Luke Yates
I currently work as a Senior Lecturer in the department of Sociology at the University of Manchester.
My research is about social movements and everyday consumption practices, in particular eating habits, living arrangements and economies of sharing. I am a member of different clusters of research in Manchester, chairing the movements@manchester research group, organising a Theories of Consumption reading group, and I am a member of the Morgan Centre. I am currently based in the Sustainable Consumption Institute where I carried out my post-doctoral research.
My PhD examined social centres: social movement-oriented and counter-cultural spaces that are based in Barcelona.
This work resulted in publications on the topics of prefigurative politics and 'everyday politics', themes I have continued to work on since. I have also done research recently on eating patterns, comparing 1955 with data gathered in 2012, and looking in particular at eating alone and eating together. My broad interest in sharing resulted in a piece in the Journal of Consumer Culture on 'economies of sharing'. Recently I have been researching the politics of contemporary ideas on sharing and the 'sharing economy', including exploring the ways in which platform businesses mobilise their users and allies in order to shape regulation.
University of Manchester profiles:
http://www.manchester.ac.uk/research/luke.s.yates/
http://www.sci.manchester.ac.uk/people/research-associates-and-assistants/luke-yates
Areas of research interest:
Social movements, platform economy, consumption, theories of practice, environmental sustainability, everyday life
My research is about social movements and everyday consumption practices, in particular eating habits, living arrangements and economies of sharing. I am a member of different clusters of research in Manchester, chairing the movements@manchester research group, organising a Theories of Consumption reading group, and I am a member of the Morgan Centre. I am currently based in the Sustainable Consumption Institute where I carried out my post-doctoral research.
My PhD examined social centres: social movement-oriented and counter-cultural spaces that are based in Barcelona.
This work resulted in publications on the topics of prefigurative politics and 'everyday politics', themes I have continued to work on since. I have also done research recently on eating patterns, comparing 1955 with data gathered in 2012, and looking in particular at eating alone and eating together. My broad interest in sharing resulted in a piece in the Journal of Consumer Culture on 'economies of sharing'. Recently I have been researching the politics of contemporary ideas on sharing and the 'sharing economy', including exploring the ways in which platform businesses mobilise their users and allies in order to shape regulation.
University of Manchester profiles:
http://www.manchester.ac.uk/research/luke.s.yates/
http://www.sci.manchester.ac.uk/people/research-associates-and-assistants/luke-yates
Areas of research interest:
Social movements, platform economy, consumption, theories of practice, environmental sustainability, everyday life
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Papers by Luke Yates
This chapter seeks to locate and explore food waste through the application of a practice theoretical lens. As the next section shows, accounts of food waste tend to focus on the acquisition of food for household consumption, and the impacts of packaging and food standards on the ways people appreciate food. It is suggested that such approaches present consumption as primarily a matter of individual action and food consumption as an almost entirely private domestic affair. Section three introduces theories of practice as a corrective to these over-emphases before exploring how we might begin to conceptualize eating practices and what light such understandings can shed on food waste. Section four briefly demonstrates the potential application of these ideas using a recent survey of eating patterns conducted in the UK (N=2784) to show how the context of meal occasions hold significant explanatory value for predicting the production of surplus food. The chapter concludes by suggesting that a conceptual framework developed from theories of practice offers new avenues for research that circumvents the current myopic focus on particular aspects of food consumption, and the conceptual tendency to default to methodological individualism. This framework has three principle lines of enquiry: 1) to explore eating as a compound practice; 2)to examine the sequential organization of constituent activities from which compound eating practices are comprised, and 3) to take account of the inter-connections across the broader practices that make up everyday life.
In this chapter, we review the term’s trajectory, noting its 1) origin in discussions of left political strategy where the social movement is understood more expansively to include political parties and projects (1968 – 1989), 2) its increasing use in labelling new social movements (1990 – 2009), and 3) subsequently its increasingly diffuse attribution as an orientation to a variety of different political activities in predominantly left-wing social movement (2010 – 2019). Across these periods, the concept has been used to qualify or distinguish activities, actors and spaces in diffuse manners that have shifted considerably. The aim of the first part of the chapter is therefore to provide clarity about the explicit use of the concept across these periods. In the second part of the paper, we shift focus to the implicit use of the term. Specifically, we observe that prefiguration is at risk of being overused to describe horizontal, non-hierarchically organised left-wing movements and of being underused in describing right-wing movements, suggesting an implicit association with particular political positions that is not warranted by the concept’s definition. Hence, it remains to be seen whether prefigurative politics are indeed much rarer in right-wing movements, or simply that this is overlooked. We conclude the chapter by discussing implications for future research.
Executive Summary
Airbnb began as an online platform enabling people to accommodation to visitors in their own homes. It is the biggest and best known of the digital marketplace companies, which now operate all over the world as an alternative to traditional forms of board and lodging.
The original Airbnb image was of hosts renting out a spare room for a few nights to a curious traveller. Today however, ‘hosts’ are far more likely to be professional landlords, supported by an industry of service providers. The company has become a symbol of neighbourhood gentrification, community displacement and skyrocketing rents.
The single-room let - central to the company’s ‘home sharing’ narrative – makes up just 8% of Airbnb listings globally. Another 59% is professional accommodation offers, a figure which rises to 92% if entire-home rentals and multiple room listings are included. Analysts suggest that commercial landlords generate by far the greatest revenue for Airbnb, with ‘home sharing’ accounting for only 12.5% of revenue according to one recent study.
