I will if you will

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• I will if you will
• consumption, sustainability and the limits of
  persuasion
• Tim Jackson
• t.jackson_at_surrey.ac.uk
• Wellington, Social Marketing Down Under
• 9th March2007

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Hardly anyone is French..
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Living in a Material World

• a proliferation of material goods
• the commodification of previously public goods
• a structural reliance on consumption growth
• personal and cultural identity
• social logic
• epistemology, ethics, myths and cosmologies

And I am a material girl..
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Consumption as Wellbeing
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Consumption as Wellbeing
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Consumption as Wellbeing
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Consumption as Pathology

• The consumer way of life is deeply flawed,
  both psychologically and ecologically
• (Wachtel 1989)
• The consumer is the eternal suckling, crying
  out for the bottle.
• (Fromm 1976)

happiness is a day at the mall?
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Behind the Consumer Society
commonality or difference?
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The Naming of Names

• Politicians are continuing to squabble over the
  Downing Street reception for England's World
  Cup-winning rugby team.
• (BBC News Online, 7 Dec 2003)
• The subjective reality of the world hangs on the
  thin thread of conversation the world begins to
  shake in the very instant that its sustaining
  conversation begins to falter.
• (Berger 1967)

All black and blue?
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Proposition 1 Behaviour is motivated by
functionings
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A Life without Shame

• To lead a life without shame, to be able to
  visit and entertain ones friends, to keep track
  of what is going on and what others are talking
  about, and so on, requires a more expensive
  bundle of goods and services in a society that is
  generally richer and in which most people have,
  say, means of transport, affluent clothing,
  radios or television sets, and so on... The same
  absolute level of capabilities may thus have a
  greater relative need for incomes (and
  commodities).
• Amartya Sen 1998

Oozing with elegance and luxury?
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Proposition 2 The self is socially constructed
The self is something which arises in the
process of social experience and activity, that
is, it develops in the given individual as a
result of his relations to that process as a
whole and to other individuals in that process.
George Herbert Mead 1934 Shame bears directly
on self-identity because it is essentially
anxiety about the adequacy of the narrative by
means of which the individual sustains a coherent
identity. Anthony Giddens 1991
Who am I?
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Proposition 3 Material goods embody symbolic
meaning
Forget the idea of consumer irrationality.
Forget that commodities are good for eating,
clothing and shelter forget their usefulness and
try instead the idea that commodities are good
for thinking treat them as a non-verbal medium
for the human creative faculty.
Douglas and Isherwood 1979
Cant buy me love?
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Proposition 4 Consumer society is a defence
against anomie
Creation is a nightmare spectacular taking place
on a planet that has been soaked for hundreds of
millions of years in the blood of all its
creatures. Hollow hands clasp ludicrous
possessions because they are links in the chain
of life. If it breaks they are truly lost
Mrs Bush and I want to encourage Americans to
go out shopping.
shopping for meaning?
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Policy Lessons

• Despite the hands-off rhetoric of consumer
  sovereignty, policy intervenes continually in
  the behaviour of individuals, both directly and
  (more importantly) indirectly - through its
  influence over the social and institutional
  context within which consumer behaviours are
  negotiated.
• This view opens out a range of vital avenues for
  policy intervention, in particular through the
  influence of government on
• facilitating conditions (markets, access etc)
• institutional context (product, media, trading
  standards etc)
• business practices
• social and cultural context and
• its own example.

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Approach evolves as attitudes and behaviours
change over time

Changing Behaviours
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The Limits of Persuasion

• social, institutional and cultural context
• community-based social change
• threatened meaning and resistance to change
• the social control of symbolic resources.

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An individuals main objective in consumption is
to help create the social world and to find a
credible place in it. Mary Douglas 1976