sustainability, self-identity and the sociology of consumption

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Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment * Correspondence to: Dennis Soron, Brock University, St. Catharines, ON L2S 3A1, Canada. E-mail: [email protected] Sustainable Development Sust. Dev. 18, 172–181 (2010) Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/sd.457 Sustainability, Self-Identity and the Sociology of Consumption Dennis Soron* Brock University, St. Catharines, ON, Canada ABSTRACT In order to develop a more nuanced model of consumer behaviour and the dynamics of behavioural change, this paper argues, the discourse of sustainable consumption needs to draw more fully upon the sociological literature addressing consumption, its varied drivers, and the complex roles it plays within contemporary life. Since its revival in the 1980s, the sociology of consumption has largely focused on the ways in which everyday consumption choices in affluent societies facilitate the process of creating and sustaining a ‘self-identity’. While the literature in this field is not without its own flaws, framing sustainable consump- tion in relation to the problem of self-identity enables us to confront not only the psycho- cultural factors that maintain demand for material goods, but also the difficulties faced by ordinary people as they try to understand and respond ethically to large-scale social and ecological problems within an everyday environment that is highly commodified and indi- vidualized. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment. Received 15 December 2008; revised 10 October 2009; accepted 1 December 2009 Keywords: sustainable consumption; sociology of consumption; over-consumption; self-identity; green consumerism P UBLISHED IN THE MIDST OF AN UNFOLDING FINANCIAL CRISIS THAT HAD BEEN DOMINATING THE ATTENTION OF world leaders for weeks, the Living Planet Report 2008 (WWF, 2008) insists that our globe’s ‘ecological credit crunch’ is actually the most urgent crisis of our time. Drawing upon an array of cumulative envi- ronmental indicators, it asserts that ‘reckless consumption’ of planetary resources has led to, among other things, accelerated rates of climate change, air and water pollution, deforestation, soil degradation and species loss. At present, it estimates, our global footprint exceeds the world’s regenerative capacity by a full 30 percent, meaning that an entire extra planet would be required to sustain prevailing consumption patterns beyond roughly the next 25 years. While troubling, such warnings have gradually acquired an aura of numbing predictability. Since well before the goal of ‘sustainable consumption’ was placed on the international policy agenda at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, countless campaigns, publications and media reports have spurred a growing recognition in the advanced capitalist world of the ecological costs of overconsumption. Unfortunately, this uneasy awareness has failed to engender an effective political response, or to bring about significant changes in the everyday behaviours of con- sumers. In spite of mounting ecological dangers, Gary Gardner and his Worldwatch Institute colleagues suggest, there is currently ‘little evidence that the consumption locomotive is braking’ (Gardner et al., 2004, p. 4). At a time when China, India and other economically expanding regions are supplying millions of new recruits to the global consumer class each year, they assert, the failure of wealthy countries to curb their consumer appetites suggests

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Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment

* Correspondence to: Dennis Soron, Brock University, St. Catharines, ON L2S 3A1, Canada. E-mail: [email protected]

Sustainable DevelopmentSust. Dev. 18, 172–181 (2010)Published online in Wiley InterScience(www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/sd.457

Sustainability, Self-Identity and the Sociology of Consumption

Dennis Soron*Brock University, St. Catharines, ON, Canada

ABSTRACTIn order to develop a more nuanced model of consumer behaviour and the dynamics of behavioural change, this paper argues, the discourse of sustainable consumption needs to draw more fully upon the sociological literature addressing consumption, its varied drivers, and the complex roles it plays within contemporary life. Since its revival in the 1980s, the sociology of consumption has largely focused on the ways in which everyday consumption choices in affl uent societies facilitate the process of creating and sustaining a ‘self-identity’. While the literature in this fi eld is not without its own fl aws, framing sustainable consump-tion in relation to the problem of self-identity enables us to confront not only the psycho-cultural factors that maintain demand for material goods, but also the diffi culties faced by ordinary people as they try to understand and respond ethically to large-scale social and ecological problems within an everyday environment that is highly commodifi ed and indi-vidualized. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.

Received 15 December 2008; revised 10 October 2009; accepted 1 December 2009

Keywords: sustainable consumption; sociology of consumption; over-consumption; self-identity; green consumerism

PUBLISHED IN THE MIDST OF AN UNFOLDING FINANCIAL CRISIS THAT HAD BEEN DOMINATING THE ATTENTION OF world leaders for weeks, the Living Planet Report 2008 (WWF, 2008) insists that our globe’s ‘ecological

credit crunch’ is actually the most urgent crisis of our time. Drawing upon an array of cumulative envi-

ronmental indicators, it asserts that ‘reckless consumption’ of planetary resources has led to, among other

things, accelerated rates of climate change, air and water pollution, deforestation, soil degradation and species loss.