These dynamics are being played out in Manchester, with non-trivial consequences. As this report demonstrates, the proliferation of short term rentals (STRs) is a key contributing factor to the local housing crisis.
Our research has found:
• A year on year growth rate of over 300% in Airbnb listings in Manchester between 2016 and 2020, and of nearly 400% for entire properties, consistent with the increasing domination of STR platforms by professional landlords.
• That if maintained, this level of growth will cause a significant loss of housing stock that could shut out 35,000 residents within the decade (using the Greater Manchester average household size of 2.33)
• That Airbnb is increasingly professionalised: at least 54.9% of all Manchester STR listings are by landlords with more than one property
• That the city has a well-developed STR management company industry, another clear sign that the short-term lettings market is largely a commercial operation.
Airbnb’s use of grassroots lobbying, where businesses influence democratic institutions by creating and coordinating apparently independent social movements to act on their behalf, has been key in their response. Airbnb presents carefully curated and intensively coordinated groups of landlords with a single room or property as ‘people power’: independent grassroots groups who share its policy preferences. This offers the company legitimacy and additional political influence to protect a business model that is increasingly dominated by professional accommodation providers.
This chapter seeks to locate and explore food waste through the application of a practice theoretical lens. As the next section shows, accounts of food waste tend to focus on the acquisition of food for household consumption, and the impacts of packaging and food standards on the ways people appreciate food. It is suggested that such approaches present consumption as primarily a matter of individual action and food consumption as an almost entirely private domestic affair. Section three introduces theories of practice as a corrective to these over-emphases before exploring how we might begin to conceptualize eating practices and what light such understandings can shed on food waste. Section four briefly demonstrates the potential application of these ideas using a recent survey of eating patterns conducted in the UK (N=2784) to show how the context of meal occasions hold significant explanatory value for predicting the production of surplus food. The chapter concludes by suggesting that a conceptual framework developed from theories of practice offers new avenues for research that circumvents the current myopic focus on particular aspects of food consumption, and the conceptual tendency to default to methodological individualism. This framework has three principle lines of enquiry: 1) to explore eating as a compound practice; 2)to examine the sequential organization of constituent activities from which compound eating practices are comprised, and 3) to take account of the inter-connections across the broader practices that make up everyday life.
In this chapter, we review the term’s trajectory, noting its 1) origin in discussions of left political strategy where the social movement is understood more expansively to include political parties and projects (1968 – 1989), 2) its increasing use in labelling new social movements (1990 – 2009), and 3) subsequently its increasingly diffuse attribution as an orientation to a variety of different political activities in predominantly left-wing social movement (2010 – 2019). Across these periods, the concept has been used to qualify or distinguish activities, actors and spaces in diffuse manners that have shifted considerably. The aim of the first part of the chapter is therefore to provide clarity about the explicit use of the concept across these periods. In the second part of the paper, we shift focus to the implicit use of the term. Specifically, we observe that prefiguration is at risk of being overused to describe horizontal, non-hierarchically organised left-wing movements and of being underused in describing right-wing movements, suggesting an implicit association with particular political positions that is not warranted by the concept’s definition. Hence, it remains to be seen whether prefigurative politics are indeed much rarer in right-wing movements, or simply that this is overlooked. We conclude the chapter by discussing implications for future research.
Executive Summary
Airbnb began as an online platform enabling people to accommodation to visitors in their own homes. It is the biggest and best known of the digital marketplace companies, which now operate all over the world as an alternative to traditional forms of board and lodging.
The original Airbnb image was of hosts renting out a spare room for a few nights to a curious traveller. Today however, ‘hosts’ are far more likely to be professional landlords, supported by an industry of service providers. The company has become a symbol of neighbourhood gentrification, community displacement and skyrocketing rents.
The single-room let - central to the company’s ‘home sharing’ narrative – makes up just 8% of Airbnb listings globally. Another 59% is professional accommodation offers, a figure which rises to 92% if entire-home rentals and multiple room listings are included. Analysts suggest that commercial landlords generate by far the greatest revenue for Airbnb, with ‘home sharing’ accounting for only 12.5% of revenue according to one recent study.
These dynamics are being played out in Manchester, with non-trivial consequences. As this report demonstrates, the proliferation of short term rentals (STRs) is a key contributing factor to the local housing crisis.
Our research has found:
• A year on year growth rate of over 300% in Airbnb listings in Manchester between 2016 and 2020, and of nearly 400% for entire properties, consistent with the increasing domination of STR platforms by professional landlords.
• That if maintained, this level of growth will cause a significant loss of housing stock that could shut out 35,000 residents within the decade (using the Greater Manchester average household size of 2.33)
• That Airbnb is increasingly professionalised: at least 54.9% of all Manchester STR listings are by landlords with more than one property
• That the city has a well-developed STR management company industry, another clear sign that the short-term lettings market is largely a commercial operation.
Airbnb’s use of grassroots lobbying, where businesses influence democratic institutions by creating and coordinating apparently independent social movements to act on their behalf, has been key in their response. Airbnb presents carefully curated and intensively coordinated groups of landlords with a single room or property as ‘people power’: independent grassroots groups who share its policy preferences. This offers the company legitimacy and additional political influence to protect a business model that is increasingly dominated by professional accommodation providers.