Introduction In his article titled ‘Consumption’ published in 2011, anthropologist David Graeber observed that consumption has come to mean ‘any activity that involves the purchase, use or enjoyment of any manufactured or agricultural product for any purpose other than the production or exchange of new commodities’ ( 2011 : 491). He noted that for wage labourers, this can cover almost anything they do when not working. Indeed, the use of goods and services procured on the market now seeps into all areas of our everyday lives. This includes relationships with
Consumption Only in the later 20th century did social scientists take consumption as a specific topic for examination and make it a major focus of research ( Warde, 2015 ). The result is an impressive and rich body of scholarship concerning the acquisition and use of goods and services for purposes of social, cultural and material enrichment. But it is a disparate and divided field. Consumption has both economic and social components. These have typically been examined separately by different social scientific communities. Our knowledge is heterogeneous
, female, late 60s, Sheffield) Introduction This chapter considers what it means to consume sustainably in Jinja, Nanjing and Sheffield, in particular how residents’ views on resource consumption are interwoven with anxieties about intergenerational value change (Inglehart, 2008). Sustainable consumption research has often neglected the Global South (Dermody et al, 2015 ; Ariztia et al, 2016 ; Liu, Valentine et al, 2018 ), or else it has emphasized the interdependencies of Northern consumers and Southern producers (Shanahan and Carlsson-Kanyama, 2005). There
Introduction During the mid-late 2000s, as I was coming to the end of my PhD, I started to think that consumption – a latent and tangential theme in my doctoral research– might be a useful topic around which to organise my future career. Upon learning of this, a senior academic in my department offered some unsolicited, but I assume well-intentioned, advice. They suggested that consumption studies had ‘very much had its day’ and that it would be prudent for me to position and orientate myself slightly differently. I paid no attention to this advice, not least
The United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development makes climate change and responsible consumption key priorities for both industrialized and emerging economies. Moving beyond the Global North, this book uses innovative cross-national and cross-generational research with urban residents in China and Uganda, as well as the UK, to illuminate international debates about building sustainable societies and to examine how different cultures think about past, present and future responsibility for climate change.
The authors explore to what extent different nations see climate change as a domestic issue, whilst looking at local explanatory and blame narratives to consider profound questions of justice between those nations that are more and less responsible for, and vulnerable to, climate change.
If our species does not survive the ecological crisis, it will probably be due to our failure to imagine and work out new ways to live with the earth, to rework ourselves and our high energy, high consumption, and hyper-instrumental societies adaptively. We struggle to adjust, because we’re still largely trapped inside the enlightenment tale of progress as human control over a passive and ‘dead’ nature that justifies both colonial conquests and commodity economies. The real threat is not so much global warming itself, which there might still be a chance to head
In the context of the calls for sufficiency held by climate experts, consumption is a major lever of ecological transition. Numerous international reports, non-governmental organisations (NGO) advocates and media articles highlight the need for consumers to change their consumption behaviour to achieve sustainable development. For their part, governments in many countries have implemented sustainable consumption policies to guide consumers towards behaviours that reduce greenhouse gas emissions ( Welch and Southerton, 2019 ). This centrality of consumption is
consumption. This article seeks to address this deficit. It shows the relevance of family display ( Finch, 2007 ) to the substantive area of family consumption, as reported by parents in Ireland, to uncover a complicated interaction between display and the middle-class norms of proper parenting and family life. First, Finch’s (2007) family display framework is elaborated and then the literature on family consumption is reviewed. After describing the study methodology on which the article is based, findings from the data analysis are presented and discussed. Family display
