This article draws on 40 in‐depth semi‐structured interviews of three groups of people who restrict their consumption in various ways: voluntary simplifiers, religious environmentalists, and green home owners. I identify common patterns in the emergence of green lifestyles across all groups. Green practices are not isolated decisions or actions, but components in an ongoing project. As a result, green lifestyles are often experienced as both a work in progress and a provisionally coherent life narrative. Furthermore, I explore bricolage, the cobbling together of resources at hand by nonexperts, as a mechanism for lifestyle change and expand the concept to include environmental practices and themes. I adopt a pragmatist perspective to understand lifestyle change as a deliberate process undertaken in response to a problem left underaddressed by current policies and practices. This article also weighs in on the debate in the sociology of culture over how culture influences action.
Reducing greenhouse gas (GHG)-intensive consumption can be an important route to reducing the GHG emissions that cause climate change. To effectively mitigate climate change by reforming human consumption patterns we must have a comprehensive understanding of the linkages between consumption and climate change and how consumption may be altered. This article begins by reviewing the empirical research that links consumption and GHG emissions and identifies GHG-intensive actions and systems. We then identify four social science understandings of consumption: the consumer as homo economicus, the predictably irrational consumer, the locked-in consumer, and the socially organized consumer. These understandings of consumption that emerge from economics, psychology, anthropology, and sociology lead us to different conclusions on what can be done to change consumption patterns to mitigate climate change. To effectively transform consumption, we advocate the implementation of a range of policy solutions and explore several levers for managing change.
Attempting to inf luence everyday consumer practices is an increasingly popular strategy used to address environmental problems and further social change. This article focuses on exploring the controversial topic of green consumption, a growing area of study that brings together multiple disciplines including environmental sociology and the sociology of consumers and consumption. The article begins with a summary of the literature on green consumption and is then organized around three debates over how green consumption contributes to, or fails to contribute to, social and environmental change. The first debate is over locating responsibility for carbon dioxide emissions, the main contributor to greenhouse gases and climate change. The second debate considers what average people are doing to help address environmental problems. The third debate is about access to green consumption. Should policies work to increase access to greener products and efficient technologies for everyone or does the question of access push aside questions of inequality (race, class, and gender) and sufficiency (how much is enough)? These debates, in different ways, attempt to address the broader question of how social change happens and what we should do to support it.
Social networks are typically associated with recruitment tactics. In this article, I offer an additional perspective on social networks as a constraint to social change and an under-recognized challenge to reducing consumption. I draw on 45 interviews with: voluntary simplifiers, religious environmentalists, and green home owners. Informants, failing to withdraw from gift-giving networks, instead (1) negotiate a reduction in gift giving, (2) green gift giving, and (3) attempt to transform gift giving into a tactic for lifestyle change. Rather than viewing social networks as channels for cultural cohesion, I argue that we need to better conceptualize the way culture and networks are co-constituted by tactics of influence within areas of contention.
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