Between Worth and Waste. Sustainable Consumption, Inequality, and Normative Resistance

• In Event: Theoretical and Methodological Advances in the Sociology of Consumption

Abstract

This paper reconceptualizes sustainable consumption as a stratified moral field in which environmental responsibility, social inequality, and normative resistance intersect. Rather than treating green consumption as behavioral change, it advances a theoretical framework that understands sustainability as a regime of valuation structured by symbolic boundary work, environmental normativity, and struggles over recognition. In contemporary consumer societies, commodities organize everyday access to goods while exposing tensions between markets and environments, individual desires and collective responsibilities. Sustainable consumption intensifies this paradox by moralizing practices such as organic food, ethical fashion, eco-housing, recycling, and energy conservation. These practices are valued as responsible, while other forms of consumption are stigmatized, producing symbolic hierarchies that mirror and reproduce social stratification. Access to eco-commodities and recognition of sustainable lifestyles remain uneven, shaped by economic resources, cultural capital, and institutional validation. From a cultural-political perspective, sustainable consumption operates as environmental normativity: it disciplines conduct, establishes evaluative norms, and forms responsible subjects. Yet because ecological virtue is unevenly accessible, this moralization also generates normative resistance. Disengagement, reinterpretation, or the reassertion of embodied pleasures reveal sustainability’s ambivalence as both compliance and contestation. By synthesizing moral economy theory, governmentality studies, and boundary work approaches, the paper reframes sustainable consumption as a contested arena where worth and waste, privilege and exclusion, normativity and resistance are intertwined. Understanding sustainability thus requires analyzing not only individual practices but also the structural and symbolic conditions that organize ecological virtue across unequal social actors.

Author

• Roberta Sassatelli, Department of History and Cultures University of Bologna