Elizabeth Shove is professor in Sociology at Lancaster University. She has written about everyday practices, mundane technologies and ordinary consumption. This emphasis on the dynamics of routine consumption relates to a parallel concern with the environmental burden of changing habits like those of comfort, cleanliness and convenience. Understanding the social organization of normality, and understanding how this evolves and varies is one central theme. Others have to do with the relation between material culture, technology studies and social theories of practice. In contrast to much social research on consumption, her emphasis is not on the symbolic significance of ownership, or on moments of acquisition, but on the active parts things play in daily life and in the conduct and reproduction of what people do.