At present, it estimates, our global footprint exceeds the world’s regenerative capacity by a full 30 percent, meaning

that an entire extra planet would be required to sustain prevailing consumption patterns beyond roughly the next

25 years.

While troubling, such warnings have gradually acquired an aura of numbing predictability. Since well before

the goal of ‘sustainable consumption’ was placed on the international policy agenda at the Rio Earth Summit in

1992, countless campaigns, publications and media reports have spurred a growing recognition in the advanced

capitalist world of the ecological costs of overconsumption. Unfortunately, this uneasy awareness has failed to

engender an effective political response, or to bring about signifi cant changes in the everyday behaviours of con-

sumers. In spite of mounting ecological dangers, Gary Gardner and his Worldwatch Institute colleagues suggest,

there is currently ‘little evidence that the consumption locomotive is braking’ (Gardner et al., 2004, p. 4). At a time

when China, India and other economically expanding regions are supplying millions of new recruits to the global

consumer class each year, they assert, the failure of wealthy countries to curb their consumer appetites suggests

Sustainability, Self-Identity, and the Sociology of Consumption 173

Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment Sust. Dev. 18, 172–181 (2010)DOI: 10.1002/sd

that ‘the prospects for corralling consumption everywhere before it strips and degrades our planet beyond recogni-

tion would appear to be bleak’ (p. 4).

One default explanation for this impasse put forth by many environmental thinkers and activists has been that

the quest for sustainability has run up against the unwillingness of privileged consumers to relinquish the lifestyles

to which they have become accustomed. Accordingly, this inertia not only signals a moral lapse into hedonism,

but refl ects the degree to which the maintenance of personal identity has become linked to consumption. Indeed,

environmental researcher Alan Durning argues, consumption has today become ‘our primary means of self-

defi nition’, leading us to attempt ‘to satisfy with material things what are essentially social, psychological, and

spiritual needs’ (Durning, 1992, pp. 8, 23). Along similar lines, voluntary simplicity guru Duane Elgin (1981) argues

that prevailing forms of ‘identity consumption’ run counter to the requirements of ‘ecological living’. To this extent,

the pursuit of sustainability is tied up with the decision to step off the consumption escalator, and to cultivate an

alternative identity premised on a lifestyle of moderation and reverence for the natural world.

As a part of the broader effort to rethink established strategies for promoting environmentally friendly behav-

iours, proponents of sustainable consumption need to begin developing a more carefully theorized notion of

consumption’s identity value. Across a diverse range of approaches within academic fi elds such as anthropology,

history, cultural studies and sociology, Gabriel and Lang assert ‘[i]dentity is Rome to which all discussions of

modern Western consumption lead’ (Gabriel and Lang, 2006, p. 79). Identity is also an implicit, if largely unac-

knowledged, destination for discussions of sustainable consumption, for – as sociologist Anthony Giddens has

argued – everyday consumption choices in today’s world are increasingly ‘decisions not only about how to act but

who to be’ (Giddens, 1991, p. 81). Unfortunately, such discussions have failed to adequately address the commu-

nicative and identity-oriented aspects of consumption practices and the ways in which these can either facilitate

or retard the quest for environmental sustainability. ‘At a time when there is a widespread recognition that those

living in developed nations need to consume in ways that are more sustainable’, David Evans and Tim Jackson

write, ‘the task of motivating sustainable consumption is often treated in a largely instrumental manner relying

heavily on communication campaigns aimed at individual “behaviour change” ’ (Evans and Jackson, 2008, p. 4).

In order to move beyond a narrowly rationalistic model of consumer behaviour, they suggest, the discourse of

sustainable consumption needs to draw more fully upon the sociological literature addressing consumption, its

varied drivers and the complex roles it plays within contemporary life.

The remainder of this paper aims to enrich the ongoing discussion on sustainable consumption by bringing it

into a theoretical engagement with ‘a view of consumption as an identity project and an ongoing construction of

lifestyles’ (Dobers and Strannegard, 2005, p. 329), particularly as distilled from the sociology of consumption.

Since its revival in the 1980s, the sociology of consumption has revolved around the question of identity and its

related problematics. While diverse, Alan Warde writes, work within this fi eld has tended to ‘assert the predomi-

nance of a particular social psychology of the self, a self which is defi ned by the labour of creating and sustaining

a “self-identity”. In this process, consumption is deigned central, for commodities are principal channels for the

communication of self-identity’ (Warde, 1994a, pp. 877–878). While such work can shed light upon the complexi-

ties of consumer behaviour, its insights cannot be incorporated into the sustainable consumption debate without

acknowledging the critical reaction it has spawned. As a number of critics (Shove and Warde, 1998; Spaargaren,

2004; Murphy and Cohen, 2001) have noted, the profusion of sociological writings in recent decades on the

expressive and identity-oriented nature of consumption practices has been accompanied by an unusual degree of

silence about the environmental repercussions of overconsumption. For all of the useful conceptual resources they

provide, as Evans and Jackson acknowledge, ‘sociological theories of consumption – with a few notable exceptions

– have tended to shy away from an explicit concern with ‘sustainability’, eschewing in particular its normative

agenda’ (Evans and Jackson, 2008, p. 4).

