Page 25 - Sustainability Communication Interdisciplinary Perspectives and Theoritical Foundations

8 J. Godemann and G. Michelsen

increases in the context of sustainability development and requires a critical awareness
of risk as well as the ability to assess risk and a tolerance for ambiguity.
Sustainability always involves, either indirectly and directly, taking risk into
consideration. There are numerous examples of risk including the risk of climate
change, nuclear energy use, species loss, resource consumption, land use, noise pol-
lution. Whoever would like to send a message is well advised to first understand
how his communication partner perceives the world. Risk research shows that peo-
ple deal with risk in a largely irrational manner (WBGU 1998). This is also an
opportunity to approach risk from the perspective of natural and engineering
sciences and communicate indicators and their critical values.
Comparative risk research reveals large differences in the perception of risk
between different societies. This is known as the cultural relativity of risks, with the
society in which one lives apparently determining which events are perceived as
risks and feared. This is also valid for different lifestyle groups and milieus within
a given society, with different forms of social organisation and lifestyles being asso-
ciated with, for example, different images and understandings of nature and percep-
tions of danger. This thesis has received considerable support by comparative studies
on risk perception (see for example Wildavsky 1993). Thus the statement that risk
perception is culturally influenced does not simply mean that it varies from one
country or culture to another, but that it also varies within a given country, with the
social milieu in which an individual lives also helping to form his perception of risk.
Taken together these two factors determine the importance of risk to an individual.
From a sociological perspective, the important question refers to the differentia-
tion and change of lifestyles in the context of sustainability communication. Without
using social science methods to conduct a detailed analysis of milieu and lifestyle
together with the resulting consequences for ‘marketing’ the idea of sustainability,
it would hardly be possible to develop a generalisable communication concept that
would serve as an anchor for the idea of sustainability. The construct ‘lifestyle’
draws attention to the fact that with the increasing individualisation of society, the
differentiation of economic conditions and educational biographies, with the vary-
ing use of mobility etc., a great number of different lifestyles have evolved. Lifestyles
unite the use of resources, behaviours and value orientations to a pattern of life
conduct. The development of different lifestyles is seen as an answer to individuali-
sation in society, as the sociologist Ulrich Beck has described in his publications.
Lifestyles are not emancipatory lifeplans but life patterns that are today closely
related to patterns of consumption orientation. When sustainability communication
is connected with changes in individual attitudes and behaviour, then differences in
lifestyle take on a special importance.
A different context of sustainability communication is foregrounded in a further
sociological perspective on the stabilisation and change of institutional practices
through sustainability communication. This relationship between public communi-
cation and institutional change is a particularly important one to analyse. Especially
noteworthy are the structuration theory of Anthony Giddens (1984), the symbolic
interactionism of Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann (1966) and the discourse-
analytical perspective taken by Jürgen Habermas (1981).