ABSTRACT
Runaway consumerism has been identified as an important engine of global emissions, and has been treated in many discussions as an assumed opposite to the goal of sustainable consumption. Yet this consumerism is rarely defined, and is often assumed to be the outcome of individual decision-making. This assumption is highly questionable, and unsustainable individual behaviours usually occur within larger socio-technical systems that help shape, encourage and normalize the ‘excess’ in question.
After a brief discussion of the meaning, history and origins of consumerism, this chapter argues that contemporary consumerism is best understood through some characteristics that typify its expansionary and compulsory nature. These include and depend upon the increasing integration of a number of enabling socio-technical systems – in extraction, production, distribution and persuasion or communication – whose guiding aim, especially since World War II, has been to reproduce and accelerate mass consumption, and on a global scale. The ‘sunk cost effect’ of these socio-technological systems makes substantive change towards sustainability appear politically and economically costly, even though inaction incurs an increasingly heavy price. Identifying the relationships that have shaped these systems provides a somewhat neglected opportunity to design or reconfigure their components towards more measurably sustainable outcomes. Through some reflections on mobile phone consumption trends and marketing systems, the chapter concludes with a discussion of how instigating such change might be approached.
