Household Recycling and Consumption Work: Social and Moral Economies, by Kathryn Wheeler and Miriam Glucksmann

This well-written and well-researched book forms part of Palgrave’s ‘Consumption and Public Life’ series, and as such, I feel justified in approaching it from the vantage point of consumption scholarship. The development of sociological and related (in geography, anthropology, cultural studies, and so on) approaches to consumption from the 1980s onwards was premised on its analytic separation from the long-standing concerns of political economy. The cultural turn helped establish consumption as a legitimate object of social scientific enquiry; so too did claims that consumption and leisure were replacing disciplined labor as a primary source of identity and social reproduction in an era of late-/reflexive-/post-modernity. After three decades of flying solo, there is growing interest in finding ways to reconnect production and consumption (see Warde 2015). Against this backdrop, Household Recycling and Consumption Work makes a number of important interventions.

The research here derives from a larger programme of work that brings consumers into understandings of societal divisions of labor. The authors introduce the idea of ‘consumption work’ in order to recognize the distinctiveness of the labor that consumers bring to the economy and to challenge that idea that ‘production’ and ‘consumption’ are ‘watertight realms’ (p. 29). Starting from the observation that ‘end users’ are put to work, albeit in different ways – ranging from window shopping, through putting together the constituent parts of a pre-prepared ‘ready meal’, to the self-assembly of furniture – across virtually all economic processes, they define ‘consumption work’ as ‘all work necessary for the purchase, use, re-use and disposal of consumption goods and services’ (p. 37). Importantly, they note that although some forms of consumption work – such as cooking or DIY – may be experienced as a leisure activity for some people, there is nevertheless a ‘material social reproduction’ (p. 45) aspect to it. The book zooms in on the role of consumers in economies of waste and the unpaid work that they do under the auspices of household recycling, work that assists state and market actors in meeting environmental targets and recovering value from discarded materials.

Kathryn Wheeler and Miriam Glucksmann articulate a sophisticated framework for thinking about the ways ‘the division of labor’ can be opened up to revision, refinement, and development. Whilst they are refreshingly modest and humble regarding the ‘unfinished’ (p. 203) nature of their own concepts, the ‘Socio-Economic Formations of Labor’ (SEFL) framework that they develop throughout the book is rigorous, compelling, and innovative in equal measure. To the accepted wisdom of thinking about the ‘technical division of skills and jobs within particular work processes’ (p. 32), they add Glucksmann’s concept of ‘Total Social Organization of Labor’ (TSOL) in recognition (citing the example of care work) that the same task may be undertaken in different economic domains (state, market, household) and that ‘work undertaken in one socio-economic domain presupposes and interdepends with that undertaken in another’ (p. 33). Mark Harvey’s (2015) concept of Instituted Economic Processes (IEP) – which stresses the relationships between production, distribution, exchange, and consumption – provides the final ingredient. Despite the weight of this conceptual architecture, the authors carry it lightly and guide the reader through a discussion of how the technical, modal (TSOL) and processual (IEP) dimensions of the division of labor will be used to analyze the work of recycling.

Drawing on an impressive array of primary and secondary empirical materials, the analysis involves a robust comparison of waste management systems in Sweden and England. Attention is paid to recycling rates, policy contexts, technologies, institutional arrangements, and the configuration of state and non-state actors in the provision of waste services. Despite clear differences between Sweden (where environmental protection is a mature policy agenda) and UK’s status as ‘the dirty man of Europe’ (p. 77), consumers are shown to be central to recycling work in both contexts. Attention is paid to the practical accomplishment of recycling work, leading to a helpful categorization of consumers as ‘suppliers’ (p. 133) who sort and clean recyclable materials; as actors who provide a ‘warehouse’ (p. 115) insofar as they store these materials until such time that the relevant collection agency is ready for it; and as ‘distributors’ who take the correct materials to the kerbside at the correct time or else transport them further afield to the appropriate bring-station. The comparison between the UK and Sweden throws a number of substantive (e.g., related to domestic divisions of labor) and conceptual (related to the development of SEFL) questions into sharp relief. A real strength is the discussion of how consumption work influences the work that is required elsewhere to complete the process of recovering value from discarded materials.

With all of this in place, the authors do two more things. Drawing on secondary materials, they extend their analysis to give a ‘snapshot’ (p. 166) of recycling in Brazil and India. The distinctive formations in these contexts – such as the significance accorded to waste pickers and the informal economy – provide a useful counterpoint to the comprehensive analysis of recycling in the Global North that forms the core of the book. They also develop a moral economy framework to theorize ‘how moral principles intertwine and interact with forms of economic organization’ (p. 143). Drawing on Wheeler’s elaboration of a holistic approach to moral economy that ‘accounts for individual agency and institutionalized structures of community and political economy’ (p. 145), attention is paid to institutionalized systems of provision, collective customs, and lay normativity. The focus on morality complements the socio-economic processes theorized by the authors, and the integration of social and moral economies is one of the book’s key strengths.

I would have welcomed, at times, greater engagement with theories of consumption and waste. For example, I was taken by the idea that when authorities and agencies responsibilize ‘the consumer’, the burden is one of labor; however this important contribution could have been pushed further by a more comprehensive discussion of recent work on the politics of consumption (Barnett et al. 2011). Similarly, where this book represents a major contribution to the nascent sociology of waste, the performative role of materials in waste economies (following Gregson et al. 2010) could have been considered. Finally, approaches to consumption that are rooted in the cultural turn remain at the margins of this analysis, leading to the comparative neglect of key concepts such as appropriation. Attention to these issues would certainly have extended this book’s reach and ensured even greater relevance to readers of the Journal of Cultural Economy. Suffice to say these criticisms are minor and largely a matter of taste. Overall this is a timely and important book that represents vital reading for anybody interested in linking consumption and waste to production, labor, and capital. Moreover, it is something of a master class in establishing an intellectual agenda, illustrating it, and communicating with absolute clarity.