By celebrating the ‘freedom’ of individuals to create their self-identities via symbolically laden commodities,

Conrad Lodziak (2002) has argued, such theories downplay the social and material determinants of consumer

behaviour and become a de facto endorsement of consumerist ideology. While such theories have seldom addressed

ecological questions, he suggests, their account of consumption as driven by the identity choices of consumers

seems to defl ect responsibility away from powerful economic and political interests, implying that sustainability

hinges upon the efforts of individuals to adopt ‘greener’ lifestyles. Whereas Lodziak believes that sociological

analyses of consumption can only become environmentally relevant by curtailing their preoccupation with the

174 D. Soron

Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment Sust. Dev. 18, 172–181 (2010)DOI: 10.1002/sd

theme of identity, this paper holds that a contextualized understanding of self-identity can sharpen our awareness

of the impasse at which the sustainable consumption agenda now fi nds itself. Framing sustainable consumption

in relation to the problem of creating and expressing self-identity forces us to confront not only the psycho-cultural

factors that maintain and expand demand for material goods and services, but also the contradictions faced by

ordinary people as they try to understand and respond ethically to large-scale social and ecological problems within

the ambit of an everyday environment that is highly commodifi ed and individualized.

Sustainable Consumption and the Complexities of ‘Behaviour Change’

In the years since the Rio Earth Summit, Nick Robins and Sarah Roberts assert, sustainable consumption has

‘come of age as a global priority’, becoming one of the ‘pillars of the wider goal of sustainable development’ (Robins

and Roberts, 2006, p. 39). While not novel in a substantial sense, Rio’s Agenda 21 (UNCED, 1992) lent new legiti-

macy in international policy circles to the idea that reining in the consumption of affl uent regions was required

to achieve environmental sustainability, and to address the unmet needs of the globe’s poorest citizens in the

context of ecologically constrained conditions. By making the ‘excessive demands’ of affl uent consumers a central

object of political concern, Tim Jackson argues, this foundational document also provided ‘a far-reaching mandate

for examining, questioning and revising consumption patterns – and, by implication, consumer behaviours, values,

expectations and lifestyles’ (Jackson, 2006b, p. 3).

Notwithstanding its consistent focus on the interconnection between ecological destruction and overconsump-

tion in the affl uent world, the discourse of sustainable consumption that has emerged in recent decades is by no

means unifi ed or monolithic, but is plural, contested and crosscut by different political orientations, points of

emphasis and strategies for promoting change. Within the international policy community, debates over sustain-

able consumption following the Rio gathering led to a heady stream of conferences, educational programs, research

projects and social marketing campaigns, the formation of the United Nations Environmental Programme’s Sus-

tainable Consumption Network, and the publication of many policy-related documents on the topic by learned

societies, national roundtables and international organizations. While such top-down initiatives have garnered the

most academic attention to date, Gill Seyfang (2005) argues, the ‘mainstream policy model of sustainable con-

sumption’ has developed in tandem with ‘alternative’ models of sustainable consumption advanced in various

locales by grassroots community activists. As Seyfang suggests, such ‘alternative’ initiatives have done much to

sustain the progressive edge of the sustainable consumption agenda at a time when the mainstream policy model

has increasingly eschewed any ‘far-reaching’ challenge to prevailing lifestyles or economic priorities.

Indeed, consumption’s prominence as a site of popular concern pertains to its ability to draw political aware-

ness beyond the grey world of technocratic policy prescriptions, its capacity to establish a moral and cognitive link

between everyday life-practices, personal identity and a range of pressing contemporary problems. With its focus

on the unequal distribution of the costs and benefi ts of the historic consumption boom, the discourse of sustain-

able consumption enables us in the fi rst instance to draw a vital link between environmental decline and ques-

tions of global equity. Far from demanding an ethos of grim asceticism, however, the discourse of sustainable

consumption has often highlighted the ‘double dividend’ (Jackson, 2005) of mindful consumer behaviours,

reframing the wealthy world’s responsibility to transform its consumption patterns as an opportunity to simulta-

neously address disenchanting aspects of the consumerist lifestyle that undermine personal and collective

well-being.

