Summary
Shove’s Triad is shorthand for a three-element model of social practice. It says everyday activities such as driving, cooking, cycling or showering exist only while people keep combining materials (objects, tools, infrastructure, the body), competences (skills and know-how) and meanings (the ideas that make the activity worth doing). Elizabeth Shove, Mika Pantzar and Matt Watson developed it through the 2000s, building on Andreas Reckwitz, and set it out in ‘The Dynamics of Social Practice’ (2012).
The unit of analysis is the practice, not the individual’s attitudes or choices. In Janine Morley’s summary, practices “evolve as new elements and/or new interlinkages are (per)formed, and disappear as links are broken”.
Rationale
Part 1 calls deep dispositions ‘cultural habits’, “held in place by many different aspects of our lives”. Shove and colleagues name three such aspects, and explain why a new meaning alone rarely shifts a practice.
Redrawn for Deep Garden — after Shove, Pantzar & Watson (2012). Original at in.sagepub.com ↗