Daniel Welch

Constructing and mobilizing ‘the consumer’: Responsibility, consumption and the politics of sustainability:

This paper advances critical perspectives on the governance of sustainable consumption by exploring the ways in which ‘the consumer’ is constructed and mobilized by strategic actors and organizations. Existing approaches draw on theories of practice to emphasize the limitations of governing through behaviour change. Whilst this provides a welcome corrective to the overemphasis on individual responsibility in sustainability research and policy, fundamental questions concerning changes over time, variation across substantive domains, and the mechanisms through which authorities and intermediaries responsibilize ‘the consumer’ are neglected. By way of rejoinder, we suggest that attention should be paid to the project of sustainable consumption and – following Clive Barnett, Nick Clarke and colleagues’ analysis of ethical consumption campaigning – the ways in which it engages consuming subjects and mobilizes the rhetorical figure of ‘the consumer’. To illustrate, we present the findings from an empirical study – drawing on documentary sources as well as 38 key informant interviews – of how the challenge of food waste reduction has been framed, interpreted and responded to in the UK. Our analysis suggests that initial responses to the issue made claims on the responsibilities of individuals as consumers, but that this quickly gave way to an emergent sense of shared and distributed responsibility. To conclude we argue for the importance of exploring specific instances of sustainable consumption governance and their underlying political rationalities, as well as periodizing these accounts.

Sustainable Production and Consumption

Sustainable production and consumption (SPC) is both a policy area and a multi- and interdisciplinary research agenda that seeks to address the transformation of society toward environmental and social sustainability. The SPC field encompasses diverse research topics and theoretical approaches, often characterized as falling into stronger and weaker versions, defined by commitment to more or less systemic socioeconomic change. Fault lines within the field reflect fundamental controversies within the social and behavioral sciences more broadly, such as the structure–agency antinomy. Major theoretical developments within SPC include novel conceptual frameworks for production–consumption systems and reconceptualizations of consumption.

Consumption and Teleoaffective Formations: Consumer Culture and Commercial Communications

This article considers the potential of a novel practice theoretical concept – teleoaffective formation – for the study of consumption. The concept builds on Schatzki’s social ontology of practice. Teleoaffective formations are configurations across multiple practices that enjoin those practices to common ends, ordering their affective engagements and offering general understandings through which participants make sense of the projects they pursue. This article argues that the approach affords consideration of large-scale configurations of practice and discourse and, therefore, enables re-engagement, from a practice theory perspective, with an earlier generation of concerns with consumer culture – including issues of cultural intermediation, consumption norms and the motivational structures of consumption. The distinctive features of the approach are illustrated through three successive teleoaffective formations that link the field of commercial communications (advertising, marketing, public relations, etc.) with consumer culture. The first – ‘consumer sovereignty’ – originates in the 1920s and 1930s and finds its fullest expression in the mid-20th century. The second – ‘emancipatory consumerism’ – emerged in the late 1960s and came to characterise late 20th-century consumer culture. These are briefly sketched. The third, which I propose to call ‘promotional sustainable consumption’, is a nascent formation of discourse and practice relating brands, sustainability and consumption. This formation is explored in more depth. The periodisation should not be understood in terms of epochal shifts but as an ongoing, recombinatory process. The three formations represent reconfigurations between heterogeneous elements, inter alia: general understandings, teleological orientations and affective engagements. Each successive formation informs novel understandings of the consumer and provides cultural resources for transformations in consumption norms. Each also provides resources for capitalist legitimation. The article concludes with a brief discussion of some theoretical and methodological implications of the approach.

Who’s responsible for food waste? Consumers, retailers and the food waste discourse coalition in the United Kingdom:

Drawing on empirical research, including interviews with 38 key informants, this article examines how the challenge of food waste reduction has come to be framed, interpreted and responded to in th...

Consumption in Perspective

In a recent review of developments in the sociology of consumption Alan Warde (2015: 129) noted that the ‘problem of the relationship between production and consumption, which was in a sense the starting point of empirical investigations of consumption, is returning to the agenda’. Acknowledging the partial autonomy of consumption, and ‘separating it out for specialized attention’ (2015: 129), has afforded multiple analytical insights. However, today, novel ‘ways to reconnect [consumption] with production and provision, and with capital and labour, are needed’ (2015: 129). Mark Harvey’s Drinking Water and Kathryn Wheeler and Miriam Glucksmann’s Household Recycling and Consumption Work do just that. Léna Pellandini-Simányi’s Consumption Norms and Everyday Ethics situates consumption within a wider societal context in a different way: through linking the norms enjoining everyday consumption with Weltanschauung that ‘integrate ethical ideas of the good life and justice as well as pragmatic beliefs concerning how the world is’ (p. 51). In Drinking Water Mark Harvey deploys the neo-Polanyian ‘instituted economic process’ (IEP) approach he has spent many years developing to the political economies of drinking water as they have been configured and reconfigured in the UK (specifically

