ABSTRACT
In recent years, practice theory has garnered a great deal of attention for its purported ability to reframe the sustainable consumption debate and to highlight promising new strategies for intervening into complex social processes so as to steer them in a more sustainable direction. While this theoretical turn has contributed substantially to the development of a theoretically sophisticated sociology of sustainable consumption, it remains beset by a number of unresolved problems that undercut its capacity to productively refocus the sustainable consumption agenda. Indeed, while practice-theoretical approaches often present themselves as representing a bold departure from earlier work in the field, they often recapitulate and compound many of the qualities in that work that have contributed to the current malaise of “weak” sustainable consumption. Primary among such qualities is what Fuchs et al. have identified as the “troublesome pattern of neglect of questions of power in research and action on sustainable consumption” (2016, p. 298). While applications of practice theory to sustainable consumption are not entirely incompatible with the type of “power lens” that such authors propose, their failure to more explicitly and forthrightly engage with questions of power has significantly weakened their conceptualization of the dynamics of overconsumption, the specific forces, and interests that perpetuate it and the forms of collective agency required to initiate meaningful change.
