Sufficiency in social practice : searching potentials for sufficient behavior in a consumerist culture
- To live a life of sufficiency in a consumerist culture may be one of the most ambitious experiments an individual could undertake. To investigate this challenge, we employed a social-practice approach. This article is based on 42 qualitative interviews asking respondents why and how they acted in a sufficient way within a Western infrastructure and culture. The results indicate that sufficiency-oriented people draw on particular meanings in everyday-life practices when adopting relevant resource-extensive actions. These understandings encompass an amalgam of environmentally friendly attitudes, positive social intentions, and/or personal commitments to thriftiness. We further identified a set of specific practices - including sharing,To live a life of sufficiency in a consumerist culture may be one of the most ambitious experiments an individual could undertake. To investigate this challenge, we employed a social-practice approach. This article is based on 42 qualitative interviews asking respondents why and how they acted in a sufficient way within a Western infrastructure and culture. The results indicate that sufficiency-oriented people draw on particular meanings in everyday-life practices when adopting relevant resource-extensive actions. These understandings encompass an amalgam of environmentally friendly attitudes, positive social intentions, and/or personal commitments to thriftiness. We further identified a set of specific practices - including sharing, recycling, and reusing - as useful for the adoption of a sufficient lifestyle. For our respondents, many of these sufficiency practices occurred regularly in daily life and were rarely questioned. Using an additional survey, we show that these routines lead to less resource-intensive lifestyles and demonstrate how a small group of people has been able to habitually adopt sufficiency practices. However, the majority does not see a need for more frequent implementation of such routines because daily decision-making processes are widely focused on the consumption of products.…
Document Type: | Peer-Reviewed Article |
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Author: | Melanie Speck, Marco Hasselkuß |
URN (citable link): | https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:bsz:wup4-opus-65258 |
DOI (citable link): | https://doi.org/10.1080/15487733.2015.11908143 |
Year of Publication: | 2015 |
Language: | English |
Source Title (English): | Sustainability |
Volume: | 11 |
Issue: | 2 |
First Page: | 14 |
Last Page: | 32 |
Divisions: | Nachhaltiges Produzieren und Konsumieren |
Dewey Decimal Classification: | 300 Sozialwissenschaften |
OpenAIRE: | OpenAIRE |
Licence: | Creative Commons - Namensnennung |