The 13th World Conference on Tobacco OR Health

The call to consider the social context of smoking is being increasingly heard in the tobacco control literature, not to replace (or deny) the importance of physiological dimensions of addiction, but to better understand and account for the uneven social distribution of smoking. But what is "the social", and why is it important? In this talk we examine the nature and significance of the social as a domain of inquiry. Our particular interest is to better understand smoking as a collective social practice. We offer a brief analysis of some persistent limitations in the literature and suggest promising avenues of theoretically-informed research, which we believe have profound implications for tobacco control research and practice. In particular, we posit several key tenets derived from the social theory literature that could inform work in this area: (1) the central role of power relations in shaping this uneven social geography; (2) the central importance of physicality, sociality and the body in smoking (techniques of the body; comportment; bodily competence; smoking as bodily performance; smoking as embodiment of social position), (3) the role of desire/pleasure; (4) the importance of smoking to the formation of social identity in the context of the 'stylization of life' embedded in complex patterns of consumption (in late modern consumer societies); and (5) smoking as a social activity rooted in 'place'. Each of these will be explicated with reference to the literature as well as to empirical research conducted with smokers in Toronto, Ontario.