Compartmentalization as the norm: Exploring the bundling of (un-)sustainable practices in Germany

Abstract

In the face of intensifying socio-ecological crisis phenomena, a public and academic discourse of urgency has developed with regard to the sustainable transformation of lifestyles. However, in reality, individuals prove resistant to normative calls for more sustainable consumption and consumption patterns often remain inconsistent across different domains of everyday life. A variety of relatively well-studied causes exist for this (e.g., behavioral lock-ins or motivational goal conflicts). Nevertheless, it remains crucial to empirically investigate questions such as: Between which everyday domains are relations of congruence or incongruence particularly pronounced? And how do these relations differ with sociodemographic variables? Starting from a practice theoretical perspective on everyday life, I present empirical findings on the clustering of (un-)sustainable everyday practices in the fields of energy, food, and mobility. Drawing on population representative survey data from the German cities of Muenster and Stuttgart (n = 2005), I identify six distinct clusters of (un-)sustainable practice patterns by combining a multiple correspondence analysis and a hierarchical cluster analysis. Furthermore, I show how these clusters relate to sociodemographic characteristics. My overall analysis reveals that compartmentalization rather than congruence of (un-)sustainable everyday practices is the empirical norm. However, two clusters represent uniformly (un-)sustainable performances of practices but each only account for less than 10% of the surveyed population.