In planning the summer school we thought it would be useful to begin with questions of consumption. What theories, concepts, and critiques might be borrowed from the literature and used for the purpose of understanding and analysing relationships between consumption, everyday life and sustainability? Just as important, what gaps and omissions might this reveal? Put another way, what new challenges does the study of sustainability present for contemporary theories of consumption?

This is an ambitious agenda to get through in just a few hours. Undaunted, the three papers in this session tackle big issues. Not content with merely looking at consumption, Daniel Miller starts by commenting on the broader context in which it has been considered. He argues that one of the problems is that consumption has so often been viewed as a problem. Having shaken off this negative veil it is possible to see and to think more clearly about the positive aspects of consumption. As a means of tackling poverty, there is a case to be made for more not less consumption. There is further case to be made for recognising the positive values of consumption and the social arrangements those entail. He makes both cases and does so with the aim of strengthening, not weakening, arguments about sustainability.

Alan Warde’s problem is the problem of choice. In challenging the very idea of consumer choice he introduces a raft of issues which are central to the Summer School and to many of the papers which follow. If we were to summarise the essence of his paper in one short limerick it might go something like this:

They say there’s no choice but to choose,

A claim that’s designed to confuse,

But modes of provision

And social division

Are superior concepts to use.

(Warde, Palmer and Shove, 2001)

This paper tries to provide a broader context for the overall consideration of consumption. It starts by noting the ideological framework within which consumption is usually considered as an intrinsically destructive if not evil activity, as against the creative work of production. This is as true for ancient and for many tribal societies as it is for contemporary environmentalist debates. By contrast the talk then provides a series of arguments for a positive view of consumption and future increases in consumption as well as its ethical consequences for the population of consumers.

The first of these is to re-cast the increase in consumption as an attempt to tackle poverty and the moral argument for a massive expansion of consumption throughout the developing world and with respect to large populations of underprivileged groups within the developed world. The second is to consider the positive arguments for consumer goods whose primary attraction is typically characterised by commentators as symbolic rather than fulfilling what have been termed functional needs. Two cases will be presented, the first based on the role of goods in the expression of care and love within the contemporary British family as against family relations that were previously not primarily expressed through the medium of consumption. The second will be the role of goods in relation to racial and other stereotypes in Trinidad, and the impact of mass consumption in becoming a primary medium for the expression of generalities about other people. Finally within this section an argument will be made against the common assertion that the rise of mass consumption is merely an indication of the spread of either Americanisation or indeed capitalism by considering the possibilities of mass consumption as either authentically `Eastern’ or `Socialist’. Overall it is suggested that there is a danger that the denigration of consumption as, for example, stupid or wasteful, becomes a medium for the denigration of populations associated with consumption. Typically this becomes a medium for the denigration of women as the `natural’ consumer, or the mass population who are associated with what are seen as `vulgar’ or `manipulated’ expressions of consumption.

Having argued for the poverty of much of the moralism within which most debates around consumption are currently framed, the talk will examine other ways in which we can start to construct a more nuanced stance towards the rise of consumption and its specific contents. This will be based around the case-study of the car. First an examination will be made of the conventional critique of the car through an exploration of the concept of `externalities’. This approach insists that an assessment of the car must include all those implications of its existence in the world that have become taken for granted and are no longer evidently the consequences of car use. This approach will be broadened to consider what might be called social as well as economic externalities. I will then argue that while this approach has several merits over a more naïve assessment of the car it fails to acknowledge what emerges from an ethnographic encounter with the car in diverse societies (see D. Miller Ed Car Cultures Berg 2001), which is the way people experience its `humanity’ and its centrality to what are regarded as moral and social necessities.

In conclusion it will be suggested that none of what has been argued in this talk precludes a stringent critique of consumption on the basis of issues of sustainability and the negative consequences of the car in terms of both labour exploitation and environmental damage, but that such a critique is likely to be much more effective if it acknowledges the many positive and ethical advantages that people feel derive from the vast bulk of contemporary consumption including their possession and use of cars.

