Suchergebnisse

Includes bibliographical references

Increasing numbers of people in welfare societies express worries about their ecological footprint. Some make efforts to significantly reduce their consumption. Because people have been socialized into a society of mass/excess consumption, there are great challenges. How can someone learn to downsize when society incessantly compels her to continue with mass consumption habits? This article demonstrates, theoretically and empirically, how social relations, within a societal context of mass consumption, shape the conditions for transforming lifestyles to reduce consumption. It contributes to sociology as well as a growing interdisciplinary literature on reduced consumption by focusing specifically on challenges related to social relations. The study uses a qualitative approach and an interview study of 24 people in Sweden making significant efforts to reduce their consumption. Findings – both perceived challenges and creative ways of coping with them – are related to four analytical themes: (1) the intersection of everyday rituals and consumption; (2) the norms and normality of mass consumption; (3) social comparison and status consumption; and (4) social and community support for reducing consumption.

This paper deals with the challenging task of permanently organizing projects that include a broad range of actors: enterprises, social movement organizations and state actors. It focuses on a special type of standardization activity, namely eco-labelling, and is based on case studies of two Swedish projects/organizations: labelling of organic food and sustainable forestry. In this paper, I theorize about the concept of inclusiveness, which is seen as being instrumental for the creation of regulatory credibility and authority and argue that different types of members/participants have different types of power resources, which the standardization organization (SO) seeks to mobilize and control. The combination of these individual power resources brings action capacity and symbolic resources to the SO, including an image of independence. Moreover, the SO provides an organizational setting that, inter alias, helps interdependent actors to maintain a hold on each other, and forces them to engage in a dialogue and repeated interaction over time. This interaction can, in turn, result in common expectations and understandings that are essential for the operations of non-state governance. However, the case studies also indicate difficulties in organizing such complex networks. It can, above all, be difficult to prevent a power shift in favour of organizations with large power resources.

In this paper, we examine the phenomenon of representation through the theoretical lens of ambivalence, concentrating on the people involved in representation: representatives . We argue that the theoretical concept of ambivalence can be helpful in analysing and understanding the various tensions environmental and other representatives encounter in their practice . Based on the concepts of "sociological ambivalence", "ideological dilemma", and "the organizational centaur", as well as on insights from social studies of science and sustainability studies, the paper develops a typology of three potential sources of ambivalence: role conflicts, value conflicts, and conflicts between goals and means . In addition, the paper identifies various ways of co- ping with ambivalence, including the construction of meta-norms, organizational and network support, pragmatism, drawing boundaries for reasonable and acceptable actions, rule bending and discursive negotiation . The paper concludes that the concept of ambivalence adds crucial insights to the positions, practices, and challenges of environmental representatives and notes that ambivalence is not only a matter of tensions and conflicts but can be a source of reflexivity, learning, and agency.