Routines Disrupted: Reestablishing Security through Practice Alignment

Routines are the taken-for-granted practices that form the rhythm of everyday life,making people feel secure. How do consumers manage when their routines aredisrupted? Practice theorists assert that practices are important to understandingconsumption and stress their shared, repetitive, and conventional nature. Whenpractices are stable, they are performed effortlessly, producing feelings of easeand trust in a predictable world. People are often unaware of the embodied competencies,or practical understandings, involved in the performance of these practices.However, practical understandings become apparent when elements ofpractices are misaligned. Our findings advance Giddens’s (1984) theorization ofontological security by showing how the interplay between practical and discursiveunderstandings and material configurations works to produce different ontologicalstates that we call embedded security, embedded insecurity, discursive insecurity,acclimating security, and new embedded security. We also show how householdssubtly rework the underlying constitutive rules that anchor important practices inplace within practice alignment.Open Acces