Alan Warde

The prevailing view of consumption is that it can be comprehended as the exercise of individual and voluntary choices made with reference to personal preference regarding the style(s) in which a person’s life should be led. This talk seeks to problematise that view, challenging arguments which suggest consumption has become a realm, sometimes playful and sometimes anxiety-provoking, of freedom. It is suggested instead that consumption is the expression of socio-structural differences and constrained by the unequal distribution of various resources between social groups. It is proposed that consumption is a collective enterprise that is, above all, embedded in routine social practices. Consequently, most consumption becomes normalized within the practical conduct of daily lives and becomes taken-for-granted.

This view of consumer behaviour raises important empirical and theoretical issues regarding the capacity for individuals to reflexively adopt, and adapt, more environmentally sustainable modes of consumption. This is not to say that groups of ethical consumers do not strive, reflexively, to consume in environmentally friendly ways. However, consumption is a complex and socially differentiated process that cannot be altered, modified or changed by simply offering consumers a diversity of lifestyle options nor by generating information regarding qualities of different products. In short, many hopes for more environmentally sustainable forms of consumption are based on misleading models of consumption as an individual and voluntaristic process.

The talk will develop notions of ordinary consumption and social practice.

Elizabeth Shove

Environmentally-relevant patterns of consumption are changing and are doing so in what appear to be unsustainable ways. If we see consumption as an individualistic or a voluntary enterprise it makes sense to view these developments as correspondingly optional. But what are the implications of taking a more embedded and a more systemic view of ordinary consumption? If we do this, how are we to explain the dynamics involved?

I want to explore two potentially relevant concepts, ratcheting and standardisation. Ratcheting first. If we argue that consumption is part of everyday life, and that practices and habits in some way hang together there is merit in thinking about the evolution of expectation as a process of collective ratcheting. The ratchet is a device the teeth of which lock a wrench – or perhaps a culture – into a particular position. Once held, there is no way back. The only option is forward, onto the next tooth. Standardisation second. Standardisation suggests that the reach of what comes to be normal is more and more encompassing. Practices once confined to specific cultures – like wearing a business suit, or working between the hours of 9am and 5pm - seem to be extending (and thereby eroding other traditions) in ways which imply convergence in both technology and practice. Old routines die-hard, some are stubbornly resistant to change and the reinventing of normal and ordinary practice is neither certain or inevitable. Nonetheless, some things are changing as demonstrated by the recent history of comfort and cleanliness.

In the course of just a few years, the diversity of the global indoor environment has reduced dramatically. The spread of heating and cooling technologies has been such that many people now inhabit and expect uniform conditions all over the world. The siesta is going out of fashion, the seasons are barely detectable and, in some places at least, climate sensitive building types are no longer constructed. If they are to provide environments which meet international comfort standards (defined on the basis of physiological research), designers are increasingly obliged to include energy intensive equipment with which to manage and control the weather inside. Bit by bit, ways of life and related infrastructures have changed and have done so in a manner which seems to illustrate global standardisation realised through a process of local ratcheting.

The business of bathing is a touch more complicated. Americans use roughly twice the amount of water that the British do for bathing and showering. In America, showering accounts for 90% of this water consumption compared with 36% in the UK where the bath remains important. But this is not a stable picture. The British bath is in danger of being abandoned in favour of showering on a daily or twice daily basis. In environmental terms this is a problem for although one bath might use more hot water than one shower, frequent showering, especially with a power shower, soon tips the balance.

At the level of the individual, the concept of ratcheting still makes sense: habits form and once established there seems to be no way back. However, a longer term history of bathing reveals radical swings in what counts as "normal". Although the Romans bathed and the Greeks showered, there have been times – indeed entire centuries – during which there was no association between washing, cleaning, health and hygiene. Perhaps because people have had different reasons for getting wet all over, the story here is not a simple narrative of ratcheting standards or of escalating expectations of cleanliness.

