To Örebro University

Adoption of sufficiency-oriented lifestyles is an important part of curbing overconsumption, yet many individuals who try to reduce their consumption volumes experience social difficulties. Combining the perspectives of care and sufficiency-oriented lifestyle changes, this article aims to contribute to the understanding of why such social obstacles occur, how they might be counteracted and in what ways social relations instead may facilitate consumption reduction. Starting from an interview study with 25 Swedish consumption reducers, this article builds on a processual theory of consumer identity and the perspective of care to explore how care and consumption are (re) negotiated in the different stages of reduction. The results highlight the different aspects of care involved in consumption reduction – from motivations for change to negotiations toward a more holistic understanding of care – and show that consumption reduction in many ways is an ongoing process of both caring and striving. By emphasizing how care is renegotiated in a gradual construction of a caring consumer identity, this article discusses the importance of maintaining a sensitivity to the multi-faceted nature of care, acknowledging it both as a source of difficulties and as a key driver for sufficiency-oriented lifestyle changes.

Ethical consumption can take different forms, each with its own justifications and underlying rationales. While countries in north-western Europe have well-established mechanisms for promoting ethically labelled products, the situation is different in many other regions across the world. This paper examines ethical consumption in Sweden and Iran to identify the societal factors that influence the phenomenon. Employing social practice theory and a multilevel perspective, the empirical study explores the assumption that ethical consumption develops in an interplay between different levels and between different social actors, which can both challenge and rely on existing capacities. Data was generated from 34 semi-structured interviews with citizens in both countries. Expanding beyond micro-level factors, this study makes a dual contribution to the field of ethical consumption. First, it offers insights into the diverse ethical perceptions related to consumption across societies, broadening the understanding of various aspects of the phenomenon. Secondly, it sheds light on the role of societal regimes in the emergence and adoption of ethical consumption.

Given the excessive consumption of natural resources in affluent contexts across the world, this paper argues that there is a need to discuss, critique, and advance the concept of ethical consumption, which is commonly understood as involving only relatively minor practices of consumption refinement, such as acts of boycotting and buycotting. The paper does so by linking ethical consumption to the concepts of sufficiency and care and suggesting a temporal categorization. The sufficiency lens is applied to show why and how the understanding of ethical consumption cannot be restricted to that of consumption refinement but must also address consumption reduction, due to high ecological and climate footprints in many coun-tries. A temporal categorization is helpful for further expanding on this idea. Therefore, we propose understanding ethical consumption in three stages; pre-consumption, consumption and post-consumption. Finally, we emphasize the need to nurture a culture of responsibility and a sense of caring for others, including people, materials, and nature. Such a more comprehen-sive framework could help bring attention to both the promises and contradictions within ethical consumption, and some avenues for further research are suggested in the conclusion.

By drawing on the sociology of consumption and other literature, the chapter contributes to understanding how and why people in affluent contexts are, due to sociopsychological, cultural, and structural factors, locked into high-carbon lifestyles. The chapter discusses both macro- and micro-drivers of high-carbon lifestyles. The former involves how high-carbon lifestyles are embedded within encompassing structures such as capitalism, social stratification (increasing inequalities), and infrastructures of mass consumption, and the latter on how consumption provides social meaning such as identity, positive social relationships, and social status to the consumer. Furthermore, the chapter addresses a variety of invisible drivers of consumption, such as processes of normalization, the role of ignorance, and how everyday high-climate impact practices are temporally and spatially structured. In the final section, the chapter discusses the importance of collective empowerment for unlocking societal patterns of high-carbon lifestyles and argues that a vision for change must take into account the actions and counterpower of people coordinating themselves in bottom-up change-driven processes.

The restricted mobility and homebody life people experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic implied a dramatic change of the time–space configuration in everyday life. Based on a qualitative interview study with 35 participants in Ireland and Sweden, this article presents theoretical perspectives and empirical illustrations on how changes in the sociotemporal rhythms in everyday life can shape conditions for making people's lifestyles more environmentally sustainable. Its findings suggest that the experience of a slower tempo can contribute to how people reflect on and engage in more sustainable practices, but they also reveal that people can have ambiguous and differentiated positive and negative experiences of time, and that said experience was often perceived as a temporary break rather than a lasting change. The article contributes by offering a nuanced understanding of the promises of slowing down as a way to encourage sustainable consumption.

This entry presents drivers of mass/excess consumption by drawing on classic and contemporary sociological concepts and research. Mass consumption is understood as the totality of consumption of commoditized goods and services, which is increasing in a fundamentally unsustainable way. The entry relates mass consumption to concepts such as consumerism, excess, and sufficiency. It argues that consumption, including needs/wants/desires, needs to be studied as social and symbolic, that is, part of a communicative act expressing identity, status, social roles, belongings, etc. It furthermore argues there is a need to combine macro- (e.g. institutions, infrastructure, consumer culture, social stratification), meso- (e.g. social practices) and micro-perspectives (socialization, identity, social relationships) to explain and understand the phenomenon. Temporal and spatial aspects are also considered.

Reflexivity and its counterpart— anti-reflexivity— are key concepts in environmental sociology. Reflexivity and similar concepts are presented as means for taking constructive steps towards sustainability in face of the often wicked nature (complex, uncertain, dynamic, value-laden, dilemmatic, ambivalent) of socio-ecological problems and risks. Anti-reflexivity is the suppressing or resisting of reflexivity. This entry discusses definitions of reflexivity, anti-reflexivity and related concepts based on key scholarly work in environmental sociology. From this field of research, reflexivity— or its absence/resistance— is discussed with regards to the system or macro level (society at large, state apparatus, the scientific field or general discourses in the public sphere), the process level (governance networks, decision-making processes), or at the level of individual and collective choices of action (consumption/lifestyle choices, social movements).

This entry reviews the concept of transformative learning. Transformative learning theory stresses a learning perspective for situations when actors in (self-)critical ways recognize and reassess basic assumptions and expectations that steer their thinking, feeling, and acting. The theory relies on the humanistic assumption that people have, via deliberative acts, inner capacities to change circumstances. Transformative learning is defined as the process through which actors transform problematic frames of reference. The concept has been applied broadly in sustainability studies, including environmental sociology. The entry discusses five such fields of research, with relevance for environmental sociology: (1) environmental and sustainability education research, (2) the role of emotions in relation to, for example, climate change, (3) research on environmental activism, (4) lifestyle change, and (5), on transformative learning on community/organizational levels.