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Illustrated by a wide range of case studies from planning contexts, this book examines culture as a socio-historically situated concept, introducing a line of scholarship, both established and recent, to show what 'culture' does and why. It addresses the materialisation of abstract concepts, performance and embodiment, and social categorisation and, in doing so, it shows how a deeper understanding of culture can offer new insights into the challenges that planners and planning theorists face.

Abstract This paper introduces key current themes in social sciences of energy that look beyond conventional concerns with energy consumers. Close, detailed studies of energy practices at all levels can offer insights into the ways that energy systems are enmeshed in social, legal, cultural, economic and political frameworks that pre-empt expectations about energy production, distribution and consumption. By bringing a sociological and anthropological focus onto the energy industries themselves, social sciences can offer new theoretical perspectives, reveal the political relations that accompany energy flows, and offer new ways to think about the potentials for current and future energy systems.

Abstract This paper introduces key current themes in social sciences of energy that look beyond conventional concerns with energy consumers. Close, detailed studies of energy practices at all levels can offer insights into the ways that energy systems are enmeshed in social, legal, cultural, economic and political frameworks that pre-empt expectations about energy production, distribution and consumption. By bringing a sociological and anthropological focus onto the energy industries themselves, social sciences can offer new theoretical perspectives, reveal the political relations that accompany energy flows, and offer new ways to think about the potentials for current and future energy systems.

Meetings are the apotheosis of contemporary bureaucratic life, containing dilemmas and contradictions that are at the heart of modernity. In particular, political and bureaucratic meetings (both state and civic) are ritual performances in which rules are enacted, ritual correctness is met with manipulative political game‐playing, and formal transparency is intertwined with relational and informational secrecy. Meetings in bureaucratic government rely on a series of legitimating motifs, including the invoking of 'conjured contexts' to link bureaucratic practices to external action. This essay shows how meetings order political and bureaucratic life, and vice versa, and explores the materiality and embodiment of meeting practices, illustrating how a dominant global model of bureaucratic meeting is elaborated locally.

State planning has been a defining means for modern subjects to regulate the passage of time. In practice, it is the focus of multiple conflicts and doubts, which planners attempt to mediate. In this paper, I address the regimes of time that planning both promotes and encounters, and tease out what these imply for anthropology. Using ethnography of Norwegian and Swedish planning offices and their encounters with participatory planning, I question recent claims that there has been an evacuation of the near future or a retreat of administrative intervention. I also suggest that recent anthropological concerns with time have been confined by their attempts to characterize the changing timescapes of specific modal shifts, such as from the modern to the neoliberal. Instead, in my ethnography, I focus not on tracking epochal breaks in time, but on demonstrating how time is manipulated, and how multiple temporalities are performed in ongoing projects of democratic planning.

A great deal of current planning literature is concerned with the behaviour of public sector planners and their roles within organizations. What is lacking, however, is a more nuanced understanding of what ideas or concepts people use to think about their roles in organizations, and how their very personalities have become tied into the creation of professionalism. This article looks at the dilemmas for public servants in a Norwegian municipality and shows how structural dilemmas may be internalized by individual employees. The emic concept of 'loyalty' is shown to symbolize attempts to individualize such dilemmas and render them subject to personality, rather than recognize them as conceptual problems.