Industrial Ecology and Spaces of Innovation

Sustainable Technologies and the Sociology of Consumption

Elizabeth Shove (Lancaster University) & Dale Southerton (Manchester University)

Abstract

When environmentalists consider sustainable consumption they tend to focus on what it is that prompts more or less green consumers to choose 'more' sustainable technologies. More commonly, their attention remains focused on supply side processes and particularly the generation of more efficient modes of meeting taken-for-granted 'needs'. Together, these tendencies result in a focus on ecoefficiency and its promotion.

In this paper, we take a different line. We argue that a more complex account of the processes that constitute final consumption is critical to any understanding of sustainability. In essence, our claim is that a focus on consumer choice misses the normative, routine and culturally embedded character of 'ordinary consumption'. This means that analyses tends to take 'needs' for granted and instead concentrate on ways of meeting them more efficiently (i.e. fewer resources involved).

We suggest that in order to develop a more sophisticated understanding of the potential for 'sustainable consumption', it is necessary to consider the dynamics of inconspicuous consumption and the very construction of demand. The sociology of consumption is of some help here, especially in so far as it identifies mechanisms of escalation: novelty, distinction, matching, specialisation, etc. and in that it reveals the range of social processes that impact on what different social groups consume and how they do so. However, this literature has also failed to devote much attention to routine and the ordinary forms of consumption. This is relevant in that it is these that are of greatest environmental significance: as illustrated by the demand for water, electricity etc.

The key question that needs to be addressed relates to how routine practices of consumption (such as food provisioning, laundering, bathing etc.) change in seemingly taken-for-granted and invisible ways. From a different perspective, the sociology of technology provides useful insights into how such practices change. Studies of large scale technical systems and their development, infrastructures and the coevolution of routine and habit, the idea of sociotechnical regimes have much to offer in trying to track and comprehend changes in convention and practice and the consequences these entail for sustainability.

We take the case of laundering to show how the sociologies of technology and consumption might be combined to generate a better understanding of the development and reproduction of resource intensive and apparently unsustainable practice on the part of households and 'consumers'. In doing so, we show the production of appropriately clean clothing to be a complex enterprise. In following the dynamics of this practice we have to examine multiple elements (stocks of clothing, tools and technologies, detergents, machines, rationales for washing, norms and conventions about who washes, etc.) and the intersection between them.

In examining this complex we show how one might understand competing trends: for example the decline of boiling (environmentally good) and the increasing frequency of washing (environmentally bad). Such an analysis is sensitive to the construction of demand (not just eco efficiency), and to the co- and reproduction of convention routine and practice.

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