Rights statement: © 2014 The Author(s). Published by Taylor & Francis. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The moral rights of the named author(s) have been asserted.
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Final published version
Licence: CC BY
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
}
TY - JOUR
T1 - Theories of practice and public health
T2 - understanding (un)healthy practices
AU - Blue, Stanley
AU - Shove, Elizabeth
AU - Carmona, Chris
AU - Kelly, Michael P.
N1 - © 2014 The Author(s). Published by Taylor & Francis. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The moral rights of the named author(s) have been asserted.
PY - 2015/1/1
Y1 - 2015/1/1
N2 - Psychological understandings and individualistic theories of human behaviourand behaviour change have dominated both academic research and interventionsat the ‘coalface’ of public health. Meanwhile, efforts to understand persistentinequalities in health point to structural factors, but fail to showexactly how these translate into the daily lives (and hence health) of differentsectors of the population. In this paper, we suggest that social theories ofpractice provide an alternative paradigm to both approaches, informing significantlynew ways of conceptualising and responding to some of the mostpressing contemporary challenges in public health. We introduce and discussthe relevance of such an approach with reference to tobacco smoking, focusingon the life course of smoking as a practice, rather than on the characteristicsof individual smokers or on broad social determinants of health. Thismove forces us to consider the material and symbolic elements of whichsmoking is comprised, and to follow the ways in which these elements havechanged over time. Some of these developments have to do with the relationbetween smoking and other practices such as drinking alcohol, relaxing andsocialising. We suggest that intervening in the future of smoking depends, inpart, on understanding the nature of these alliances, and how sets of practicesco-evolve. We conclude by reflecting on the implications of taking socialpractices as the central focus of public health policy, commenting on the benefitsof such a paradigmatic turn, and on the challenges that this presents forestablished methods, policies and programmes.
AB - Psychological understandings and individualistic theories of human behaviourand behaviour change have dominated both academic research and interventionsat the ‘coalface’ of public health. Meanwhile, efforts to understand persistentinequalities in health point to structural factors, but fail to showexactly how these translate into the daily lives (and hence health) of differentsectors of the population. In this paper, we suggest that social theories ofpractice provide an alternative paradigm to both approaches, informing significantlynew ways of conceptualising and responding to some of the mostpressing contemporary challenges in public health. We introduce and discussthe relevance of such an approach with reference to tobacco smoking, focusingon the life course of smoking as a practice, rather than on the characteristicsof individual smokers or on broad social determinants of health. Thismove forces us to consider the material and symbolic elements of whichsmoking is comprised, and to follow the ways in which these elements havechanged over time. Some of these developments have to do with the relationbetween smoking and other practices such as drinking alcohol, relaxing andsocialising. We suggest that intervening in the future of smoking depends, inpart, on understanding the nature of these alliances, and how sets of practicesco-evolve. We conclude by reflecting on the implications of taking socialpractices as the central focus of public health policy, commenting on the benefitsof such a paradigmatic turn, and on the challenges that this presents forestablished methods, policies and programmes.
KW - social practice
KW - public health
KW - behaviour change
KW - smoking
U2 - 10.1080/09581596.2014.980396
DO - 10.1080/09581596.2014.980396
M3 - Journal article
VL - 26
SP - 36
EP - 50
JO - Critical Public Health
JF - Critical Public Health
SN - 0958-1596
IS - 1
ER -