Abstract
The debates about socio-ecological change and a sustainability shift oscillate between green capitalist strategies and critical leftist approaches. Despite their antagonism, both poles highlight the crucial role of everyday practice. However, the paper argues that neither of them provides a convincing theoretical framework for the analysis of our daily routines. The article thus advocates Bourdieusian praxeology as a useful tool for understanding socio-ecological change and sustainable practice. Drawing on Bourdieu’s concepts of practice, field, and habitus the widespread view of a knowledge-driven change of everyday behavior patterns is challenged. It is suggested to describe the new significance of ecological questions in our everyday lives as the emergence of both a specific realm of practice, an “ecological field”, and a set of specific dispositions of action, “ecological habitus”.
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Notes
- 1.
In this article, I use terms such as sustainability shift or socio-ecological transformation as rough equivalents.
- 2.
For instance, when an ecological rucksack of goods and services receives a proper price tag, the market will do the rest.
- 3.
The academic and political surprise at a knowledge-behavior gap serves as a succinct example here. Whereas ‘lay people’ do not wonder at inconsistencies in behavior, the gap becomes “mystifying if we suppose that values do (or should) translate into action” (Shove 2010, 1276).
- 4.
Even though they do not use the term sustainability.
- 5.
That is, ideas about what, materially speaking, is a normal or good life.
- 6.
Unavailability of nature means that society has only limited capacities to transform, use, or influence nature in the directions it wants, since nature (or the bio-physical world) follows its own logic.
- 7.
- 8.
A shorter, but also widely shared understanding, considers practice as “embodied, materially mediated arrays of human activity centrally organized around shared practical understanding” (Schatzki 2001, 2).
- 9.
In Bourdieu’s view, habitus and field are not ‘existing’ entities in the sense that everyday agents use them as a means to describe their social experiences. Instead, they are specific, sociological ways of comprehending the social world. Neither habitus nor field are thus simply observable objects. On the contrary, to take them ‘for real’ would, according to Bourdieu, conflate the logic of theory with the inherent logic of practice (see Bourdieu 1990a, 81, c).
- 10.
As an aside, this view is close to what Max Weber and Alfred Schütz refer to as spheres of values or provinces of meaning.
- 11.
I discuss some exceptions below.
- 12.
This, of course, is a disgraceful oversimplification of the debates about sustainability, but it will suffice for our purposes.
- 13.
Practice theory also shows that through these internalization processes, the perseverance of nonsustainable lifestyles is not only a question of existing material infrastructures, but also of mental and bodily ‘infrastructures,’ so to speak.
- 14.
In her work on emotional capitalism and emotional fields Eva Illouz develops a similar, inspiring approach, albeit in an entirely different context (see Illouz 2007).
- 15.
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Acknowledgements
I am greatly indebted to Dorothee Quade, who patiently provided helpful comments on earlier drafts.
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Gäbler, K. (2015). Green Capitalism, Sustainability, and Everyday Practice. In: Werlen, B. (eds) Global Sustainability. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16477-9_4
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