Kurzinfo:
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Rapidly increasing levels of consumption of materials, energy, and services are one of the fundamental drivers of global and local environmental change. Yet consumption is still a poorly understood phenomenon and the social, cultural, economic, and psychological variables that determine consumption have not been clearly identified. Effective policymaking and prediction is impossible without knowing what determines and changes consumption levels. Diverse social-scientific models of consumption are largely incommensurate, poorly articulated, and untested. Rather than argue for one fundamental cause, this author reviews a number of alternative theoretical approaches, and then proposes a heterodox ″multigenic″ theory based on the work of Pierre Bourdieu. Such a theory accepts multiple types of causes of consumption, operating at different analytical levels, from the individual, through household, community, and ultimately to nations and other groups. Factors impelling and restraining consumption can therefore be balanced or unbalanced by relatively minor changes in a large number of interrelated variables.
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