Download Theorising the Three Facets of Housing: a sociological perspective

Theorising the Three Facets of
Housing: a sociological perspective
Hannu Ruonavaara
Department of Social Research
University of Turku
1.Introduction
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In English ‘housing’ has a double meaning
Housing (noun)  an object, a good, that can be manufactured and demolished,
produced and consumed, perceived and experienced, bought and sold.
Housing (verb)  the process of people getting ‘housed’, that is, the sum of
activities that people in a society do to provide housing for themselves or for other
people (noun)
The same is true of some other languages (German, French, but not Finnish!) that
the same word is used for material artefacts that people can live in and the activity
of living in them
So: in many languages the word ‘housing’ is multifaceted
Is this more generally the case? Is the concept of housing still multifaceted if our
languages provides means to distinguish between houses, flats etc. and living in
them? And if housing is multifaceted, how can it be theorised?
2. Can there be a theory of housing?
Jim Kemeny’s critique of housing
research, part 1
Housing research has
• neglected the theoretical debates in the various social science
disciplines
• kept itself in a special housing studies bubble where outside
influences reached only belatedly
• tended to ‘reinvent the wheel’, i.e. come up with ‘new’ ideas
that had been long ago discovered elsewhere.
• Why? Housing studies is a policy-oriented field
• The way how multidisciplinary work was performed in housing
research: research united around the ‘smallest common
denominator’ (e.g. the empirical issues at hand, policy makers’
concepts and general ideas)
• Kemeny’s ‘back to disciplines’ program: researchers should
return to the ideas of their parent disciplines and then bring
these to the common multidisciplinary endeavor.
Jim Kemeny’s critique of housing
research, part 2
• Housing research has neglected the
fact that housing is so deeply
embedded in social relations and
structures that trying to theorize it
independently of other aspects of
society is doomed to failure
• “The most important thing in the
name of HTS is the comma between
‘Housing’ and ‘Theory’” (interview) 
‘a theory of housing’ is not worth the
effort
• Peter King: this is the established view
on theorizing in housing studies
King’s argument against the
established view, part 1
• The established view (EV): housing studies can only apply theories
developed elsewhere, not develop their own theory
• King’s critique: the justification of the EV referring to the social
embeddedness of housing is a false one 
• (1) all topics of research interest (at least in social sciences and
humanities) are embedded in social relations;
• (2) if social embeddedness prevented theorizing specific topics,
there could not be any other but general theories of the ‘social’;
• (3) but it is a fact that there are successful special theories of
specific research topics (indeed some think these are just the
theories we need! Cf. the renaissance of ‘theories of the middle
range’)  reductio ad absurdum
• I think King is quite right about this
King’s argument against the
established view, part 2
• There is a kind of theory of housing developed
from contemplating what King calls private
dwelling:
• ‘activity in which we use dwellings to meet our
ends and fulfill our interests, to such an extent
that this singular dwelling becomes meaningful
to us’ (King 2009).
• What is this?
• A phenomenological analysis of what people do
as users of housing
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• BUT: this is quite far from the mainstream of
housing studies … ‘the concern for the
production, consumption, management and
maintenance of a stock of dwellings’ (King 2009)
Where Kemeny and King agree
(perhaps)
The mainstream, ordinary housing
research focusing on the housing
provision chain and its elements
(production, consumption …) is, if it is to
be theoretical at all, indeed dependent
on theory developed in the parent
disciplines (like sociology, political
science or economics).
Housing studies as a theory parasite?
• But did Kemeny think that in the field of theory
housing studies is a Serresian parasite that only takes
from others but never gives anything back? No.
• He writes:
Housing research needs both to draw more
extensively from debates and theories in the
social sciences and to contribute to such debates
with studies of housing. (Kemeny 1992)
• So … the relation between housing studies and
disciplines should be reciprocal
• But can studies of housing contribute theoretically to
more general questions?
An example of housing studies’
contribution to a (sub)discipline
• Kemeny’s influential book on homeownership from 1981 
• A theoretical hypothesis about the inverse
relation between the dominance of homeownership in a country and the level of social
welfare provided by the state
• Kemeny hypothesis was later discussed and
tested more systematically by welfare state
researchers, particularly Stephen Castles and
his co-workers
• BUT: they missed the potentially more
ambitious theoretical idea about privatised
and collectivised social structures …
• Also research on ‘housing-asset based
welfare’
Why EV is right? What do we theorise
when we theorise housing?
