Households as Morally Ordered Communities: Explorations in the Dynamics of Domestic Life

Abstract

Homes are not merely repositories of human action, nor can they be understood as the output of larger sociological phenomena, as is often argued in the mainstream sociological literature. Rather, households (or families or groups of people sharing common facilities – however they might be labelled) are in many ways communities in their own right: they possess a tradition, a moral order which frames and guides behaviour as well as the use of household facilities and technologies. This chapter explores, using ethnographic evidence drawn from a panel of households in the south-east of England, how households exhibit these patterns of distinctive moral ordering. It will explore the problems of understanding them analytically; and on this basis, point towards how this moral ordering needs to be accommodated when trying to design and implement digital technologies in and for home settings. A particular theme will be to explore, on the basis of evidence, how the adoption of digital technologies will, as a matter of course, generate various conflicts; but not necessarily of power and hierarchy, having to do much more often with such everyday matters as “appropriate behaviours” for different times and places. Here, issues to do with how the home is at once a place for hosting friends and for resting, for living out personal desires and for sharing with others who may have different desires, need to be managed and “worked out”. Though these matters may seem from certain views prosaic, the conflicts that can result are often consequential. More importantly, they also have implications for what are the factors affecting the suitability of various digital technologies.