Page 81 - Sustainability Communication Interdisciplinary Perspectives and Theoritical Foundations

64 K.-W. Brand

However, even in the latter case there is no presumption of a random variation of
individual lifestyles. Rather, it is possible in all countries to identify social groups
with similar ideas about life and ways of living which can be sorted into different
life-style milieux and can be positioned in the ‘social space’ (Bourdieu) of a given society.
The members of these milieux share basic value orientations, have similar pref-
erences in taste and styles of consumption, similar attitudes towards work, family
and leisure but also towards the environment and politics. These milieu-specific
commonalities in sports, leisure or cultural areas reflexively strengthen social iden-
tities and serve at the same time to mark social distinction (Schwenk 1996).
Depending on the dynamics of social change, these milieux show a greater or lesser
degree of stability, may change or are created anew. In the 1980s and 1990s a num-
ber of empirical studies in Germany developed such milieu typologies (e.g. Flaig
et al. 1993; Schulze 1992; Vester et al. 1993, 1995) that identified a considerable
shift in the forms of social inequality as well as a greater differentiation in new life-
styles. Some of these typologies, especially the ‘SINUS Milieus’ (Sinus Sociovision),
are used in a number of very different contexts, from market research to political
attitude surveys and environmental research in the social sciences. Representative
surveys conducted at regular intervals by the German Federal Environmental
Agency on ‘Environmental awareness and behaviour in Germany’, for example,
investigated the specific environmental attitudes and behaviour in ten SINUS
milieux in Germany in 2008 (Umweltbundesamt 2009).
Such lifestyles are a kind of filter for the translation of sustainability discourses
into the everyday life of different social milieux (Rink 2002). They determine which
aspects of this debate – together with which implicit conditions for action – find a
high or low resonance. In the extreme case of ‘ecological pioneers’, ecological
norms can also become the central, organising principle of their lifestyle. The cog-
nitive side of the selective, group-specific internalisation of ecological norms in
everyday consciousness can be reconstructed in the form of typical ‘environmental
mentalities’ (for Germany, see Poferl et al. 1997; Brand et al. 2003). As to the
behavioural aspect of lifestyles, empirical research has focused on the question of
which basic action motives provide the closest link of individual lifestyles to sus-
tainable consumption (for example, ECOLOG 1999; Kleinhückelkotten 2005) and
how mobilisation campaigns or political incentive systems, for instance, for sustain-
able mobility, living or nutrition can make use of these insights (Götz 2007;
Empacher and Hayn 2005; Schultz and Stieß 2008).
The expectations placed on such target-group specific dissemination strategies
are nevertheless mostly too high. They must be tailored very selectively in order to
reach their specific target group, which is a very resource-consuming exercise and
can usually only be done as part of commercial product marketing. In addition, it is
often overlooked that for the change of consumption patterns, inconspicuous ‘ordi-
nary consumption’ is more important than the ‘conspicuous’ aspects of consump-
tion that play the dominant role in the distinction of lifestyles (Gronow and Warde
2001; Shove and Warde 2002). To be sure, these conspicuous aspects have considerable
ecological implications too. What has a much greater effect on the overall sustain-
ability of social life are, however, the given sociotechnical ‘systems of provision’