In spite of its potential as a basis for developing a cultural and political counter-vision to the consumerist para-

digm, doubts have increasingly been expressed about the coherence and effectiveness of the ‘offi cial’ program that

has developed under the mantle of sustainable consumption. Jackson believes that the historical failure of estab-

lished approaches to ‘sustainable behaviour change’ is partly a refl ection of the in-built limits of the prevailing

rational choice model within the sphere of consumer policy, which

. . . contends that consumers make decisions by calculating the individual costs and benefi ts of different courses

of action and then choosing the option that maximizes their expected net benefi ts. If it is cheaper for me to

travel from A to B by train than by car, I will usually choose to go by train. If it is more costly and time-

Sustainability, Self-Identity, and the Sociology of Consumption 175

Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment Sust. Dev. 18, 172–181 (2010)DOI: 10.1002/sd

consuming for me to recycle my household waste than to throw it in the trash, I will tend to do the latter . . .

From this perspective, the role of policy appears to be straightforward, namely to ensure that the market allows

for people to make effi cient choices about their own actions (Jackson, 2006a, p. 110).

One of the problems with this model of the consumer is that it ignores how everyday consumption choices are

enmeshed in a web of non-instrumental motivations, values, emotions, self-conceptions and cultural associations

that complicate the uptake of environmentally friendly ‘behaviour change’. In light of such factors, any effort to

advance the sustainable consumption agenda requires a deeper engagement with the social and cultural pressures

that wed people to established consumption patterns in ways that are not strictly rational.

The Possibilities and Limits of the ‘Communicative Paradigm’

To this end, recent work within the sociology of consumption presents itself as a promising source of direction,

albeit one fraught with certain diffi culties. Although sociology as a whole has a ‘long tradition of seeing consump-

tion as morally suspect and analytically secondary’ (Slater, 2005, p.175), this has been counterbalanced since the

1980s by a range of work that has framed consumption as a central site of social reproduction, identity formation,

and the expression and containment of social resistance. This new sociology of consumption has opposed both

totalizing dismissals of consumer culture and ‘mass society’, on the one hand, and overly simplistic models of the

utility-maximizing consumer on the other, striving to understand how and why consumption has become such a

socially valued and culturally meaningful sphere of activity. Inspired in part by work within cultural anthropology

(Geertz, 1975; Sahlins, 1976; Douglas and Isherwood, 1979), the core of this ‘communicative model’, Gabriel and

Lang argue, is ‘the idea that material objects embody a system of meanings, through which we express ourselves

and communicate with each other. We want and buy things not because of what things can do for us, but because

of what things mean to us and what they say about us’ (Gabriel and Lang, 2006, pp. 47–48).

Unfortunately, as Lars Dobers and Peter Strannegard (2005) claim, studies of sustainable consumption have

not suffi ciently taken account of the expressive, aesthetic and identity-oriented dimensions of contemporary life-

style consumption. As they insist, such factors cannot be dismissed as superfi cial or environmentally inconsequen-

tial, insofar as ‘they are drivers of consumption that are fundamental issues for understanding the path toward a

sustainable future, and the potential impediments on that path’ (pp. 328–329). While material goods have always

acted as cultural signifi ers and identity markers, this process has been amplifi ed and accelerated in late capitalism,

where – as Fredric Jameson asserts – ‘the frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-

seeming goods (from clothing to aeroplanes), at ever greater rates of turnover, now assigns an increasingly essential

structural function and position to aesthetic innovation and experimentation’ (Jameson, 1992, pp. 4–5). If design,

branding and lifestyle marketing have become important strategies by which producers competitively differentiate

and symbolically defi ne their products, some thinkers insist, individuals have also increasingly availed themselves

of consumer culture’s possibilities for expressive self-creation and lifestyle experimentation (McCracken, 1986;

Miller, 1987; Featherstone, 1991; Lury, 1996). In contrast to a parallel sociological tradition relating the display-

oriented aspects of consumption to the symbolic reproduction of systemic hierarchies and class inequalities

(Veblen, 1967; Bourdieu, 1984; Schor, 1998), consumption in this incarnation becomes like cutting ‘a path through

a forest of signs in which we choose to consume what is meaningful to us and thereby construct actively our own

identity’ (Durrschmidt and Taylor, 2007, p. 104).

While the interpenetration of identity construction and expressive consumption practices can, as the comments

of Durning (1992) and Elgin (1981) suggest, be analysed as a source of environmental stress, this line of analysis

has rarely been explored within the sociology of consumption. This is partly attributable to the fact that such think-

ers, seeking to disavow the reductive notion of the consumer embedded in critiques of mass society, have tended

to steer clear of normative judgments about consumer behaviour, often regarding environmentalists’ distaste for

‘excessive’ consumption as simply another species of elitist ‘moralism’ that casts ordinary people as mindless

hedonists or passive dupes (Miller, 1987). The problem with this avoidance of normative critique is that it has

risked steering the sociology of consumption toward an uncritical celebration of consumer identities and

lifestyles.

