Review of the literature relating to comfort practices and socio-technical systems

Abstract

This paper approaches the literature on comfort and energy practices from a socio-technical systems perspective, reviewing relevant studies and recent thinking on how we study comfort and energy in the home. This constitutes a first cut at developing a theoretical position from which to explore the empirical data coming out of the CCC fieldwork.

The CCC study aims to reduce domestic energy consumption through an understanding of, and interventions in, comfort practices. Whilst “there is more to comfort than space heating and cooling, these two processes account for the lion’s share of domestic energy use in most western societies” (Shove 2003b: 396), where the aim of the CCC study is to encourage less energy intensive comfort practices rather than sacrifices in individual comfort in order to meet the desired reduction in energy consumption. The overlapping subjects of domestic energy consumption and comfort have been approached in a number of different ways within the psychological, sociological, technical and socio-technical literatures. Each of these literatures conceptualises agency differently, which has implications for the types of interventions that flow from a reading of these literatures; if we attribute agency to particular actors then this affects the types of interventions we develop and the types of results we expect them to have. For example, whilst a proponent of a socio-technical systems approach might argue that “comfort can only be understood through a perspective that accounts for historical, technical and social change” (Wilhite, 2009: 85), psychological approaches tend to stress the significance of individual attitudes and values, sociological approaches tend to stress the role of social structure, and technical approaches tend to stress the significance of the ability for different configurations of technologies to produce environmental conditions under which the majority of participants report feeling comfortable. In this paper, psychological, sociological and technical approaches to understanding and intervening in energy consumption and comfort practices are discussed from a socio-technical systems perspective, in order to draw out commonalities and empirical precedents that can inform our approach to – and analysis of – data collected during the CCC study.

This paper is structured as follows. Section 1 introduces a socio-technical systems approach, and situates this alongside other approaches by distinguishing between the objects of these approaches and their attribution of agency to different human and non-human actors. Section 2 focuses on psychological and sociological approaches to understanding and driving particular types of individual-level interactions within energy systems, including a discussion of the potential for information-based interventions to result in behaviour change. Section 3 considers the ‘parameterisation’ of comfort, or the ways that comfort has been constructed and institutionalised. Section 4 explores comfort as a socio-historical artefact, drawing from the socio-technical systems literature and distinguishing between two main ways of constructing comfort: as an attribute and as an achievement. This section concludes with a discussion of the types of intervention that may be appropriate to influence the socio-technical systems that comfort practices are both produced by and are involved in reproducing. Section 5 focuses on comfort as an everyday practice, including a discussion of practice-based approaches and empirical comfort studies. The paper concludes with section 6, which summarises the implications emerging from this literature review for the CCC study.

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