AN APPRAISAL OF CONSUMING VALUES AND CONTESTED CULTURES

ABSTRACT

The term “sustainable consumption” is subject to many interpretations, from Agenda 21’s hopeful assertion that governments should encourage less materialistic lifestyles based on new definitions of “wealth” and “prosperity”, to the view prevalent in international policy discourse that green and ethical consumerism will be sufficient to transform markets to produce continual and “clean” economic growth. These different perspectives are examined using a conceptual framework derived from Cultural Theory, to illustrate their fundamentally competing beliefs about the nature of the environment and society, and the meanings attached to consumption. Cultural Theory argues that societies should develop pluralistic policies to include all perspectives. Using this framework, the paper examines the UK strategy for sustainable consumption, and identifies a number of failings in current policy. These are that the UK strategy is strongly biased towards individualistic, market-based and neo-liberal policies, so it can only respond to a small part of the problem of unsustainable consumption. Policy recommendations include measures to strengthen the input from competing cultures, to realize the potential for more collective, egalitarian and significantly less materialistic consumption patterns.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This research was carried out as part of the Programmed on Environmental Decision-Making, at the Centre for Social and Economic Research on the Global Environment, University of East Anglia, for which the author gratefully acknowledges ESRC core funding. Thanks also to the editor, the anonymous referee and Andy Jordan for comments which resulted in a far improved paper; remaining inadequacies are the author’s sole responsibility.

Journal Information

For over sixty-five years, the Review of Social Economy has published high-quality peer-reviewed work on the many relationships between social values and economics.   The field of social economics discusses how the economy and social justice relate, and what this implies for economic theory and policy. Papers published range from conceptual work on aligning economic institutions and policies with given ethical principles, to theoretical representations of individual behavior that allow for both self-interested and ‘pro-social’ motives, and to original empirical work on persistent social issues such as poverty, inequality, and discrimination.   In promoting discourse on social-economic themes, and unifying and invigorating scholarship around them, the journal is centrally concerned with these core research areas. The Review is a journal specialized in and a premier outlet for scholarly research at the intersection of social values and economics, and encourages researchers engaged in high-quality work in these areas. Implications for social programs and policies may be discussed in regular articles or in a Speakers’ Corner contribution.   The Review provides a platform for established social-economics research, but also for research from other branches of economics and the social sciences, when the goal of developing better understandings of the role of social values in economic life is pursued.  

Publisher Information

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