Page 80 - Sustainability Communication Interdisciplinary Perspectives and Theoritical Foundations

5 Sociological Perspectives on Sustainability Communication 63

On the one hand, the selectivity of public attention to certain issues is influenced both
by the way a given country is affected by particular problems and by its specific cul-
tural traditions, which create a very different responsiveness for (different kinds of)
environmental, social and technological problems and risks (e.g. Goodbody 2002;
Rootes 2007; Selin 2003). On the other hand, in all countries the link between envi-
ronmental awareness and behaviour is generally not only rather weak, it also shows
a very inconsistent pattern, even among people with strong pro-environmental beliefs
(e.g. de Haan and Kuckartz 1996; Diekmann and Preisendörfer 1998; Kollmuss and
Agyeman 2002; Middlemiss and Young 2008). These findings are not very surpris-
ing considering the difficulty of making actual choices in line with strict ecological
criteria in a society geared toward economic growth and material affluence.
Institutional efforts to establish new and more environmentally friendly practices
encounter a host of structural barriers. Individual choices are moreover complicated
by incomplete and overly complex information, adverse price incentives, poor sup-
ply, insufficient infrastructural arrangements, practical inconveniences, contradictory
interests, values and norms, which all render the ideal of consistent pro-environmen-
tal behaviour a particularly intricate venture.
This does not militate against a broad dissemination of ecological norms in most
Western countries. These norms can also be strengthened in individual areas of
behaviour through lifestyle trends, as can be seen from the great media resonance
that ‘LOHAS’ (Lifestyle of Health and Sustainability) has met with since 2007.
This trend influences above all the market (Wenzel et al. 2007). LOHAS are, how-
ever, no less inconsistent in their behaviour. Indeed, it would be an illusion to assume
that this specific mixture of wellness and sustainability could be equally attractive
to all social milieux. On the contrary, what is typical of all social groups is that
expectations of ecological behaviour are integrated into everyday life only very
selectively. The answer to why this is so varies according to the theoretical approach
taken.
In the case of psychology, such decisions are attributed to attitudes, values, norms
and motivations (van Kasteren 2008), in economic or in rational choice theory to
‘rational’ cost-benefit calculations, which typically entrap individual environmental
behaviour in ‘social dilemma’ situations (Diekmann 1996). Sociological studies
criticize the individualistic assumptions of these approaches. In contrast, they
emphasize the social and cultural embeddedness of environmental behaviour and
focus on the symbolic meaning of lifestyles and consumption (Bourdieu 1984;
Featherstone 1991; Reusswig 1994).
The lifestyle concept is used in a number of different ways in sociology with a
central controversy centring on the question of how closely lifestyles are linked with
socio-economic life situations or class structures. Are lifestyles, as Bourdieu (1984)
argues, the cultural practice of a ‘class habitus’, which itself is determined by the
relational position of actors in the hierarchically structured fields of economic, social
and cultural capital? Or have accelerated processes of social disembedding and indi-
vidualisation produced a more reflexive pattern of life that demands a more active
shaping and enactment of lifestyles, as is claimed by Beck, Giddens and other theo-
rists of post-modernity or ‘reflexive modernity’ (Beck 1992; Giddens 1991)?