trends and future of sustainable development - TransEco

Veblen’s observation on the interpersonal dependency of human needs is also significant. Manycritically minded researchers see people as locked in the position of consumer, where the task ofobtaining purchasing power requires more and more work effort of them. Reasons for the lack ofmomentum for change have been sought in, for example, the institutional structures and practices ofconsumer society and in the habituation of new forms of consumption. People compulsively “carryalong”, for structural, social, cultural or economic reasons, practices that define consumption in a fieldscattered with the traps of fashion, brands, trends and symbols. They feel either powerless to detachfrom it or have unquestioningly adjusted to the state of affairs they regard as normal, as if they were onan endless journey with no other goal than to keep up with the others. People’s need to ‘keep up with theJoneses’ or ‘fit in’ has also been seen as a cause for the resistance to change. (Galbraith,1969; Sanne,2002; Schor, 1998, 1993; Warde, 2005. Ks. myös Southerton, Warde & Hand, 2004; Røpke 1998.)I see however in the critical discourse on consumption the danger of being stuck at the level ofabstractions: for example, the concepts of ‘ostentatious’ or ‘conspicuous’ associated with Veblen, aspoignantly as they do depict the extreme phenomena of consumption, seem to refer to such a thing as‘consumption an sich’. Viewed from a critical, change-oriented perspective, I find the idea proposed byWarde (2005) that various practices create different needs to buy and situations and ways of usingproducts more fruitful. It is the very changing of practices that plays a critical part in terms of socialchange.‘Ostentatious consumption’, as described by Veblen, would seem to also aptly refer to the battle over‘social territory’ which is being waged at present. In it consumers who are simultaneously concernedabout their individuality and about ‘belonging in’ struggle to ‘be seen’ as a condition of social survival, asBauman (2007) describes the predicament today’s young people, especially, find themselves in. In thissense affluence and (the connected) purchasing power have become a source of ‘social livelihood’, afterpeople’s basic physiological needs have been fulfilled. Even when a person’s material needs have beenfulfilled, the ‘felt chronic need’ is present for reasons such as “the Joneses have a bigger car” or “theJones boy or girl” has a more conspicuous status in cyberspace.A social territory is created through private ownership. The amount of private ownership peoplehave varies to large degree. Riihimäki (1996, p.28) writes that aspirations of status provided by privateownership on the one hand and restricting social livelihood to a matter of individual responsibility in theother make up a viscous cycle. He underscores the economic implications of livelihood by stating that“organized, economic insecurity is the dynamic basic principle of our society, in other words, the forcethat sets people in motion.”5. The Veblen good vs. common goodThe term ‘Veblen effect’, coined by Harvey Leibenstein (1950), an economist who followed in Veblen’sfootsteps, represents people’s need connected with private ownership to do better than others when itcomes to the quality, price or conspicuousness or – in a word – desirability of the product owned.‘Veblen good’ is an apt term for a thing (be it a physical object such as a property or a car or some otherthing that yields status, such as a trip around the world, a certain type of women’s high-heeled shoe or achild’s school) that the effect concerns as a human relationship-influenced ‘disturbing factor’ in thetheory of demand. The Veblen good is principally all about the illusion in which an object that has status178