Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience

Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience

Author: Elizabeth Shove

Publisher: Berg 3pl

Published: 2003-07

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Shove maintains that habits are not just changing, but are changing in ways that imply escalating and standardizing patterns of consumption.


Home Comforts

Home Comforts

Author: Cheryl Mendelson

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2005-05-17

Total Pages: 900

ISBN-13: 0743272862

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A classic bestselling resource for every household, Home Comforts helps you manage everyday chores, find creative solutions to domestic dilemmas, and enhance the experience of life at home. “Home Comforts is to the house what Joy of Cooking is to food.” —USA TODAY Home Comforts is an engaging and comprehensive book about housekeeping. It is a lively and readable guide for both beginners and experts in all the domestic arts. From keeping surfaces free of germs, watering plants, removing stains, folding a fitted sheet, cleaning china, tuning a piano, lighting a fire, setting the dining room table—this guide covers everything that people might want to do for themselves in their homes. Further topics include: making up a bed with hospital corners, expert recommendations for safe food storage, reading care labels (and sometimes carefully disregarding them), keeping your home free of dust mites and other allergens, this is a practical, good-humored, philosophical guidebook to the art and science of household management.


Popular Mechanics

Popular Mechanics

Author:

Publisher:

Published: 1956-09

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Popular Mechanics inspires, instructs and influences readers to help them master the modern world. Whether it’s practical DIY home-improvement tips, gadgets and digital technology, information on the newest cars or the latest breakthroughs in science -- PM is the ultimate guide to our high-tech lifestyle.


Dirt

Dirt

Author: Ben Campkin

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2012-12-05

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 0857738828

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Dirt - and our rituals to eradicate it - is as much a part of our everyday lives as eating, breathing and sleeping. Yet this very fact means that we seldom stop to question what we mean by dirt. What do our attitudes to dirt and cleanliness tell us about ourselves and the societies we live in? Exploring a wide variety of settings - domestic, urban, suburban and rural - the contributors expose how our ideas about dirt are intimately bound up with issues of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality and the body. The result is a a rich and challenging work that extends our understanding of historical and contemporary cultural manifestations of dirt and cleanliness.


Consuming mobility

Consuming mobility

Author: Jorrit O. Nijhuis

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2023-09-04

Total Pages: 259

ISBN-13: 9086867944

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The current fossil fuel-based system of mobility is associated with a wide range of environmental and social problems. There is a growing body of literature on system innovations and transitions which has as a common understanding that long-term transformative change is necessary to deal with these complex problems. However, knowledge on the crucial role of citizen-consumers in sustainable mobility transitions is still underdeveloped. By incorporating the viewpoint of consumption patterns and everyday life routines, this book provides (new) knowledge on the role of citizen-consumers in sustainable mobility transitions. Theoretically, a practice based approach is developed as a novel framework to analyse, understand and influence transition processes to sustainable mobility at the level of everyday life. The focus in each of the three cases studies is on situated interactions between consumers and producers. Amongst these is an analysis of the role environmental information and subsidies in new car purchasing. Also, various examples in which an attempt was made to orchestrate a (modal) shift in commuting practices are examined. Each of the empirical case studies shows the important role of contextual factors in understanding and influencing mobility behaviour of citizen-consumers. In addition, this book helps to understand how and why innovation in mobility practices takes place or not.