• The possibility of a or the theory of housing can be questioned from a
completely different perspective
• Long time ago Manuel Castells questioned the scientific status of urban
sociology by asking whether it had a specific, well-defined and
characteristically urban object of theorizing
• As some of us may remember, he fond that it lacked such an theoretical
object and from this he drew wide-ranging consequences about its status
• The idea of theoretical object can be applied to housing studies (HS)
• What do we theorize when we theorize ‘housing’?
• King’s answer: ‘private dwelling’ … but this research area is very restricted
in terms of topic and also of method (phenomenology of housing
experience)  most of what we have been accustomed to call housing
research deals with completely other questions
Will the real HS stand up?
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Housing studies theorise also King’s ‘housing policy’, the housing provision chain
and its elements (e.g. structures housing provision approach, hybridization of
social housing organizations etc.)
And many other topics that perhaps do not neatly fall under the housing policy
categories: e.g. middle-class activism in housing issues, gentrification of LGBT
households, cohousing, the social construction of homelessness,
recommodification of housing, cognitive frames shaping the practices of housing
professionals, feeling of home, housing equity, etc. (from 2015 volume of Housing,
Theory and Society)
With such a variety of topics it seems unlikely that any one theory of housing could
account for them all
The established view is correct … but
not for Kemeny’s reasons
• The basic reason for the impossibility of A Theory of Housing
is that housing itself is not a research topic but a common
denominator of a number of research topics: housing policy,
housing provision, housing organizations, housing choice,
housing mobility, housing tenures, use of housing, meaning of
housing, politics of housing, etc.
• Therefore the borders of HS are fuzzy and unclear  research
under its broad umbrella can be seen as belonging to one or
more other specialisms  
An example of housing research with
multiple affiliations
• A great deal of recent research on home ownership in Europe and
Australia has focused on housing equity (that is, the wealth that
homeowners hold in the form of housing they own): how equity is
made use of by owner-occupiers, how equity is distributed between
different social groups, to what extent households perceive housing
wealth as providing security at old age, are governments starting to
reformulate welfare policies towards housing-asset based welfare.
These questions have to with housing and therefore they can be
seen to fall into the scope of housing studies. However, just as well
some of them can be seen as belonging to the more general field of
economic sociology, as well as research on inequality. The question
of whether there is a trend towards housing-asset based welfare
provision or not, is equally a part of a more general analysis of
trends in welfare provision, falling under jurisdiction of social policy
research.
Interim conclusions
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Housing indeed is embedded in society to the extent that it is a common
denominator of a number of research topics that often are connected to questions
that concern wider range of issues than just housing
A sensible strategy for theorization in housing research is to make use of the
concepts and ideas developed in more general research specialisms as well as
general research approaches developed within disciplines
Apart from just applying theories developed elsewhere, housing researchers
should pay back the debt to other fields by trying to contribute to them with the
ideas and concepts they have developed while investigating housing issues
2. Sociologists theorising housing
Metatheoretical preliminaries: What
sociologists theorise? Part 1
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Four kinds of questions
Actions/interactions: the impact of people’s membership in groups, communities
and societies on their actions and interactions
Examples in the housing field: Acquisition of housing, everyday use of residential
space, home-making, neighboring, housing transactions, collective action in
housing issues, housing politics all are issues that concern the activities people
under take in connection with housing.
Institutions: what kind of institutionalised patterns of action and interaction there
are in groups, communities and societies and how they form institutional orders
and systems
Illustration from the housing field: Social housing in the sense of non-profit rental
housing allocated on the basis of need is an institution that exists in many
countries in Europe, but not all. Social housing is part of a larger institutional order,
the system of housing tenures in a country.
Examples: housing tenures, systems of housing provision, housing policies, housing
organizations
Metatheoretical preliminaries: What
sociologists theorise? Part 2
• Social structures: division of people into unequal power positions in
society in terms of economic resources, social power and prestige
• Examples in the housing field: unequal access to housing, socioeconomic
differences in housing tenure and wealth, social and ethnic segregation
• Shared meanings: the meanings that people share due to their
membership in groups, communities and societies. These meanings
concern the way how people perceive the society, the way they see
themselves, the values and attitudes they hold, the symbols they cherish,
the customs and habits they consider appropriate etc.
• Examples in the housing field: meanings of housing and home, the public
image of housing tenures, public image of people living in different
tenures, social construction of housing problems, ‘policy theories’ behind
housing policies (Bengtsson)
You can start any place but often you
have to visit other places, too
• Most sociological theories start from one or the other of the four objects
of theorising: action, institutions, structures or meaning
• Often it is the case that starting from one kind of theoretical question you
have to somehow deal with the other kinds: a theory focusing on
institutional orders might come up with the problem of accounting for
actors actions, structural theorising needs to think about the institutional
grounding of social divisions, etc.
