This handbook sets out the issues and themes with which the Summer School engages. It describes something of the Summer School’s history and context and explains what this means for the framing of the programme and for the central questions addressed in each of the five sessions.

The Summer School is funded by the European Science Foundation’s Tackling Environmental Resource Management Programme (TERM). The European Science Foundation, supported by subscriptions from a range of national research councils, funds exchanges, summer schools, and workshops with the aim of adding European value to existing research activity.

The 2001 Summer School is organised by a team including Joann Bowker, Heather Chappells, Dale Southerton and Matthew Watson and by a Steering Group consisting of Jaap Jelsma, Mika Pantzar and Hal Wilhite. It is co-ordinated by Elizabeth Shove. Most of the organisers and some of the presenters and speakers have taken part in the previous Summer School or Workshops.

Building upon this work, the people involved have sought to establish an interdisciplinary but nonetheless distinctive approach to questions of consumption, everyday life and sustainability. By way of introduction the following paragraphs give an indication of the direction this has taken.

Rather than concentrating on individual beliefs and attitudes or the behaviour of "green" consumers, the Summer School programme assumes that questions of sustainability and consumption have to do with the routine organisation of everyday life and the mediation of lifestyles and "choices" through social institutions and sociotechnical infrastructures. The programme takes consumption to be a collective enterprise held together by social expectations, cultural conventions, and material constraints. This way of thinking has theoretical implications for academic research and practical consequences for policy. Critically, it puts the question of how consumption practices change, and with what environmental consequence, in a new light.

In environmental terms, current patterns of consumption pose threats for CO₂ emissions and global warming; for pollution and loss of biodiversity and for the depletion of finite resources. This has led environmentalists to concentrate, rather anxiously, on the consumption of key resources like energy and water, and on raw materials and the production of waste. Claims about the need to reduce material intensities by factors of four or ten have followed, as have efforts to quantify the effects of individual consumer choice (Noorman and Uiterkamp 1998). The idea of measuring and comparing "ecological footprints" is rooted in this tradition.

Resource-based paradigms of this kind are internally consistent: they offer ways of thinking about the "metabolism" of society and of tracing the ecological impacts of production and consumption from cradle to grave. As such they have proved to be extremely influential in shaping the way the environment is conceptualised and in framing policy responses. However, preoccupation with the consequences rather than the processes of consumption has led to a particularly restricted view of what is involved. Three aspects are especially relevant.

First, and as a number of Summer School contributors argue, consumers do not consume resources, they consume the services those resources make possible. In buying electricity, consumers really buy lighting, heating, comfort, convenience and more. However influential, the language of resources bears such little relation to the world of consumer practice that it is of limited value in understanding what people do and why.

Second, deliberate efforts to reveal the environmental implications of individual action position the problem of sustainability as a problem of personal choice. The underlying assumption is that people could and would act differently if only they knew what damage they were doing. Such ideas inform programmes of research into the relationship between environmental belief and action and the design of policy initiatives geared around the provision of more and better information. As well as embodying an arguably suspect theory of choice (see Alan Warde’s presentation), exercises like this fail to appreciate the socially situated and socially structured character of consumption.

Third, in focusing rather one-sidedly on the end-consumer, such approaches obscure important questions about the production and manufacturing of options and the intersection between design, demand and use. In practice, relationships between consumers and producers are varied and complex. Sometimes they are so varied and so complex that the distinction between them makes little sense at all.

Most of the contributors to the Summer School agree that existing patterns of consumption are environmentally problematic. Most are also of the view that the dominant resource-based paradigm and the language of choice fail to capture what is at stake. The big questions, and the ones which the Summer School tackles head on, have to do with definitions of well-being (Jacobs 1995) with how societal expectations of normality are established, and with the design, construction and institutionalisation of demand (Redclift 1996; Strasser 1999). Re-defining the agenda in this way has the dual effect of connecting the study of environmental consumption with that of consumption in general and of springing open a new tool-box of analytical and theoretical resources. Historians, anthropologists, economists, geographers, sociologists, psychologists, and political economists all have things to say about the social organisation of consumption and the dynamics of everyday life.

In picking a path through these literatures and perspectives, the Summer School programme homes in on a handful of debates especially relevant for the analysis of sustainability. Turning the resource-based paradigm on its head, we concentrate on those aspects of consumption which trail environmental damage in their wake. In the domestic sphere this means looking at rather mundane things like changing expectations of comfort and cleanliness and at the ordering and scheduling of daily life.

Even with this filter in place, there are a great many perspectives on offer. There are, for example, deep divisions between those who equate consumption with escalating environmental harm and those who view citizen-consumers as the harbingers of ecological modernisation. While advocates of voluntary simplicity emphasise the moral, symbolic and material benefits of rejecting "consumer society" others argue that consumers’ environmental commitments have the potential to transform commercial and political priorities from the ‘bottom up’ (Spaargaren 1997; 1999). This is territory in which arguments about necessary, sufficient, and wantonly profligate consumption fizzle and flare (Slater 1997; 1999). Are we talking about more consumption or less, of what, by whom, and on what basis? (see Daniel Miller’s paper). Encompassing all these issues, but putting them in a different way, the Summer School investigates the social and political negotiability of demand. How do needs and wants come to be as they are and how do they change? That is one central theme.