176 D. Soron

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This theme is explored at length by Lodziak in The Myth of Consumerism (2002), a book that harshly criticizes

Zygmunt Bauman, Anthony Giddens, Mike Featherstone and Celia Lury, among others, for seeming to embrace

the idea that consumer culture has ‘liberated’ people to freely compose and recompose their identities. One con-

sequence of this, he argues, is a trivialized notion of identity that collapses self-defi nition into consumption,

transforms the lifestyles of affl uent youth into a universal norm, and downplays the relevance of other dimensions

of identity such as social class. By ‘de-materializing’ consumer behaviour, Lodziak asserts, this vein of sociology

has divorced consumption from its environmental dimensions, and perpetuated a voluntaristic version of selfhood

in which people are free to doff and don identities by altering their lifestyle habits, seemingly unaffected by struc-

tural constraints, fi nancial restrictions, bodily limitations, social sanctions, work routines, domestic demands and

so on. In this respect, the ‘communicative’ model of consumer behaviour appears to be equally as individualistic

and one sided as the rational choice model critiqued by Jackson, Seyfang and other analysts of sustainable

consumption.

The ‘Individualization’ of Environmental Responsibility

By foregrounding the display-oriented aspects of consumption, Lodziak and others have argued, the sociology of

consumption’s ‘communicative paradigm’ has overemphasized the role of individual ‘choice’ as a driver of con-

sumer behaviour. Indeed, Alan Warde claims, its ‘model of the consumer as a free-fl oating agent, voluntarily

choosing among commodities in the market with a view to creating a distinctive and individual self-identity’

(1994b, p. 64) has tended to downplay the socially embedded and constrained nature of consumption practices.

Whereas certain categories of consumption – as Kirsi Niinimaki’s study of clothing and eco-fashion in this issue

illuminates – are rich in identity value and open to a signifi cant measure of conscious consumer choice, others

are clearly not. In this regard, Shove and Warde (1998) argue, the communicative model tends to leave unexamined

the realm of ‘ordinary’ or ‘inconspicuous’ consumption, encompassing types of environmentally signifi cant con-

sumption with little or no identity value (household water and energy consumption, for instance), the conditioning

effects of established social, material and technical infrastructures, material fl ows at all stages of the production

process, institutional consumption by producers and state institutions, evolving baseline standards and so on.

Taking this realm seriously, they argue, requires sociologists to turn ‘away from an intellectual obsession with

the glamorous aspects of consumption towards its more routine, pragmatic, practical, symbolically neutral, socially

determined, collectively imposed, jointly experienced, non-individualised elements’ (Shove and Warde, 1998, p.

13). Taken as a whole, such elements constitute what has been called an ‘infrastructure of consumption’ that locks

individuals into materially intensive consumption patterns (Renner, 2004, p. 112). Such decisive contextual infl u-

ences help us to understand some of the key forces, other than insuffi cient personal willpower, underpinning

today’s so-called ‘attitude–behaviour gap’ or ‘value–action gap’ – wherein consumers’ self-proclaimed high levels

of environmental concern are not consistently evident at the level of everyday behaviour (Young et al., 2009).

An analogous challenge to the primacy of the individual consumer has occurred within scholarly debates over

sustainable consumption. As Southerton and his colleagues argue, sociologists and sustainable consumption

advocates alike have been hobbled by ‘a view of the autonomous consumer exercising relatively unconstrained

lifestyle choices’ that fails to appreciate ‘how consumption is socially constrained and embedded within routine

and normative practices of everyday life’ (Southerton et al., 2004, p. 10). As Robins and Roberts emphasize, the

essential early contribution of the sustainable consumption debate, which needs to be recovered today, is the

‘emphasis on rethinking the patterns of consumption. This focuses attention on to the overall determinants of

demand, which either enable or constrain individuals and institutions from contributing to sustainability, rather

than simply looking to personal action’ (Robins and Roberts, 2006, p. 45).

This renewed focus on the structural determinants of ecologically destructive consumption patterns has been

accompanied by an awareness of the political inadequacy and practical ineffectiveness of ‘individualizing’ respon-

sibility for global environmental problems (Maniates, 2002). By placing its faith in the uncoordinated, voluntary

actions of ‘green’ or ‘ethical’ consumers, the sustainable consumption agenda risks depoliticizing environmental

reform by disconnecting it from any challenge to the powerful interests currently committed to the perpetuation

of consumption-oriented growth. When focused narrowly on the everyday activities of end-consumers, Sanne

Sustainability, Self-Identity, and the Sociology of Consumption 177

Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment Sust. Dev. 18, 172–181 (2010)DOI: 10.1002/sd

argues, the sustainable consumption agenda not only obscures the ways in which individual behaviours are struc-

turally shaped, but ‘neglects the role of the state and how business tends to co-operate with or pressure govern-

ments to create conducive conditions for increasing consumption’ (Sanne, 2002, p. 273). As some critics have

underlined (Hobson, 2006; Sanne, 2005; Seyfang, 2006), the political appeal of weak versions of sustainable

consumption policy arises from the fact that they enable governments to buttress their ‘green’ image while uphold-

ing the economic status quo, transferring the burdens of stewardship over to individual consumers, who lack the

power, resources and information required for effective environmental action.

