Agencing Sustainable Food Consumers: Integrating Production, Markets and Consumption through a Socio-Material Practice Perspective
1Ingrid Stigzelius, PhD, Stockholm School of Economics, Sweden
Mistra Center for Sustainable Markets (Misum) E-mail: Ingrid.stigzelius@hhs.se
Forthcoming in Handbook on Sustainable Consumption and Production (edited by Ranjula Bali Swain and Susanne Sweet) Palgrave McMillan.
This chapter provides a deeper understanding of how consumers become capable to act more sustainable in different moments of consumption. Instead of assuming that the consumer is passive or active by default, this chapter suggests that one should take a look at the
interspaces between the dual poles and direct attention to the practices that come into play in producing consumers. As seen from a socio-material practice theoretical perspective, the chapter aims to illustrate how consumer capacity to act and make a difference is constituted through various socio-material arrangements, rather than determined by the inherent
capability of the individual consumer or the surrounding structures in markets or production.
The main argument of this chapter is that sustainable consumption is a collective achievement: wherein sustainable practices become enacted through different forms of mediation involving multiple human and non-human actors, including the consumer, that in turn work to integrate different practices in production, markets and consumption. Thus, a practice perspective makes a move away from the individual agency of consumers to the complex socio-material entities that work to produce a capacity to act. Consumers are, however, still an integral part of this collective achievement; they both get produced and are part of producing sustainable consumption (Stigzelius, 2017).
Building on empirical material of green food practices, I theorize the on-going change processes of producing sustainable consumers as the agencing of consumers, involving the mutual adjustment of the practice elements of meanings, objects and competences (Hagberg, 2016). Through re-arranging these elements in junctions of vegetable gardens, food stores and kitchens, consumers become mediated and equipped to act more (or less) sustainable across different moments of consumption. The ability to put these new agencies into motion depends on how well the elements of practices in production, exchange and usage, become integrated and thereby can act collectively as an actual agent.
As a theoretical contribution, the chapter thus seeks to integrate practice studies on consumption with market practices: two separate, yet inter-related, streams of practice
1 Parts of this text have previously been published in my dissertation entitled “Producing Consumers: Agencing and Concerning Consumers to Do Green in Everyday Food Practices” (Stigzelius, 2017), Stockholm School of Economics, Sweden. The empirical data in this chapter, however, consist of previously unpublished material.
research that bear resemblance and that can be connected in how various practice elements and actors come together in the agencing of green, sustainable consumption and markets. In order to better understand the formation of sustainable consumption, we cannot only look at one side (consumption, markets or production); rather, we need to see them as integrated and entangled through practices.
