Stress, Affluence and Sustainable Consumption

"Those concerned with sustainability and consumption have neglected the underlying compulsion to consume, and how it becomes a learned and habituated feature of contemporary life. This intriguing and provocative book sheds important new light on the stress of affluent consumption and the dysfunction that gives rise to it. This book is guaranteed to make you think again." Peter Wells, Professor of Business and Sustainability, Cardiff Business School, UK "Cecilia Solr has produced a thoughtful short volume for Routledge entitled, Stress, Affluence and Sustainable Consumption that opens up this repressed neurotic side of consumer selfhood. In my reading Solr contributes to the Maussian project of evaluating the existential consequences of market mediated consumer culture. In addition, she offers an extended exegesis of the fundamental Lacanian neurosis that this unsustainable mode of living imposes upon us all. All in all a thought-provoking and enjoyable read that takes consumption neurosis seriously as a constituent of consumer culture, and invites us to link our experiences of everyday neurotic stress and anxiety to sociological causes and environmental consequences endemic in consumer culture. A useful book for marketing ethicists, for consumer culture theorists, for students of positive psychology, and those looking for alternatives to the vicious cycle of affluence, stress, and (over-) consumption." - Eric J. Arnould, Aalto University Business School "This book discusses (un)sustainable consumption from a stress perspective, adding an embodied understanding to the sustainability-related consumption challenges that we face today. A stress perspective on affluent consumption differs from current understandings on consumption, as it fully acknowledges the consumer as having a body (including a mind) that reacts to the numerous product offerings and retail spaces, both physical and online." - Lucia A. Reisch Journal of Consumer Policy

Cecilia Solr is Associate Professor in Marketing at the School of Business, Economics and Law, University of Gothenburg, Sweden.

List of figures Acknowledgements Part 1 Overview: stress and affluent sustainable consumption Chapter 1. Introduction: the sustainability of affluent consumption Chapter 2. The sustainability of affluent consumption from a stress perspective Chapter 3. A sociological stress theory framework Part 2 Affluent marketplace stressors Chapter 4. Environmental marketplace stressors: "too much perceptual input" Chapter 5. Internalized marketplace-induced stressors: "idealized identity" overload Chapter 6. Structural life-style stressors:"work and consumption rich, time poor" Part 3 Stress coping and affluent sustainable consumption Chapter 7. Coping with marketplace stressors Chapter 8. Consumer coping strategies and sustainable consumption outcomes Chapter 9. Affluent consumer stress coping in relation to well-being Chapter 10. Promoting affluent sustainable consumption from a stress perspective: a theoretical outlook Index