These two cases, the indoor climate and the shower, suggest that the reinvention of normality proceeds in different ways. In both cases we observe a measure of convergence and in both cases too, the image of ratcheting helps capture the embedding and locking-in of new suites of practice. Yet the mechanisms of change are not the same.

To go further we need to borrow other ideas about the rate and direction of social and economic development. We might, for instance, argue that the spread of air-conditioning reveals a perfectly familiar narrative of capitalist expansion. There has been and still is a lot of money to be made by defining "natural" environments as inadequate and providing the means to fix them. From this perspective, standardisation is a consequence of global marketing, the inevitable result of which is escalating consumption. It is perhaps harder to explain the shift from bath to shower in quite these terms though there is no doubting the commercial significance of the bathroom industries. Even if the needs of capitalism account for ratcheting of demand and the standardisation (and sometimes also the differentiation) of goods and services, why does this take the form it does? Why showering and not bathing, and why are some but not other aspects of the weather controlled and reproduced indoors?

Ideas about the operation of sociotechnical regimes and the co-evolution of technologies and practices give better grip on the direction if not the rate of change. Notions of path-dependency are, for instance, of use in making sense of the history of air-conditioning and in following the institutionalisation of mains water supplies, the bathroom and the equipment it contains. Observations about the manner in which habits and practices are scripted by the technologies on which they depend also ring true with reference to the power shower and the veranda. The implication here is that the processes of ratcheting and standardisation may be generic but that the details vary from one sociotechnical context to another.

But what about the reinvention of meaning? Is it not necessary to understand that definitions of comfort and cleanliness have changed and might this not be the missing ingredient? What about conceptualising change in terms of symbolic significance? In questioning what comfort is, what constitutes cleanliness, and what heating, cooling and bathing are really for we home in on another potentially important issue. This has to do with how change is viewed and justified. Historians of bathing identify multiple reasons for immersing oneself in water and in explaining when and why they wash, people still invoke an impressive range of benefits including relaxation, invigoration, pleasure, social acceptability, appearance, cleanliness, privacy, sociability, and comfort.

These sometimes competing, sometimes complementary rationales are relevant for they suggest that practices of bathing, like those of heating and cooling, reveal different strategies for the resolution of shared dilemmas and the achievement of shared goals, mediated by the technologies and resources at hand. I argue that these dilemmas and goals are the ends around which various modes of ratcheting and standardising revolve (of course these modes also shape the ends themselves).

Looking back at the problems which showering and air-conditioning promise to resolve and at the history of ideas at stake, it is important to notice that both have to do with the reproduction of natural conditions and with keeping nature at bay. This leads to the perhaps paradoxical conclusion that some of the most environmentally damaging and some of the most energy and resource intensive dimensions of everyday life relate to our interface with nature in the home, in the bathroom, and at work. It is certainly not the whole story, but in this context it is also important to notice the standardising – even universalising – role of scientific knowledge (for example, of physiology, disease, and human biology) in defining the threats and benefits of nature and in providing the means with which they are managed.

Although consumption, (non)choice and change are consistent themes the papers raise different questions about the intersection of consumption, sustainability and everyday life. Here are just four.

• If consumption is embedded in social structure does sustainability depend upon change at that level?
• What if social structure depends upon levels of consumption, what does that mean for sustainability?
• Is there a tension between contextually specific practices of consumption and increasingly standardised expectations of "normality"?
• What more needs to be known about the dynamics of ordinary and routine as opposed to conspicuous consumption?

Cooper, G. 1998, Air-conditioning America: engineers and the controlled environment, 1900-1960, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore

Gronow, J. and Warde, A., (eds), 2001, Ordinary Consumption, Routledge

Miller, D. 2001, Car Cultures, Oxford, Berg

Miller, D and Slater, D. 2000 The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach. Oxford: Berg

Miller, D. 2001. The Dialectics of Shopping. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Ogle, M., 1996, All the modern conveniences: American household plumbing 1840-1890, Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press

Porter, R. 1993 Consumption: disease of the consumer society. In Consumption and the World of Goods. Ed. J. Brewer and R. Porter. London: Routledge