Making Social Lives

Introduction: Material lives
Steve Hinchliffe

Introduction: Material lives

Introduction: Material lives
This book is about how society is made and repaired. It asks what kinds of activities make society today. In the chapters that follow, you will learn about contemporary UK society and the special insights that the social sciences can give you as you develop an understanding of how society is made. The book will introduce both the ideas and the forms of investigation developed by social scientists. Each chapter starts with or refers to the contemporary UK, and involves you reading about a street or streets. You will soon realise, however, that the street is only a starting point. Some chapters travel back in time to understand how contemporary society is coloured and even partly produced by its past. Some extend well beyond the conventional boundaries of the UK (in other words, the land area shown on maps) in order to understand how societies are made in part through their connections to other people and places. The chapters in this book have been arranged into three strands – ‘Material lives’, ‘Connected lives’ and ‘Ordered lives’. You will read more about the second and third strands in the introductions that precede each group of chapters. This first strand, ‘Material lives’, looks at how people live, their material existence, and how these ways of life have consequences for their own and other people’s welfare, for society and for the environment. In order to start you thinking about how people live today, the kinds of things many of them do, one particular feature of contemporary UK society which all three chapters in this strand share as a focus and starting point is consuming and shopping. Why choose consuming and shopping? One answer is that for some people and for many social scientists, contemporary UK society differs from societies in the recent past in that people tend to define themselves less by their jobs and more by what they consume.... [continues]

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