Sociology has a strange habit of making ordinary things look complicated. A trip to the grocery store, for example, seems like one of the least interesting things we do. You walk through the aisles, pick up some food, pay, and go home.
But there is a lot of society hidden inside that simple journey.
Take the produce section. Apples, tomatoes, avocados, potatoes and bananas are neatly arranged in front of us. We rarely think about how far they have travelled or about the people who produced them. Yet this small section of the supermarket connects us with farmers, seasonal workers, transport companies, energy systems and landscapes hundreds or even thousands of kilometres away.
When we buy groceries, we are therefore participating in a much larger system of production and consumption.
Then there is the question of value. I pick up a jar of jam and wonder: What’s the price tag on this? The answer seems simple. Perhaps 30 kroner.
But is 30 kroner really its price?
The number tells us what I have to pay at the cashier. It does not necessarily tell us about the environmental cost of producing the fruit, transporting it, processing it and putting it on the shelf. Nor does it tell us very much about how the money is distributed among the supermarket, the manufacturer, the farmer and the worker who picked the fruit.
Even my loyalty card is sociologically interesting. In exchange for discounts, I allow the supermarket to know something about my habits. What I buy, how often I shop and which products I prefer become data. Consumption is no longer simply an economic transaction. It is also an information-producing activity.
Eventually, I return home.
Here, another apparently boring world of objects is waiting for me: an ironing board, a duvet, a houseplant, a bin, a power socket, a coat stand, a curtain.
None of them seems particularly sociological.
But consider the bin. The moment I throw something into it, an object disappears from my personal world. But, of course, it does not disappear from the physical world. Someone collects it. Somewhere it is transported, sorted, burned, recycled or buried. The bin is therefore a curious boundary between what we consider our responsibility and what becomes the responsibility of society.
The same is true of the power socket. I plug in my computer and electricity appears. I do not see the power station, the wind turbine, the transmission network or the people maintaining it. Modern life depends on enormous infrastructures that become almost invisible precisely because they work so well.
I can make a similar observation when I turn on the hot tap. Hot water arrives immediately. Again, an entire system disappears behind a very simple gesture: pipes, energy, treatment plants, institutions, engineers and workers.
Perhaps this is one of the characteristics of modern urban life: we experience the final few centimetres of systems that extend for hundreds or thousands of kilometres.
Even the objects that make a house feel like a home tell us something about society. A curtain separates private life from the street. A coat stand receives us when we enter. A houseplant introduces a carefully controlled piece of nature into the domestic environment. A duvet represents comfort, privacy and rest. The old gas fire reminds us that even the technologies we use to create warmth have histories and can eventually disappear as societies change their energy systems.
And then there is the ironing board, perhaps the least exciting object in the house. Yet even that object raises a classic sociological question: who does the ironing?
Domestic objects are connected to domestic labour, and domestic labour has never been distributed randomly. Gender, generation, income and family structure influence who cooks, cleans, shops, washes clothes and takes out the rubbish.
So perhaps there is no such thing as an ordinary Saturday.
The supermarket connects us with global production networks. The price tag hides questions about value and environmental costs. The loyalty card turns consumption into data. The bin connects the household to systems of waste management. The power socket and the hot tap connect private comfort to enormous infrastructures. And the ironing board quietly reminds us that even inside the home, everyday life is organised by social relations.
This is perhaps what sociology does best: it takes things that appear completely ordinary and asks us to look at them again.
Behind the ordinary, there is almost always a social system.
And sometimes, all you need to find it is a jar of jam.
