ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the phenomenology of routines, with the goal of understanding better how daily life has come to feel for so many people like a heavy burden, a maze of relentless demands. Like O’Dell and Ehn & Lofgren in this volume, the author concerns the subtle and often subjective differences between the routines which make life possible, and those which make living miserable. Both Durkheim and Weber associated habitual and unthinking routinized behaviour with animals, and with primitive and traditional societies. Weber thought that uncivilized peoples had not yet developed the capacities for reflexive awareness and rationality characteristic of modern peoples. The author suggests that the spaces between structure and agency also define a zone of comfort. The one extreme, where every moment is mapped out in advance and all of life becomes an endlessly repeated series of cycles of routines, defines what life in a prison or another total institution is all about.