• The choice of the starting point is a result of researchers’ ’brain activity’
that is heavily influenced by her/his sociocultural context and life history
• The starting point does not free you from the trouble of thinking of the
other points of departure. Sometimes it is possible to ignore the one or
the other but often not – at least if you want to theorize well.
• Where I start from, is action/interaction.
Preliminaries for an action-focused
theorization of housing
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Why action? The most obvious reason: society happens only through activity
of and interaction between actors, both individual and collective.
The starting point of Max Weber’s brand of sociology: the focus on
“interpretative understanding of social action and thereby with a causal
explanation of its course and consequences” (Weber)
The view represents the GOFAT, the good old-fashioned action theory (John
Levi Martin) that sees action arising from motivation following a simple
formula:
((actors’ desires + actors’ beliefs) --> deliberation)/social context –>
actors’ actions
Action is thinly rational: “Neither goals nor beliefs concerning the means to
achieve them have to be rational in some ‘objective’ sense. Thinly rational
actors act for a reason on the basis of their more or less fallible beliefs that are
greatly shaped by the situation they find themselves in.” (Bengtsson &
Ruonavaara 2016)
Actors’ desires and beliefs are shaped
by meanings they attach to different
objects of action, for example housing.
These can be theorised. This will serve
as an illustration of the kind of
theorization I consider desirable in
sociology of housing.
What types of meanings housing
could be theorised to have? Part 1
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In housing research the distinction between houses (or housing), dwellings and
homes seems rather common
There are slightly different interpretations of the difference but this is rather
common:
‘House’ is referring to the physical structure of housing; ‘home’ to the people’s
relationships (psychological, social, cultural, affective, behavioural) with houses;
‘dwelling’ to activities people engage in housing. For example, Coolen and his coauthors define dwelling as ‘a system of settings (physical aspect) in which systems
of activities take place’ (Coolen, Kempen & Ozaki 2002).
Is one facet of housing here forgotten? “The recognition here that housing has
both a use and exchange value is crucially important” (Perkins and Thorns 1999).
Housing can be bought and sold, and households are compelled to do that as
there is practically no substitute for housing
What types of meanings housing could
be theorised to have? Part 2
• Dagfinn Ås’ analysis of attitudes towards housing
• The basic distinction is that between housing as home, a place that people
identify with, a part of themselves, and housing as an external object.
• As an external object housing can on one hand be “a utility article that is
to suit the household and the activities that the persons in it shall engage
in (use value)’ (Ås 1993). For Ås’ this is the dwelling facet of housing. On
the other hand, as an external object housing can be seen as a something
that has an economic value, an investment a household has made. This Ås
refers to with the term house
• Combining these we get a model of three facets of housing
Three facets of housing (first version)
The types of meaning housing
has
Concretisations
Houses
An object having a price and
economic value  exchange
value
Housing as a necessity to be purchased in a
market; housing as investment; housing as a
source of profit
Dwellings
An object that satisfies physical
housing needs  use value
Housing as shelter; housing as a setting and
enabler of activities
Homes
An object that satisfies
symbolic housing needs 
symbolic value
Housing as an expression of social identity;
housing as a status symbol; housing satisfying
the need for belonging
What’s the use of this typology?
• It is an ideal type that portrays analytically the possible general types of
meaning that housing can have in market societies  empirical cases are
probably more messy
• It can be used to analyse the actions of various actors in the housing field
from residents making choices of moving or staying put to policy-makers
deciding whether to develop asset-based welfare or not
• Different actors orient their actions according to different types of
meanings and constellations of meanings
• Conflicts between actors can be understood as arising from different
meanings they attach to housing: for one actor its just a case of houses
whereas for another it is a question of homes
• Of course, we don’t get very far with this, for example, we need
theorization of social mechanisms that are responsible for the joint
outcomes resulting from actions and interactions of various actors
Some concluding thoughts
• Sociology theorises action, institutions, structures and meanings  theory
in sociology of housing can utilise any of these as starting point
• The kind of theory I think is desirable starts from action motivated by the
shared meanings, happening in the context of the institutional order,
performed by actors in different power positions
• The style of theorisation I favour is analytical, aiming for clarity of
concepts and development of typologies which are understood as ideal
types that help order conceptually the messy reality
• There is little mysticism in this kind of theorisation
Thanks for your attention!
If you want to publish a
theoretical or a
theoretically oriented
empirical paper, try
Housing, Theory and
Society, published by
Taylor & Francis four times
a year!