Sharing a meal: a diversity of performances engendered by a social innovation

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the dynamics between social innovations and socio-spatial transformations using practice theory as linking pin. Social innovations, such as the case study of a meal sharing platform here presented, are considered as proposals. Using social practice theory as a theoretical lens enables us to explain how the principles of the proposal’s design are moderated and appropriated by its users. Consequently, familiar routinized practices expand, becoming more complex and hybrid. It is in the performance of the practice that this complexity is revealed. Specific focus is on the socio-spatial transformations that social innovations propose. This paper shows how tactics of appropriation can result in trespassing the boundaries between private and public, and between domestic and communitarian space. This way, we connect social innovations to DIY-urbanism, showing how citizens appropriate urban space.

KEYWORDS:

• Daily life
• tactics of appropriation
• urban food
• meal sharing
• social practice theory
• socio-spatial transformations

Acknowledgments

We thank all of our respondents as without them this research would not have been possible. We are also thankful to the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The authors use the term collaborative consumption, but this is often used interchangeably with “sharing economy”.

2. We chose to limit the qualitative research to this community because they are the most important carriers of the sharing practice. Moreover, their contribution is crucial for the existence and development of the platform.

3. This offer includes the following information: name of the dish, short description, picture, number of portions offered, day and time for pick up and price.

4. The platform advises cooks to base meal price on the price of ingredients, with some surplus for expenses. Meals cost €4, 50 on average. In 2019 TA introduced an online payment facility.

5. Headquarters are located in Utrecht. Funding was received from social venture funds. TA entered into partnerships with eighteen Dutch municipalities and received sponsoring of about fifteen producers, distributors or retailers of food products or associations of food producers: www.thuisafgehaald.nl.

6. https://www.thuisafgehaald.nl/impactonderzoek-thuisafgehaald/item207061 (in Dutch).

7. All quotes are the authors’ translations.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marianne J. Dagevos

Marianne J. Dagevos MA is a PhD candidate at Tilburg University, the Netherlands. Her research focusses on social innovations in informal care and the ways in which these innovations are adopted and appropriated by its users.

Esther J. Veen

Esther J. Veen obtained her PhD from Wageningen University, the Netherlands, with a thesis on the social effects of community gardening, and the extent to which participants are driven to create an alternative food system. She now works as a teacher for the Rural Sociology Group, teaching on the sociology of eating and food. Veen is interested in the urban food system, the tactics people apply to adjust it to their demands and the mediating role of routines and habits.