The Evolution of Household Technology and Consumer Behavior, 1800-2000

The Evolution of Household Technology and Consumer Behavior, 1800-2000

Author: Julia Sophie Woersdorfer

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-03-27

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 1351789082

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The increasing division and specialization of labor between the market and the nonmarket sector is a central stylized fact of long-run economic development. Over time, a large share of activities which had formerly been carried out by the private household itself has become replaced by market alternatives, raising at the same time the demand for consumer goods. The neoclassical economic framework of household production theory relates the increasing demand for household technology to rising wages and opportunity costs of time: the higher the wage rate, the more costly it is to spend time in unpaid housework activities. Consumer products are thus purchased to make household production processes more efficient and to substitute capital goods for the household’s time (time substitution hypothesis). Although this hypothesis sounds plausible at first sight, it cannot capture the essential phenomena underlying the complex process of the mechanization of the home over the past 200 years. Its major weakness lies in the treatment of consumer preferences, whose explanatory potential is explicitly factored out. Using the washing of clothes as a microcosm of household economics, this book examines long-term changes in cleanliness consumption patterns from the perspective of an evolutionary economic, psychologically informed consumer theory. Woersdorfer shows how the historical evolution of cleanliness consumption over the past 200 years is the result of the interplay of supply and demand side factors, namely, technical change in washing technology on one side and motivational driving forces and consumer learning capabilities on the other. Hence, not changing relative prices but innate consumer needs and consumer learning processes, leading to a growing understanding of how to satisfy those needs, are the essential driving forces behind the rising technological endowment of the home and the corresponding demand for household appliances. The Evolution of Household Technology and Consumer Behavior, 1800–2000 will be of interest to researchers in the field of evolutionary economics, history of technology, economic history, innovation economics and sociology.


Global Energy Justice

Global Energy Justice

Author: Benjamin K. Sovacool

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2014-10-02

Total Pages: 415

ISBN-13: 1107041953

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book explores how the idea of justice can give us a way to better assess and resolve energy challenges and problems.


Repair

Repair

Author: Markus Berger

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-09-30

Total Pages: 398

ISBN-13: 1000641619

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A collection of timely new scholarship, Repair: Sustainable Design Futures investigates repair as a contemporary expression of empowerment, agency, and resistance to our unmaking of the world and the environment. Repair is an act, metaphor, and foundation for opening up a dialogue about design’s role in proposing radically different social, environmental, and economic futures. Thematically expansive and richly illustrated, with over 125 visuals, this volume features an international, interdisciplinary group of contributors from across the design spectrum whose voices and artwork speak to how we might address our broken social and physical worlds. Organized around reparative thinking and practices, the book includes 30 long and short chapters, photo essays, and interviews that focus on multiple responses to fractured systems, relationships, cities, architecture, objects, and more. Repair will encourage students, academics, researchers, and practitioners in art, design and architecture practice and theory, cultural studies, environment and sustainability, to discuss, engage, and rethink the act of repair and its impact on our society and environment.


Southeast Asian Energy Transitions

Southeast Asian Energy Transitions

Author: Mattijs Smits

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-03-03

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 131705217X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Addressing the apparent tensions between modernity and sustainability in Southeast Asia, this book offers novel insights into the global challenge of moving towards a low carbon energy system. With an original and accessible take on social theory related to energy transitions, modernity and sustainability, Mattijs Smits argues for a reinvigorated geography of energy. He also challenges universalistic and linear assumptions about energy transitions and makes the case for ’energy trajectories’, stressing embeddedness, contingency and connections between scales. Contemporary and historical empirical examples from Southeast Asia, primarily Thailand and Laos, are drawn upon to show the importance of scale at regional, national, local and household levels. The transitions in the national power sectors here have been intimately related to discourses of modernity and state formation since the colonial era. More recently, plans for international cooperation and discourses of regional power trade have taken centre stage. Local energy trajectories are understood to be part of these transitions, but also as embedded in local social, political and spatial relations. Examining how energy practices go hand-in-hand with the dissemination of different technologies, this work shows the complexities of achieving sustainability in the context of rapidly changing energy modernities in Southeast Asia.


End-Users’ Perspectives on Energy Policy and Technology

End-Users’ Perspectives on Energy Policy and Technology

Author: Sung-Yoon Huh

Publisher: MDPI

Published: 2021-01-19

Total Pages: 166

ISBN-13: 3036500154

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This Special Issue (SI) deals with different end-users’ perspectives on newly developed energy policy and technology. Although the importance of end-users’ preferences is not totally new to the energy sector, this issue needs to be urgently and consistently addressed if new policies, projects, and technologies are to be introduced successfully. The eight papers included in this SI are focused on various issues such as modeling the future energy demand, household energy consumption behavior, public perceptions of new energy technologies and projects, and ICT–energy efficiency interrelationship. Some papers also analyze end-users’ experiences with recently introduced energy technologies. Based on these eight articles with various topics, this SI will provide fruitful insights in assessing and forecasting the evolution of the future energy sector. I hope this SI can contribute to the increase in communication and cooperation among academic researchers as well as practitioners in energy fields.