Bottled Water and the Social Sciences: A Review and Agenda for Future Research

ABSTRACT Social sciences approach the steady rise of bottled water consumption at the beginning of the 21st century from four analytical vantage points: political economy, semiotics and lifestyle, political ecology, and materiality‐centered. Each analytic has crucial methodological and conceptual contributions to make, as well as zones of potential further refinement. I suggest two additional potential extensions of this research agenda. One is to understand bottled water as a logistical operation, that is, as based around objects that need to be transported and stored by logistics and distribution companies, workers, and consumers. Bottled water logistics assemble water sources, bottling plants, warehouses, sites of storage, pallets, trucks, hand carts, water containers, shelvesand backspaces in stores. The other is to understand bottled water as a bottled ecology, defined by complex biological, chemical, and legal processes, which requires increased analytic attention to how production, storage, use and governance transform the bottled water, with what effects, and how scientific facts are translated into public understanding of water purity.