Abstract
I bring culturally-rich insight into what it means to be a modern consumer in marketized urban India living on a climatically challenged planet. Using an online panel survey and mixed methods qualitative research, I present a rich and thick account of urban middle-class Indian consumers’ materialism and sustainability consumption experiences as they interact with the marketplace. I use worldviews, materialism, environmental concern, and sustainable consumption buying behavior to explore their collusion and collision navigation within the dominant archetype of economic growth, and its sustainability challenges. Three worldviews emerge representing reflexivity, spirituality and wealth. All have sustainability implications for India. Materialism is embedded among India’s urbanites, reflecting a growth agenda. Environmental concern is subsumed by societal and political problems. Hence, not surprisingly, the sustainability buying of these consumers is largely unaffected by these behavioral theories. India has a turbulent challenge ahead, thus I conclude with my reflexivity and future research ideas.
You came here empty-handed, and you will leave empty-handed.
(Source, The Bhagavad Gita)
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Ahuvia, A.C., and N.Y. Wong. 2002. Personality and values based materialism: Their relationship and origins. Journal of Consumer Psychology 12(4): 389–402.
Anantharaman, M. 2014. Networked Ecological Citizenship, the New Middle Classes and the Provisioning of Sustainable Waste Management in Bangalore, India. Journal of Cleaner Production 63: 173–183. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2013.08.041.
Andersen, Blake, and Michael M’Gonigle. 2012. Does Ecological Economics have a Future? Contradiction and Reinvention in the Age of Climate Change. Ecological Economics 84 (December): 37–48. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2012.06.009.
Bamberg, Sebastian. 2003. How Does Environmental Concern Influence Specific Environmentally Related Behaviors? A New Answer to an Old Question. Journal of Environmental Psychology 23: 21–32. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0272-4944(02)00078-6.
Baviskar, Amita. 2011. Cows, Cars and Cycle-Rickshaws: Bourgeois Environmentalism and the Battle for Delhi’s Streets. In Elite and Everyman: The Cultural Politics of the Indian Middle Classes, ed. Amita Baviskar and Raka Ray, 391–418. New Delhi: Routledge.
BBC. 2019. India Turns to Electric Vehicles to Beat Pollution. 24th July. Retrieved from https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-48961525.
Beck, Urry. 2016. The Metamorphosis of the World: How Climate Change is Transforming Our Concept of the World. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Belk, Russell W. 1985. Materialism: Trait Aspects of Living in the Material World. Journal of Consumer Research 12 (December): 265–280.
Bell, James J. 2003, May–June. Exploring the ‘singularity’. Futurist 37 (3) 18–24. Available from https://www.questia.com/read/1G1-100204033/exploring-the-singularity.
Best, Henning, and Jochen Mayerl. 2013. Values, Beliefs, Attitudes: An Empirical Study on the Structure of Environmental Concern and Recycling Participation. Social Science Quarterly 94 (3): 691–714. https://doi.org/10.1111/ssqu.12010.
Bijapurkar, Rama. 2007. Winning in the Indian Market: Understanding the Transformation of Consumer India. Singapore: Wiley.
Burroughs, James E., and Aric Rindfleisch. 2002. Materialism and Well-Being: A Conflicting Values Perspective. Journal of Consumer Research 29 (3): 348–370. https://doi.org/10.1086/344429.
Carson, Rachel. 1962. Silent Spring. Houghton Mifflin.
Chaudhary, Richa, and Samrat Bisai. 2018. Factors Influencing Green Purchase Behavior of Millennials in India. Management of Environmental Quality 29 (5): 798–812. https://doi.org/10.1108/MEQ-02-2018-0023.
Chaudhuri, Himadri Roy, and Sitanath Majumdar. 2006. Of Diamonds and Desires: Understanding Conspicuous Consumption from a Contemporary Marketing Perspective. Academy of Marketing Science Review 11 (11): 1–18.
Clarke-Habibi, Sara. 2005. Transforming Worldviews: The Case of Education for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Journal of Transformative Education 3 (1): 33–56.
