The Theory of Collectivity of Drinking Cultures: How Alcohol Became Everyone’s Problem
Summary
The authors of this paper explore the formulation of the theory of collectivity of drinking cultures by Ole-Jørgen Skog and before that the single distribution theory by Ledermann. Both Ledermann and Skog had fundamentally the same idea: alcohol consumption in a population is spread with some form of regularity, so when changes occur in the overall population mean the entire distribution follows along.
Skog’s theoretical development sparked a large body of empirical work demonstrating a link between per capita alcohol consumption and a wide range of harms. This evidence combined with the idea of a collective drinking culture formed the cornerstones of the argument for a broader shift towards a public health approach driven by Bruun and others that fundamentally reshaped alcohol policy in many countries.
The authors observe how the theories of Ledermann and Skog have come back into focus following observations of a disconnection between levels of drinking and rates of harm in the early 2000s. These patterns ran counter to expectations and raised some fundamental questions about Skog’s theory. If rates of harm increase while per-capita consumption declines, then perhaps consumption trends were not linked across the entire population. This has renewed the field’s interest in Skog’s work, with a series of recent papers examining the distribution of consumption and scholarly debate around the definitions and interpretations of collective shifts.
As the present authors state, with the availability of data and statistical methods today which was not there in the time of Skog and Ledermann there is more opportunity now to test these theories. They further note the need for further theorizing. For example, Skog noted that the rate of change in a population was not likely to be stable across all consumption groups.
Patterns like this have recently been interpreted as either counter to collectivity or labelled ‘soft collectivity’. With the precision offered by larger samples and new methods, the key question is re-vitalized; what is a collective shift and how small can a divergence be for us to dismiss collectivity?
The authors note another critique that has been directed against the theory and debated in the research literature over the years is that the theory is too vague for any precise hypotheses to be deduced from it.
The paper concludes that, Skog’s continuing influence is a reminder of the dearth of other theories concerning population drinking, and how it changes, within the field of alcohol research. Incorporating all alcohol users, even the heaviest, into one collective distribution of alcohol use guides us in our work trying to understand the harms caused by alcohol on a societal level. This central assumption is where the theory started once upon a time and why it is still used today.
