SOC317H5 Lecture 11: Creating A More Equitable & Sustainable Consumer Culture
Creating A More Equitable & Sustainable Consumer Culture
November 30, 2018
Consumer society
• consumer culture as a social construct
• take consumer culture for granted and is only noticed when it goes downhill; ecological damage, working
conditions
• things that keep us consuming/problems of consumption
o waste
o social pressures, debt, fashion/trends
o advertising, corporate sales
o psychological/pressure/happy/habits
• new consumerism
o elevated reference groups – looking upwards for consumption cues
o marketing focused on high end goods
o accelerating pace of product innovation; planned/perceived obsolescence
o growing inequality – emerged in a
o consumption based identities – identities related to consumption practices
• consumers: dupes and heroes – both; balancing structure and agency
• Colin Beavan: No Impact Man
o consumer hero; exercises agency through sustainable lifestyle
• Juliet Schor
o structure/agency; middle ground, structural and individual strategies for responsible consumption
• undoing a social construct
o there is some power to deconstruct consumer culture
Barriers to reducing consumption
• social capacity to deal with structural forces
• habit/comfort/conveniene; personal crisis or events tend to only change habits
• culture is designed on a growth model economically and individually; people conceive life as a process of
gradually accumulating things – to deviate from this makes people uncomfortable
• change as an individual is difficult; living a sustainable lifestyle is not easy
• infrastructural challenges
o transportation, energy, food economy,
• cultural & social challenges
o go against growth model, resisting cultural structures – resistance from resisting dominant culture
• privilege
o very few can comfortable and realistically take on a sustainable lifestyle
Reforming consumer culture
• escaping the disposable society on an individual and structural level
• individual path towards making change often feels like the most obvious form of change
• democratic imagination (Perrin)
o in contemporary consumer culture people are much more creative and enthusiastic when
attempting individual solutions to change
o change as a group makes people more ambivalent
