Abstract
The subject of efficient technologies and how to get them into the homes and hands of users has been at the centre of energy efficiency policy from its inception. What the record shows is that efficient technologies may well increase the efficiency of energy throughput but that promised reductions in energy demand seldom pan out. Confronted with this problem, the usual policy approach has been to work harder to get markets, incentives and information to loosen up the ‘barriers’ to technology penetration. Social scientists have been recruited to facilitate markets with better information and incentives, in other words, to improve the behaviour of energy end-users. The paper argues that both technologists and behaviouralists have oversimplified the ways that technologies and socio-cultural contexts interact to affect energy-using practices. The concept of distributed agency is introduced to capture the theoretical link between technology and behaviour. The examples of air conditioning and food refrigeration are used to illustrate these points.
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Notes
Well known examples being Mary Douglas’s and B. Isherwood’s (1979) work on the ways people use goods to make sense out of their social worlds; Daniel Miller’s (1987 ,1994, 1995a ,b, c, 1998a, b, 2001) work on material culture, mass consumption and shopping; Arjun Appadurai’s work on the nature of commodities and on their global flows 1986, 1996); James Carrier’s work on the social meaning of markets (Carrier and Miller 1999).
This is one of the inspirations for Bourdieu’s (1977) practice theory, which essentially poses that important aspects of behaviour are embedded in everyday routines. Social agents operate according to an implicit practical logic that is embedded in routines and bodily practices.
In 2006, US Vice President Mr. Cheney, a prominent member of NRA, accidentally shot and wounded one of his hunting partners. Does he subscribe to the NRA slogan that it is people and not guns that kill people? He would have been in serious trouble if he were a better shot.
Ironically, many people do walk as part of fitness regimes, but almost no on walks in connection with shopping or other chores.
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Wilhite, H. New thinking on the agentive relationship between end-use technologies and energy-using practices. Energy Efficiency 1, 121–130 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12053-008-9006-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12053-008-9006-x