By turning questions of environmental consumption into questions of consumption in general we expand the range of intellectual resources at our disposal. However, not all are of immediate use in understanding and analysing practices which are of particular environmental significance (Shove and Warde 1999). Ideas about the construction of identities and social distinctions (Bourdieu 1984) or about the symbolic import of material objects may need some modification when applied to water, electricity, and the services they make possible. Dealing with the parameters of everyday life the Summer School has more to say about the engraining of habit than the shading of lifestyles in lighter or darker hues of green. The mechanisms and processes through which normalities (of one kind or another) are established are of particular importance. What lies behind the global convergence of expectation and what sustains persistent cultural difference? How do environmentally relevant patterns of consumption relate to social division and inequality? What if it is not consumption per se which represents a challenge for sustainability, but the normative and routine ordering of social practice into which it is embedded? (see Dale Southerton’s introduction to session 4). These are core concerns.

In thinking about these issues it is, as Latour puts it, important not to miss the masses (Latour 1992). By this he means that it is important not to overlook the extent to which habits intersect with the technologies involved in their formation and reproduction. Dealing with the development of infrastructures (Hughes 1983) and devices like refrigerators (Cowan 1985); air-conditioning systems (Cooper 1998); and electric light bulbs (Bijker 1995), historians and sociologists of technology have much to say about the emergence of options, the structuring of "choice" and the scripting of practice. Addressing questions of appropriation as well as design, this work underlines the interdependence of production and consumption and of things and the habits they sustain.

But it is not enough to talk of things and products in isolation. The manner in which infrastructures are designed and organised is of further significance for the making and management of demand. Do de-centralised networks of power have the potential to generate sustainability? What are the unintended environmental consequences of new configurations of utilities, regulators, planners, house builders and consumers? The central questions here have to do with the relationship between devices, practices, and sociotechnical infrastructures: exactly how do they co-evolve and with what implications for sustainability?

In tackling the dynamics of ordinary consumption, reflecting upon the sociotechnical structuring of practice, and exploring the social negotiability of demand, the Summer School engages with important areas of theoretical debate. It does so in a deliberately provocative manner, bringing disciplinary perspectives together in new combinations in order to challenge assumptions, positions and paradigms. This is exciting in its own right but it is of more than academic interest. The policy relevance of talking about services rather than resources and about the transformation of convention rather than choice is already apparent. Less obvious are the ways in which policies of all sorts standardise and reproduce more and less sustainable concepts and models of everyday life. In going beyond the analysis of individual consumer behaviour the Summer School has the further ambition of developing a conceptual framework with which to raise the level of policy debate.

The speakers we have invited take up these challenges in different ways. Some papers focus on the past, others on the present or the future. Some reinforce each other’s perspectives, some offer contrasting points of view. Whether talking about freezers, cars, showers, water storage, air-conditioning systems, lawnmowers, urban parks, or new networks of power, they will, we hope bring the theoretical implications of consumption, sustainability and ordinary practice to life. The afternoon workshops provide an opportunity to reflect upon the themes and issues introduced in the morning presentations and figure out what they mean for research and policy. These afternoon sessions – which involve the use of glue, crayons, maps, cameras and notebooks – are designed to be interesting and enjoyable in their own right.

Having put the Summer School in context, the following sections introduce the five morning sessions and summarise the speakers’ presentations.

Laessoe, Jeppe Quality of Life as an Eco-political Argument - a few psychological reflections a paper from the first Lancaster workshop on Consumption, Everyday Life and Sustainability, April 1997.

Lindén, Anna-Lisa, Johanna Moisander, Åsa Thelander & Liisa Uusitalo Environmental Values Attitudes & Behaviour: Perspectives on Consumption as a Social Project. paper resulting from exchange 3 in the programme

Moisander, Johanna Complexity and Multidimensionality of Ecologically Responsible Consumer Behaviour a paper from the first Lancaster workshop on Consumption, Everyday Life and Sustainability, April 1997.

Slater, D. 1999, Themes from the Sociology of Consumption, paper from 1999 Summer School.

Shove, E. and Warde, A., Noticing inconspicuous consumption paper from 1999 Summer School, a short version of 1998, "Inconspicuous Consumption: the sociology of consumption, lifestyles and the environment", in Gijswijt, A., et. al. (Eds.) Sociological Theory and the Environment, Proceedings of the Second Woudschoten Conference, ISA Research Committee 24, SISWO, University of Amsterdam, pp135-154.

Spaargaren, G. The Ecological Modernisation of Domestic Consumption, paper from 1999 Summer School.

Bijker, W., 1995, Of bicycles, bakelites, and bulbs : toward a theory of sociotechnical change Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press

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

Cowan, Ruth Schwartz, 1985, "How the refrigerator got its hum" in Mackenzie, D. and Wajcman, J (eds) The social shaping of technology, Open University Press, Milton Keynes

Hughes, T. P. 1983, Networks of power : electrification in Western society, 1880-1930, Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press

Latour, B. 1992, "Where are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a few mundane artefacts" in 

Noorman, K. J, and Uiterkamp T. S. (eds), 1998, Green households? : domestic consumers, environment, and sustainability. London : Earthscan, 1998

Redclift, M. 1996, Wasted : counting the costs of global consumption, London : Earthscan, 1996

Slater, D., 1997, Consumer Culture and Modernity, Oxford, UK: Polity Press

Spaargaren, G., 1997, The Ecological Modernisation of Production and Consumption: Essays in Environmental Sociology, Wageningen, WAU (doctoral thesis)

Strasser, S. 1999, Waste and want: a social history of trash, New York: Metropolitan Books

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