Appealing to this individualistic ethos, the consumer marketplace has increasingly presented people in affl uent

societies with opportunities for greening their identities and putting a version of ‘sustainable consumption’ into

practice. Indeed, it has tossed up an abundance of conscience-soothing goods, ranging from benign items such

as sustainably farmed produce and energy-effi cient appliances to heavily processed and packaged organic foods

and outright absurdities such as ‘eco-friendly’ cigarettes, bullets, plasma televisions, yachts and SUVs. Understand-

ably, many critics remain suspicious about green consumerism and its tide of ‘eco-junk’ (Monbiot, 2007). While

the environmental benefi ts of green consumerism remain in doubt, what is more certain is that everyday consump-

tion choices are playing an increasing role in the process of green identity construction (Horton, 2003; Linden

and Klintman, 2003; Connolly and Prothero, 2008). By reducing the pursuit of sustainability to the purchase and

display of relatively expensive ‘eco-chic’ goods, this form of consumerism has infused environmental commitment

with elitist class connotations, helping to forge – as Victoria Hurth’s contribution to this issue nicely illustrates

– symbolically powerfully but ultimately tenuous links between green consumption and affl uent lifestyles, which,

in actuality, continue to be environmentally unsustainable in many other respects. In the process, it has also helped

to dissolve the historical tension between the counter-cultural, collectivist orientation of grassroots environmental

struggle and commercial culture’s promotion of commodifi ed forms of individual identity and agency. As has been

the case with the expanding distribution of Fairtrade products in recent years (Low and Davenport, 2005), the

mainstreaming of green consumer items has facilitated a commercial appropriation of progressive values and a

gradual blunting of their more radical social, economic and political implications.

Bringing Self-Identity Back In

In this context, a key question that arises is whether the effort to explore the connection between sustainable

consumption and self-identity threatens to merely reinforce the individualization of environmental responsibility

by focusing our attention primarily upon voluntary lifestyle experiments and the symbolic trappings of green

consumerism. Shove, Warde, Lodziak and others have been rightly critical of the sociology of consumption’s

dominant ‘communicative paradigm’, but the danger is that such critiques will not lead to a more nuanced model

of the mediations between everyday consumption, identity and social structure, but to a different form of reduc-

tionism that addresses questions of material throughput by simply bypassing the question of identity altogether.

While, as Warde emphasizes, many routine forms of consumption are not driven primarily by self-identity

concerns, this does not mean that such concerns are irrelevant. Automobile dependency in the industrial world,

for instance, may be seen as a structural problem attributable to collective decisions over land-use policy and

transportation infrastructure. At the same time, individuals’ relative degree of commitment to this transportation

system, their critical awareness of its negative social and environmental consequences, and their willingness to

mobilize for alternatives to it, may indeed be strongly infl uenced by their psycho-cultural attachment to cars and

the sense of freedom, empowerment and personal identity they derive from the everyday experience of driving. In

this sense, the question of self-identity may not account for all environmentally signifi cant forms of consumption,

but it remains relevant to the extent that it helps us to address the challenges faced by people struggling to identify

and confront the collective problems with which their own everyday life-activities are entwined.

For infl uential fi gures in the sociology of consumption such as Anthony Giddens, Zygmunt Bauman and Ulrich

Beck, the freedom and agency enacted through consumer behaviour is more complex and ambivalent than critics

such as Lodziak suggest, and is situated in relation to wider socio-historical changes, which have created new

mechanisms of identity-formation and placed contradictory demands upon individuals. The paradigmatic case

here, perhaps, is Anthony Giddens, whose Modernity and Self-Identity (1991) offers a vision of ‘high modernity’ in

178 D. Soron

Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment Sust. Dev. 18, 172–181 (2010)DOI: 10.1002/sd

which individuals, loosened from the bonds of tradition and ascriptive social roles, are faced with the varied oppor-

tunities and burdens of crafting their own self-identities. What emerges from Giddens’ conceptualization of ‘post-

traditional’ society, Don Slater argues, is not a sanguine celebration of yuppie lifestyles, but a picture of ‘a kind of

permanent identity crisis that is both fed and assuaged by the mechanisms of consumer culture’ (Slater, 2005, p.

180). Under conditions of pervasive commodifi cation and lifestyle marketing, Giddens acknowledges, this identity

crisis can be readily exploited for commercial gain, such that ‘the project of the self becomes translated into one

of the possession of desired goods and the pursuit of artifi cially framed styles of life’ (Giddens, 1991, p. 172). That

said, Giddens believes that the logic of commodifi cation cannot fully neutralize the potential of everyday consumer

‘life politics’, which continues to allow for the expression of some measure of personal social responsibility in a

world characterized by inscrutable distant crises, competing authority claims, and increasingly abstract and unre-

sponsive economic and political institutions.

