these examples and many more, are controversial because of anxieties that everyday politics may replace other forms of politics that are more effective (Yates, 2021). These debates are too often are waged around metaphors: everyday politics is often framed as a ‘safety valve’ or a ‘gateway drug’. Perhaps signing e-petitions, grumbling, refusing to eat meat, deliberately working slowly, and other forms of resistance, mean that frustrations and anger dissipate gradually, and present no challenge to the system, releasing pressure. An influential claim reflecting this position is that everyday politics is ‘post-political’ – in the sense that it is the expression of a shift away from agonistic politics towards the technocratic management of populations (Blühdorn and Deflorian, 2021). On the other hand, the alternative to the safety valve is the claim that everyday politics are always significant – as a ‘gateway drug’, giving people a taste of something from which they might move onto something ‘harder’, such as contentious politics. Future research could usefully to establish the circumstances in which everyday political repertoires appear to undermine or strengthen political strategies to change the world.

In spite of some detractors, therefore, evidence shows that everyday dynamics have political relevance both directly in terms of accumulated practices, but also politically – in the form of the reproduction of civil society, limited forms of mobilisation and critical debate about coordinating or planning resistance (for example, Johnston, 1991; Tuğal, 2009), or affecting subsequent processes of political activity, from boycotts to voting blocs to revolutions. The obvious conclusions are that these processes matter in many, if not all contexts, and should be studied more widely. The examples also highlight areas for the study of implications of everyday life for transformation that are around collective identity, group formation and political emergence; what activists do together oriented towards the future, whether in the form of conventional protest repertoires or not; and the plans, imaginative work and emotional orientations which coordinate this activity. These could be combined in future work with practice theoretical insights about transformation such as those of Shove et al (2012) about direct effects of changing everyday practices, and with approaches towards collective action such as theories of fields (for example, Fligstein and McAdam, 2012). An everyday orientation towards change might appreciate both different forms of change and different theoretical angles and lenses for studying them.