Climate Change as Social Drama: Global Warming in the Public Sphere. Philip Smith and Nicolas Howe

problem’, are concealed (p. 192). Ultimately, for Macnicol, discrimination is socially constructed, it changes its meaning according to political narratives, and in our current meritocratic and competitive neoliberal world it is particularly precarious as ‘we are in effect discriminating against our future selves’ (p. 178). It is this notion of the social construction of meaning that serves as critique of Macnicol. The analysis presented is evidently Marxist in persuasion, and draws upon a top-down mode of power. There are substantial references to the ways in which governments impose ageing policies on the masses according to a neoliberal agenda, and the masking of inequalities between the rich and poor. Whilst this is insightful, it does not truly reflect the force of the neoliberal discourse upon the human populace, specifically those in old age. A historical and political analysis is useful for understanding the impact of neoliberalism upon the ageing population and wider society but it takes a very particular view, and fails to comprehend the extent to which this ideology has, since the late 1970s, shaped the thinking of people. A Foucauldian analysis, linked to the concept of ‘biopolitics’, and following a bottom-up approach to the understanding of the functions of power, would have enabled a more in-depth examination of this, providing a rationale as to why individuals in democratic countries such as the UK and USA largely accept restricting policies with little active resistance, why there are intergenerational conflicts between the young and the old, linked to Beck’s and Beck-Gernsheim’s (2001) modernity thesis, and why the meaning of discrimination has altered. However, I believe this current work on neoliberalism and ageing policy to be invaluable for academics and students alike, as it is comprehensive in scale and offers, in the conclusion, viable ways forward to combat inequalities. It raises important questions about the future, specifically in relation to the treatment of older people; something which we all have an invested interest in and cannot now ignore.

Book Review: Climate Change as Social Drama: Global Warming in the Public Sphere

problem’, are concealed (p. 192). Ultimately, for Macnicol, discrimination is socially constructed, it changes its meaning according to political narratives, and in our current meritocratic and competitive neoliberal world it is particularly precarious as ‘we are in effect discriminating against our future selves’ (p. 178). It is this notion of the social construction of meaning that serves as critique of Macnicol. The analysis presented is evidently Marxist in persuasion, and draws upon a top-down mode of power. There are substantial references to the ways in which governments impose ageing policies on the masses according to a neoliberal agenda, and the masking of inequalities between the rich and poor. Whilst this is insightful, it does not truly reflect the force of the neoliberal discourse upon the human populace, specifically those in old age. A historical and political analysis is useful for understanding the impact of neoliberalism upon the ageing population and wider society but it takes a very particular view, and fails to comprehend the extent to which this ideology has, since the late 1970s, shaped the thinking of people. A Foucauldian analysis, linked to the concept of ‘biopolitics’, and following a bottom-up approach to the understanding of the functions of power, would have enabled a more in-depth examination of this, providing a rationale as to why individuals in democratic countries such as the UK and USA largely accept restricting policies with little active resistance, why there are intergenerational conflicts between the young and the old, linked to Beck’s and Beck-Gernsheim’s (2001) modernity thesis, and why the meaning of discrimination has altered. However, I believe this current work on neoliberalism and ageing policy to be invaluable for academics and students alike, as it is comprehensive in scale and offers, in the conclusion, viable ways forward to combat inequalities. It raises important questions about the future, specifically in relation to the treatment of older people; something which we all have an invested interest in and cannot now ignore.

Climate Change as Social Drama: Global Warming in the Public Sphere Philip Smith and Nicolas Howe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, £55 (Hardcover), £21 (Paperback), 249 pp, ISBN: 978‐1107503052.

problem’, are concealed (p. 192). Ultimately, for Macnicol, discrimination is socially constructed, it changes its meaning according to political narratives, and in our current meritocratic and competitive neoliberal world it is particularly precarious as ‘we are in effect discriminating against our future selves’ (p. 178). It is this notion of the social construction of meaning that serves as critique of Macnicol. The analysis presented is evidently Marxist in persuasion, and draws upon a top-down mode of power. There are substantial references to the ways in which governments impose ageing policies on the masses according to a neoliberal agenda, and the masking of inequalities between the rich and poor. Whilst this is insightful, it does not truly reflect the force of the neoliberal discourse upon the human populace, specifically those in old age. A historical and political analysis is useful for understanding the impact of neoliberalism upon the ageing population and wider society but it takes a very particular view, and fails to comprehend the extent to which this ideology has, since the late 1970s, shaped the thinking of people. A Foucauldian analysis, linked to the concept of ‘biopolitics’, and following a bottom-up approach to the understanding of the functions of power, would have enabled a more in-depth examination of this, providing a rationale as to why individuals in democratic countries such as the UK and USA largely accept restricting policies with little active resistance, why there are intergenerational conflicts between the young and the old, linked to Beck’s and Beck-Gernsheim’s (2001) modernity thesis, and why the meaning of discrimination has altered. However, I believe this current work on neoliberalism and ageing policy to be invaluable for academics and students alike, as it is comprehensive in scale and offers, in the conclusion, viable ways forward to combat inequalities. It raises important questions about the future, specifically in relation to the treatment of older people; something which we all have an invested interest in and cannot now ignore.