For Beck, like Giddens, modernity’s processes of globalization and individualization have enhanced recognition

of the ways personal biography intersects with distant events and risks – a pattern exemplifi ed by the growing

awareness in advanced capitalist nations of how everyday consumption patterns interlink with global environmen-

tal problems. This, Beck suggests, has lead to a ‘politicization’ and ‘moralization’ of consumption that has blurred

the line between democratic citizenship and consumer behaviour (Beck, 2000). This arena of ‘sub-politics’,

however, is circumscribed by individualizing processes that disperse and fragment collective social agency, placing

burdens upon people that they are not equipped to manage. As individuals are ‘disembedded’ from traditional

norms, roles and bonds that had previously acted as anchors for identity, and are rendered ever more dependent

upon the market for their livelihood, they are forced to construct their own ‘elective’ biography amidst an array of

confusing choices and competing responsibilities (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002). In this individualized context,

people are increasingly charged with the vexing task of fi nding ‘biographical solutions’ to ‘systemic problems’ that

are beyond their immediate power to resolve (Beck, 1992, p. 137).

Far from offering an uncritical endorsement of consumer ideology, as Lodziak suggests, Bauman’s analysis of

today’s ‘identity crisis’ has a tragic undertone, focusing on how consumer culture constantly arouses desires it

cannot satisfy, and enticingly promises stable forms of identity that it continually undermines. Although, as

Bauman believes, ‘late capitalist society in its consumerist phase offers a space for human freedom larger than

any other known society’, this freedom is limited in quality, effi cacy and scope, and laced through with anxiety

and insecurity (Bauman, 1988, p. 57). In a profi t-driven economic system dependent upon the renewal of demand,

the effort to construct a stable self-identity out of the transitory market of consumer goods is doomed to fail. Today,

Bauman argues, ‘[i]dentities, just like consumer goods, are to be appropriated and possessed, but only in order to

be consumed, and so to disappear again . . . [C]onsumption of an identity should not – must not – extinguish the

desire for other, new and improved identities’ (Bauman, 1998, pp. 28–29). To this extent, the consumer’s freedom

is built upon an underlying sense of psychic deprivation and ethical disorientation in a dislocated, atomized social

world. In this context, even efforts to grapple with issues such as the environmental crisis are privatized, depoliti-

cized and rendered into discrete problems amenable to consumer-oriented solutions (Bauman, 1991, pp. 203–205).

Echoing Beck, Bauman argues that the ‘consumer attitude’ consists ‘in seeking biographical solutions to socially-

produced affl ictions . . . [I]t consists in fi ghting a nuclear threat by purchasing a family nuclear shelter, or pollution

of drinking-water supplies by fi nding a reliable brand of bottled water’ (in Blackshaw, 2005, p. 125).

Looking Forward

This discussion of Giddens, Beck and Bauman is extremely partial, and does not do justice to either the theoretical

differences between these thinkers or the internal complexity of their respective bodies of work as they have evolved

over time. That said, it succeeds at least in demonstrating that a concern with the intersection of consumption

and self-identity need not be accompanied by a naively voluntaristic model of consumer agency or by an individu-

alized notion of environmental responsibility. At a broader level, the goal of this paper’s brief sketch of some

dominant themes and contentions within recent work in the sociology of consumption has been not to compre-

hensively map out the fi eld, but to identify some issues requiring further refl ection and elaboration within future

work on sustainable consumption.

Sustainability, Self-Identity, and the Sociology of Consumption 179

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In light of the complexity of the cultural, psychological and quotidian motivations underpinning prevailing

consumption patterns, proponents of sustainable consumption need to move beyond what Murphy and Cohen

call a technocratic ‘levers, knobs and dials’ approach to behavioural change (Murphy and Cohen, 2001, p. 8).

Indeed, given the failure of efforts to transform consumer behaviour through the provision of information, price-

signals, modest incentives, and eco-effi cient products and services, a deeper engagement with the expressive and

identity-oriented nature of consumption practices is required. While this engagement unavoidably poses normative

questions about how to live in an environmentally responsible manner, it also needs to go beyond denouncing the

false needs and priorities of ordinary consumers. To be successful, efforts to encourage ‘sustainable behaviour

change’ must address the legitimate psycho-social anxieties, desires and identity needs that, however counter-

productively, have been channelled into consumer culture. This culture, as Grant McCracken (1990) argues, plays

an ambivalent role in contemporary life – enlarging consumer appetites by awakening insatiable desires, yet

transforming material goods into sites of ‘displaced meaning’ that express ideals and aspirations that are at odds

in key respects with existing social realities.

