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Warde, A. & Southerton, D. (eds.) (2012), ‘The Habits of Consumption’, COLLeGIUM of Studies Across Disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences, Volume 12.

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Debates around mitigating climate change increasingly focus on consumption. Recent popular and scientific attention has focused most sharply on ‘behaviour change’ – the basic presumption being that only if consumers (people), en-masse, change how they live their lives can a more environmentally sustainable future be achieved. Despite this being a generically sensible premise, how behaviour is conceptualised and how it comes to change is subject to much theoretical dispute and conceptual confusion. Such tensions are laid-bare when it comes to the notion of habits. The peer-reviewed essays in this volume interrogate, from different disciplinary positions, theoretical approaches to understanding behaviour change. A shared focus is the notion of habit, a mode of action not much considered by orthodox models of consumption behaviour but critical to sustainability. Each contribution considers the notion of habit (and sometimes routine) from particular disciplinary or theoretical perspectives. While clear consensus exists across disciplines that understanding habit is critical for addressing human behaviour, no consensus about how to analyse habit was available. It was as if every discipline has a place for it in its own jigsaw of concepts, but that the pieces were of different shapes and therefore not mutually transferable; the Pragmatist’s concept of habit could not be inserted into the vacant space in the economist’s picture, nor the psychologist’s into that of Sociology. It remains to be seen whether inter-disciplinary dialogue can deliver a remedy.

Contents:

Introduction: Social sciences and sustainable consumption

Alan Warde & Dale Southerton

From Habits to Social Institutions: A Pragmatist Perspective

Antti Gronow

Human Beings as Creatures of Habit

Erkki Kilpinen

Embodied Culture as Procedure: Rethinking the Link Between Personal and Objective Culture

Omar Lizardo

Towards a Better Accounting of the Roles of Body, Things and Habits in Consumption

Harold Wilhite

Habits and Their Creatures

Elizabeth Shove

Sustainable Consumption, Behaviour Change Policies and Theories of Practice

David Evans, Andrew McMeekin & Dale Southerton

The Importance of Timing for Breaking Commuters’ Car Driving Habits

John Thogersen

Habits of Sustainable Citizenship: The Example of Political Consumerism

Michele Micheletti, Dietlind Stolle & Daniel Berlin