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Dr Tina Balke
Dr Thomas Roberts
@Env_Sociology
Centre for Research in Social Simulation
Modelling Practices and Routines - Where are the households?
Centre for Research in Social Simulation
Introduction•Outline the possibility of modelling routines
using a social practice perspective•Define social practices•Define routines•Examine the similarities, differences and
relationship between social practices and routines
•Evaluate the factors associated with modelling practices and routines
•Conceptualising practices as agents•Households and routines
•Conclusions
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Define Social Practices• Activities which people
undertake in their daily lives (cooking, cleaning, washing).
• Taken together, practices make up lifestyles.
• Practices are made up of elements
• Practices change as relationships between elements evolve.
• To become practices these elements need to be regularly reproduced by skilled and knowledgeable actors or carriers.
• Practices are considered, the basic domain of study for the social sciences (Giddens 1984).
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Define Routines
• Routines contribute to the meaning element of practices
• Routines are critical to the reproduction of practices
• They are also critical to the evolution of practices
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Modelling Practices• Balke (2014) argues that
agent based models are an appropriate tool for modelling social practices
• However, to do so requires a rethink regarding the nature of agents
• Instead of seeing households or people as agents, the practices themselves are modelled as agents, representing the main unit of analysis.
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Modelling practices as agents• Giddens (1984) – Practices
posses both structure and agency and should therefore be the primary unit of analysis.
• Focus should be on ‘the doing’ of various social practices.
• Individuals become the carriers of social practices rather than the centre of attention.
• Agent based models represent one possible way way of achieving this.
• However, do practices meet the criteria to be considered agents?
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Practices as Agents?•Macy and Willner (2002) discuss the
minimum requirements need to be fulfilled to model something as an agent:
•Autonomous Behaviour: Systemic patterns emerge not as a result of central planning, authorities or institutions, but as a result of the interactions between the individual actants in the system.
•Interdependence: The different agents in a system influence each other.
•Agents follow simple rules.•Adaptive and backward-looking behaviour: Agents adapt by imitation, replication, and so on, but not by calculating the most efficient action.
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Practices CAN Act as Agents• Social practices can show individual autonomous influences
on the system •their system influences are not centrally planned and
coordinated, but result from the individual characteristics of the social practices and the environment they are situated in.
• Practices can influence other practices (e.g. the showering practice might for example influence the laundry practice in terms of more towels being used and therefore requiring washing).
• Practices can change, as a result of changes in the elements the households use when performing the instances of practices (e.g. adopting power showers).
• New practices can be ‘born’ (e.g. the showering) if new elements appear and are being used (e.g. the shower as product) or if old practices are being recombined in a new way.
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Modelling Routines• The interconnected nature of practices and routines
suggests that they could be modelled simultaneously • routines can show individual and autonomous influences on
the system by influencing the reproduction of practices through the carriers of practices (e.g. humans or households)
• A routine can influence other routines (e.g. a getting up routine can influence a breakfast-making routine)
• In this sense, there are a number of similarities with practices, i.e. routines encouraging (or trying to strengthen) the number of their performances
• Routines can change (due to changes in the environmental setting, e.g. when new materials become available) and they can die or be born
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Modelling Practices and Routines
• To model routines and practice simultaneously it is necessary to develop a hierarchy of agents.
• This is because as well as being instrumental in the evolution of practices, routines are only one part of one element of a practice
• Nevertheless the relationship between practices and routines is circular with routines contributing to the evolution of practices and practices influencing the nature od routines
Routines
Social Practices
Hierarchy of agents
Co-evolution of practices and routines
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Conclusions• Based on the literature of practice theory and the
concept of agency by Macy and Willner, in this paper we argue that both routines and practices can be modelled in a similar fashion as agents in an agent-based model.
• This approach is different from traditional agent-based models where typically households or individuals are seen as agents, where in our approach these are simply carriers of practices and are therefore not explicitly modelled.
• With respect to the relationship of the different agent types to one another we propose the idea of a hierarchy of agents with practice agents being at a higher hierarchy level then routine agents, whilst recognising that the two concepts are highly interlinked.
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Thank you
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