Cecilia Fredriksson

Sustainability service in-store: Service work and the promotion of sustainable consumption

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore, illustrate, and conceptualize how sustainability service is performed and the role it plays in the promotion of sustainable consumption. Design/methodology/approach – Theoretically, this paper takes a practice theory approach, conceptualizing the provision of sustainability service as a set of complex, socio-material, and performative practices. Methodologically, this paper draws on an ethnographic study of a retail chain – W-Store – and its sustainability service. Interviews with management and focus group interviews with shop assistants and consumers, as well as observations made in-store, make up the material analysed. Findings – The provision of sustainability service is accomplished in this case via three service practices; arranging green shopping trails, answering sustainability questions, and promoting sustainability to green consumers in-store. The analysis shows that the retailing of sustainable products is not simply a matter of including sustainability products in the range and instructing shop assistants to promote them. Sustainability service – as enacted at W-Store – was dependent on the successful combination and configuration of human competence (service staff) and IT and organizational artefacts. There also needed to be congruence between consumers and their images and between retailers and the version of sustainability they were enacting. Finally, the provision of sustainability service required an investigative and adaptive organization capable of keeping up as well as developing vis-a-vis changing sustainability discourses and issues. However, once the necessary conditions had been met, sustainability service worked towards promoting sustainable consumption by making green shopping possible, educating consumers on sustainability issues, and motivating them via positive feedback and dialogue.Originality/value – Underscores the importance of investigating sustainability service and offers both a conceptual approach to and an analysis of this particular type of retail service work.

Secondhand Index and the Spirit of Green Vintage Fashion

This chapter analyses how secondhand consumption and vintage fashion retailers are incorporated into Swedish urban life and the retail planning context. The chapter is part of an ongoing research project, studying retail planning and vintage fashion consumption practices. Key concepts when discussing retail and localization are attractiveness and accessibility. Cities are often characterised by their unique qualities and the spirit of creativity. In the “experience society”, retail and (fashion) consumption are regarded as everyday activities for identity development and communication. Goods/services have become value-creating components of a hedonistic fashion consumption culture that is characterised by an increasingly more knowledgeable and demanding fashion consumer. Secondhand and vintage fashion represents an economic grey area and an important part of the informal economy. The existence of both types of retailer within an urban space can communicate specific values and imagery. Stores, which sell pre-owned goods and dedicate themselves to re-use and charity, have their own specific historiography. In the Western welfare context, however, re-use and secondhand goods obtain a specific significance via the fashion transformation of the pre-owned, which took place during the post-war era. In place development and retail planning, there is trust in the potential of fashion, sustainability and creativity. This finds specific expression when it comes to the production of urban fashion retail space. This chapter sheds light on the complex relationship between retail planning and the production of green vintage fashion space. By identifying how some Swedish secondhand and vintage fashion markets are organised, the study contributes to an understanding of the conditions under which secondhand and vintage fashion markets operate.

Fashion Thinking Practice: On Crafting Confessions and the Creative Consumer

Abstract Practices of creative self-expression are related to specific considerations and confessions in the context of positioning within a contemporary fashion consumer society. If the craft consumer is someone who exercises personal control over all the processes involved, how then will these practices be transformed into learning objectives? Where are the manuals and how can we understand the practice of the creative and confessing consumer? Taking its starting point in the production of second-hand value, this article focuses on crafting confessions and creativity as a fashion thinking imperative in a Swedish context. The art of confession is a practice that can be understood as a self-regulating mechanism. By thematizing a number of cultural programs of confessional everyday practice, it is the intention of this article to illuminate how these have become an important part of how alternative consumption trends act as self-regulating practices on the Swedish fashion market.