By challenging the equation of human progress with increased consumption, discussions of sustainable con-

sumption can highlight the non-material sources of well-being that consumer culture cannot ultimately satisfy.

Conversely, however, they need to recognize that consumer culture is ‘popular’ precisely because it does, in some

ways, resonate with powerful collective desires and identity needs. In the case of advertising, for instance, market-

ers learned long ago that selling a product on the basis of its functionality alone was a losing strategy. Over time,

advertising has come to focus less on the properties of goods, and more on the social and human qualities they

embody as part of our ‘extended selves’. Many of these qualities – pleasure, freedom, leisure, adventure, self-

expression, empowerment, access to nature, connection with friends and family, community recognition – are

compatible with a progressive approach to sustainable consumption, and are a refl ection of what many people, in

their current social circumstances, feel that they lack. The appeals that advertising makes, Sut Jhally (2006) argues,

are legitimate because they address real sources of unhappiness in advanced capitalist society, but the solution

that it offers – the individual acquisition of commodities – is an inadequate one that generates environmental

destruction even as it undermines personal identity and detracts from the collective negotiation of more sustain-

able and satisfying ways of life.

Finally, exploring the intersection of sustainable consumption and self-identity requires us to comprehend the

constrained context and political limits of individual ‘green’ lifestyle choices even as we engage sympathetically

with the ethical and collectivist impulses underlying them. The heightened sense of personal responsibility for

global problems with complex systemic roots today, Beck argues, ‘puts the individual in the position of potentially

having to take a continual stand. At the same moment as he or she sinks into insignifi cance, he or she is elevated

to the apparent throne of a world-shaper’ (Beck, 1992, p. 137). Indeed, as two members of the Union of Concerned

Scientists have underlined, mainstream environmental wisdom in the affl uent world today is premised on the

dubious idea ‘that environmental damage is primarily caused by myriad small actions on the part of individual

consumers and that the answer is for individuals to voluntarily change their behaviour in dozens and dozens of

ways’ (Brower and Leon, 1999, p. 7). Consequently, they suggest, consumers not only end up feeling a great deal

of unnecessary anxiety surrounding banal everyday decisions with little environmental impact, but also fail to

realize that, in many situations, ‘the emphasis must be placed on changing the policies of governments and insti-

tutions rather than the habits of consumers’ (Brower and Leon, 1999, p. ix).

Although timely and valid, such critiques of the individualization of environmental responsibility often proclaim

the need for ‘structural’ social change without considering where the agency and cultural will for such change

might reside. In this respect, drawing too stark a line between the everyday realm of ‘consumer habits’ and the

formal political sphere is, as Giddens and Beck suggest, counter-productive. At one level, the proliferation of com-

modifi ed green lifestyles represents what Bauman calls consumer capitalism’s unprecedented ability ‘to absorb all

and any dissent it inevitably . . . breeds, and then to recycle it as a major resource of its own reproduction, reinvigo-

ration and expansion’ (Bauman, 2007, p. 48). While, as Deirdre Shaw and Iain Black (2009) have recently argued,

we need to acknowledge the limits of ‘market-based political action’ as a means of moving towards a sustainable

economy, we also need to understand its current role as a particular avenue for public participation and a means

of communicating a variety of popular social concerns. In this sense, we can also – following Giddens – regard

green or ethical consumer behaviour as a legitimate but constrained attempt to act in accordance with

180 D. Soron

Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment Sust. Dev. 18, 172–181 (2010)DOI: 10.1002/sd

environmental ideals within the one sphere in which ordinary people typically feel some direct control. Indeed,

at a time of declining faith in the willingness of public institutions to confront the ecological crisis, green con-

sumption choices have come to provide a ritual basis for shared identity among those who feel a sense of envi-

ronmental responsibility but are otherwise confused and ambivalent about their own capacity to effect meaningful

change.

While the effort to build oppositional identities out of ethical consumption may be limited in some respects,

Josée Johnston argues, it is perhaps ‘a more realistic strategy than expecting collective identities of citizenship to

spontaneously emerge from thin air’ (Johnston, 2001, p. 47). Indeed, the struggle for sustainable consumption

requires that the moral impetus of such practices be extended beyond the shopping aisle, so that it becomes what

Johnston calls ‘a conduit to a broader notion of citizenship, where an obsessive focus on individual “choice” is

replaced, or at least supplemented with a broader notion of community, sustainability, justice, and democracy’

(p. 47). In this respect, the promise of what Seyfang calls ‘alternative’ models of sustainable consumption – com-

prising bottom-up initiatives such as cooperative local distribution food systems, non-monetary community barter

networks and so on – resides not only in their capacity to transform the context and material intensity of everyday

consumption practices, but in their ability to challenge the powerlessness that people feel as individuated ‘consum-

ers’ by reconstituting a social, collective and non-commodifi ed basis for personal identity.

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