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Researching the Future: How
Can we Promote Sustainable
Consumption? Can we promote
sustainable
Prof Cathy Urquhart consumption?
Sustainable and Ethical Enterprise Group
the
Future: Can we promote
##esrcfestival #mmususcon
sustainable
Overview
• What are an organisations options when
choosing how to respond to a more
sustainable world?
• What do we mean by sustainable
consumption?
• What needs to happen in order to have
sustainable consumption ?
• What are the research needs of businesses
when it comes to sustainability?
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Figure 1. CVF with
sustainability focus.
Source: Robbins and
Page (2012: 177)
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Dilemma of Growth
• Growth is unsustainable, de-growth is unstable
• Downward pressure on employment, people lose
jobs, output of economy falls, public spending is
cut, ability to service public debt is diminished 
spiral of recession
Green New Deal
• Keynesian response – tax cuts and public spending to
stimulate consumer demand
• Economic recovery needs investment
• Target investment towards energy saving,
• Low carbon infrastructures and ecological protection
• Green stimulus offers jobs and economic recovery in the
short term, energy security and technological innovation in
the medium term and ultimately sustainability – still growth
• Need different macroeconomic structure
• …..
The (non segmented) Green consumer
McDonald et al 2012
• The consumption undertaken by private
households accounts for a large proportion of the
economy’s environmental impact (30-40%)
• Previous dichotomous classifications in
marketing literature, grey and green, recyclers
and non recyclers, etc
the consumption undertaken by
private households accounts for a
large proportion
of the economy’s environmental
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Translators
• Translators are green in some aspects of their lives
and grey in others. They do not necessarily think
about sustainability in a holistic way. Not motivated
by a political agenda but by a sense of trying to do
what they perceive to be the right thing.
• If they are made aware of a concrete action that they
can take and they can see a clear benefit from doing
it, then they are apt to undertake it:
• Translators translate awareness into specific actions
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Exceptors
• Lifestyle is likely to be underpinned by, and designed
to implement, a personal philosophy of consumption,
such as, ‘I don’t believe in consumerism’
• They all have at least one aspect of their lives in
which they behave like grey consumers. This
exception to their otherwise coherent sustainable
lifestyles is likely to be a relatively small but conscious
lapse into mainstream consumerism.
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Selectors
• Selectors select an aspect of sustainable consumption
on which to focus. For example,
• They may be avid recyclers or pay a premium for
green energy or sponsor a child
• This group is attracted or motivated by a single issue
but is not interested in sustainability in a holistic way.
• Largest in terms of numbers
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A critique of sustainable consumption
• First, economic elites redefine the nature of the problem
from political to one of individual consumption (for
example, global warming stems from consumers failing
to cultivate a sustainable lifestyle).
• Next, economic elites promote the idea that the only
viable solution is for consumers to change their
behavior.
• Third, new markets are created in order to turn this
solution into a material reality
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“The responsible consumption myth promotes the
idea that governments can never achieve harmony
between competing economic and social or
environmental goals, and that this instead requires
a global community of morally enlightened
consumers who are empowered to make a
difference through the marketplace”
Markus Giesler and Ela
Veresiu 2014
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In Conclusion
• Organisations can focus internally or externally,
and on efficiency or innovation..the competing
values framework still holds
• The ‘green consumer’ is a complex beast not
necessarily amenable to simple segmentation
• There is a school of thought that the notion of
sustainable consumption shifts the responsibility
for sustainability on to individuals and markets
rather than society as a whole
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