How do consumers make sense of sustainable consumption: a study on lived experience and discourses

Abstract

This paper investigates the understanding of sustainably conscious consumers on their consumption and non-consumption experience of sustainable clothes from a phenomenological perspective. It further elaborates on the underlying discourses that inform consumers way of understanding sustainable consumption and practices aligned with that understanding. For this objective a Foucauldian discourse analysis was integrated under phenomenological framework in order to gain insights into both the consumers' reflection of their ‘lived’ experience at micro level and how these experiences reflected the dominant discourses that inform their understanding, from a macro level perspective. Nine interviews were conducted with nine Swedish sustainably conscious female consumers who purchased both sustainable and non-sustainable clothing items. The findings illustrated three perspectives where consumers experienced different types of emotions ranging from positive ones, like empowerment and gratification, to negative ones, like anxiety and guilt, showing that consumer experience of sustainable consumption was highly emotional rather than rational. In the case of clothes, the nature of clothes having high symbolic values added to the various conflicting discourses, making the consumers experience even more intense internal conflicts when not acting accordingly to their sustainable beliefs. In addition, consumers understanding was also found to be highly subjective, individualized and influenced by prior experience, as consumers made sense of different discourses and shaped them in their own way to fit in with their own values and everyday life. They further made use of different alternative sustainable consumption practices other than the one being asked in order to address their sustainable values and identities.