Between routine and moral obligation: Exploring family consumption, emotions and sustainable lifestyles
Abstract
Consumption and production are crucial areas for reducing societies’ impact
on the climate and environment and this is also one of the United Nations’ global
goals for sustainable development. Despite that the risks of climate change and environmental
degradation is well-known, lifestyle changes where it is needed have not
reached sufficient scales. This study focuses on the emotional aspects of sustainable
choices to highlight the ambiguousness of consumption. The purpose is to explore possibilities
and barriers for sustainable consumption by investigating the family as one
unit of consumption, as well as families’ emotional orientation and reasoning about
consumption and sustainability as a way of living. It does so by conducting interviews
with six middle-class families in Gothenburg, Sweden, that to some extend try to make
sustainable choices in everyday consumption. The results indicate that changing consumption
patterns are intertwined with changing emotional attachments to consumption
practices, re-negotiating relationships connected to these practices, and developing
an emotional obligation to sustainability or environmentalism. Emotions also inform
and express barriers to sustainable living, in that even the interested have to balance
sustainable consumption with conventional consumption to manage everyday
family life.
Degree
Student essay
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Date
2020-09-08Author
Andersson, Erik
Keywords
sociology of emotions
sustainability
family
consumption
lifestyle
Language
eng