ABSTRACT
Although nations in Northern Europe like to see themselves as the avant-garde of the environmental political movement they practically ignore their own ongoing lifestyle changes and growth in material consumption, both of which threaten to undermine their efforts to promote a sustainable development. Obviously, the growth of consumption is propelled by the functioning of the economic systems – the driving forces of competition currently extend the markets and give rise to continuous technological development. The political system supports this development by breaking down trade barriers and by providing better infrastructure. Changes in these conditions at macro level interact with dynamics at micro level. The growth in household consumption is not just about ’more of the same thing’; it is invariably tied up with the interplay between changed social conditions and individual dreams of a better life. One of those changes in our external context is the continuing influx of new technologies for use in everyday life that continue to offer consumers increased diversification and specialization, standard improvements, increased individual independence, increased mobility, mechanization of household chores, intensification of time-use, and introduction of new activities (Røpke, [1]). These types of technological options all enable increased consumption, and thus produce a greater impact on the environment. However they can also change the way we organise our everyday lives, and thus introduce new – potentially more consumption-intensive – patterns of behaviour. Røpke, in a taxonomy of the different properties of novelty associated with new everyday technologies, pointed out that the most radical changes in everyday life will happen whenever a new technology leads to new processes in familiar functions, or to completely new functions/forms of activity (Røpke, [2]). However consumers are by no means the passive victims of market supply. Viewed from each person’s psycho-social conditions in our present modern world, the dynamics of the growth of consumption are concerned with normative social pressure, signalling 1 The project on Consumers and New Household Technologies in Ecological Transformation was carried out together with Inge Røpke, and this paper owes much to discussions with her.
