After the steady stream of historical insight and the

excellent early chapter stressing the importance of

social values, the authors disappoint with their treat-

ment of decision-making. The chapter, Decision

Processes, provides a sufficient overview of types of

decision-making processes from individual to societal

levels, but it fails to discuss breal worldQ constraints indecision-making, including political infighting, culture

clashes, dominant personalities and inertia inherent in

stable political systems. Applying hindsight, we often

find that poor policies did not result from lack of

knowledge or lack of appropriate technology, but have

often been driven by political or social values. For

example, environmental historians have documented

that in the western US, most major dams did not pass

economic muster, even at the time they were being

proposed. Social values, such as the idea of technology

as savior, along with dominant personalities in Con-

gress and Federal agencies created an atmosphere that

deemed the dams bgoodQ despite their economic

shortcomings. Such contextual analysis is not present

in this chapter. To use a key point from the book as

another example, ages old approaches to water

management are making a comeback, but the authors

do not discuss why they faded in the first place. What

historical events, social values, and individual person-

alities affected decisions to move away from particular

approaches and toward others? The authors do

acknowledge that politics affect the decision process.

Specifically, they write that 18th century efforts to

apply scientific methods to regional water administra-

tion encountered bpolitical obstacles that persist to the

present day. . .Q and a few pages later comment that a

multiple criteria approach to water and environmental

management was bapplied at the national, river basin,

and project scales, up until its repeal for largely political

reasons in 1983.Q Without providing further details

about these political bobstaclesQ and breasonsQ there

remains a serious drought in our understanding of

decision-making processes.

Following this disappointing chapter, the book ends

on a positive note by discussing Integrative

Approaches. The authors present watershed manage-

ment, adaptive environmental management, and global

environmental management as three approaches that

show promise in improving our water and environment

management attempts. With solid information about

current efforts to re-view our ideas about water and the

environment, readers are left with hope that all is not

lost, that we can find a way to sustain the natural waters

that enable us, and all life, to sustain ourselves.

Kristan Cockerill

American Studies Department,

University of New Mexico,

Albuquerque, NM, USA

E-mail address: kristan5@unm.edu.

E. Shove, Comfort, cleanliness and convenience: the

social organization of normality, Berg Publishers,

Oxford and New York, 2003, ISBN: 1859736300,

224 pp.

Elizabeth Shove’s new book is a welcome contri-

bution to the field of consumption and environment; a

field that is also expanding in relation to ecological

economics. Shove is a British sociologist who has

worked extensively with energy issues and who applies

a transdisciplinary approach, including inspiration

from socioeconomic studies, to the understanding of

consumption growth and environmental impacts.

The main message of her new book is that much of

the extremely environmentally costly consumption is

related to ordinary, routinized and taken-for-granted

practices, and it is therefore important to study how

these normal practices are constructed and develop

over time. The perspective is formulated in opposition

to the approach taken in much research on sustainable

consumption where the relationship between individ-

ual bgreenQ beliefs and individual behaviour is

studied. Shove argues that studies on individual

bgreenQ behaviour tend to deal only with the tip of

the iceberg—a minor part of the environmental impact

related to consumption. The major part relates to the

long-term changes of daily life and the changing

collective conventions regarding the constituents of a

normal life; studies of the construction and trans-

formation of such conventions require a more

systemic approach. The purpose of the book is to

assemble a framework of ideas that can be useful in

understanding the social construction of normality.

10.1016/j.ecolecon.2004.11.004

Book reviews144

Shove looks at three main cases where everyday

practices have become more environmentally costly in

terms of energy and/or water consumptions: the

spread of air conditioning, the habit of showering

daily or twice daily and the growing quantities of

laundry. Furthermore, she supplements with pieces on

lighting and different convenience technologies. The

examples suggest that standards and the related

environmental costs are ever-increasing; however,

Shove also mentions counter-examples such as the

fall in the temperature of water for washing laundry.

The cases illustrate different kinds of dynamic

force behind changing conventions and habits. In the

case of air conditioning, the interplay between

commercial interests and the development of the

science of comfort has been decisive. Historically,

people have been able to make themselves comfort-

able in many different climates in many different

ways, but air conditioning implies a trend towards

global harmonization of indoor climate. The case

highlights the importance of the translation of science

into design practice through the development of

engineering standards and the way in which the air-

conditioned lifestyle becomes inscribed into buildings

and technical systems. The history of the development

of bathing habits has a different focus, as the

standards of cleanliness have changed without basic

changes in technology. In contrast to comfort,

cleanliness is soaked with moral and a highly

symbolic matter relating to the policing of social

boundaries. Changing scientific understandings also

play a role, but they are not mediated through

technical standards. Therefore, the study of changing

discourses and rationales becomes central to the

understanding of changing bathing practices.

The laundering case discloses still other dynamic

forces, because laundering is a form of work and a

composite and complex task that requires the coordi-

nation of several relatively independent sociotechnical

systems, and which is also bound up with gender

aspects. The study thus has to focus on the interaction

between the sociotechnical systems, the relationship

with wider social trends such as the decline of the

employment of servants as well as the changing

discourses in relation to cleanliness. Finally, Shove

discusses how people coordinate and schedule their

daily activities to try to cope with the sense of

increasing time pressure. One way to alleviate the

pressure is to apply convenience technologies such as

deep freezers and microwave ovens, which are

supposed to help save or shift time and provide

people with greater flexibility and control. However,

the technologies tend to fragment the daily tasks even

further and thus contribute to the problem they were

intended to solve—a paradox exemplifying another

driving force that can change everyday life in a more

environmentally demanding direction.

Shove’s analyses draw on theoretical inspiration

from several different fields. Some of her basic

thought patterns are well known in ecological

economics, such as co-evolution, path dependency

and the systemic perspective. The book demonstrates

the complexity for the processes shaping our everyday

life and the related environmental impacts, and argues

forcefully for the need to delve deeper into the

collective dynamics of normalization to develop a

basis for the political promotion of more sustainable

patterns of consumption. Shove, however, does not

elaborate on the political implications.

The book provides a gold mine of details and

useful guidelines that can inspire further studies of

consumption practices. However, it is not an easy

reader and this is not only due to the complexity of the

issues. The style of writing is sometimes too intricate

and the organization of the material can be difficult to

follow. The different types of dynamical processes are

illustrated with drawings of mechanical analogies.

Some of them are useful, but Shove tends to get

carried away with these illustrations and analogies that

are sometimes more confusing and restricting than

eye-opening. Readers wanting a quick and more

accessible introduction should start with Shove’s short

version of the book in the article bConvergingconventions of comfort, cleanliness and convenienceQin Journal of Consumer Policy 26:395–418, 2003.

Inge RbpkeDepartment of Manufacturing Engineering and

Management, Technical University of Denmark,

Matematiktorvet, DK-2800 Kgs. Lyngby, Denmark

E-mail address: ir@ipl.dtu.dk.

Tel.: +45 4525 6009; fax: +45 4593 6620.

10.1016/j.ecolecon.2004.11.005

Book reviews 145