Cleveland, Mark, Michel Laroche, and Nicolas Papadopoulos. 2009. Cosmopolitanism, Consumer Ethnocentrism, and Materialism: An Eight-Country Study of Antecedents and Outcomes. Journal of International Marketing 17 (1): 116–46. www.jstor.org/stable/27755591.
D’Alisa, Giacomo, Federico Demaria, and Giorgos Kallis (eds.). 2014. Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era. New York, NY: Routledge.
Daly, Herman E. 1991. Steady-State Economics, 2nd ed. Washington DC: Island Press. (1st ed. 1977, Freeman).
Daly, Herman E. 1996. Beyond Growth: The Economics of Sustainable Development. Boston: Beacon Press.
De Vries, Bert J.M., and Arthur C. Petersen. 2009. Conceptualizing Sustainable Development. An Assessment Methodology Connecting Values, Knowledge, Worldviews and Scenarios. Ecological Economics 68: 1006–1019. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2008.11.015.
De Witt, Annick, Joop de Boer, Nicholas Hedlund, and Patricia Osseweijer. 2016. A New Tool to Map the Major Worldviews in the Netherlands and USA, and Explore How they Relate to Climate Change. Environmental Science & Policy 63: 101–112. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2016.05.012.
De Witt, Annick, Patricia Osseweijer, and Robert Pierce. 2017. Understanding Public Perceptions of Biotechnology Through the “Integrative Worldview Framework”. Public Understanding of Science 26 (1): 70–88. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963662515592364.
Dermody, Janine, Stuart Hanmer-Lloyd, Nicole Koenig-Lewis, and Anita Lifen Zhao. 2015. Advancing Sustainable Consumption in the UK and China: The Mediating Effect of Pro-environmental Self-identity. Journal of Marketing Management 31 (13–14): 1472–1502. https://doi.org/10.1080/0267257X.2015.1061039.
Dermody, Janine, Nicole Koenig-Lewis, Anita Lifen Zhao, and Stuart Hanmer-Lloyd. 2018. Appraising the Influence of Pro-environmental Self-identity on Sustainable Consumption Buying and Curtailment in Emerging Markets: Evidence from China and Poland. Journal of Business Research 86 (May): 333–343. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2017.09.041.
Dong, Xuebing, Hongbo Li, Shengmin Liu, Chuangneng Cai, and Xiaojun Fan. 2018. How does material possession love influence sustainable consumption behavior towards the durable products? Journal of Cleaner Production 198(1): 389–400. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2018.07.054.
Dunlap, Riley E., and Robert Emmet Jones. 2002. Environmental Concern: Conceptual and Measurement Issues. In Handbook of Environmental Sociology, ed. Riley E. Dunlap and W. Michelson, 482–524. Westport, London: Greenwood Press.
Dunlap, Riley E., and Richard York. 2008. The Globalization of Environmental Concern and The Limits of The Postmaterialist Values Explanation: Evidence from Four Multinational Surveys. The Sociological Quarterly 49 (3): 529–563. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1533-8525.2008.00127.x.
Eckhardt, Giana M., and Humaira Mahi. 2012. Globalization, Consumer Tensions, and the Shaping of Consumer Culture in India. Journal of Macromarketing 32 (3): 280–294. https://doi.org/10.1177/0276146712440708.
Ellen, Pam Scholder, Joshua Lyle Wiener, and Cathy Cobb-Walgren. 1991. The Role of Perceived Consumer Effectiveness in Motivating Environmentally Conscious Behaviors. Journal of Public Policy & Marketing 10 (2): 102–117. https://doi.org/10.1177/074391569101000206.
Fernandes, Leela. 2009. The Political Economy of Lifestyle: Consumption, India’s New Middle Class and State-Led Development. In The New Middle Classes, ed. Hellmuth Lange and Lars Meier. Dordrecht: Springer. (Chapter 12).
Gupta, Nitin. 2012. The Impact of Globalization on Consumer Acculturation: A Study of Urban, Educated, Middle Class Indian Consumers. Asia Pacific Journal of Marketing and Logistics 24 (1): 41–58. https://doi.org/10.1108/13555851211192696.
Handa, Meenakshi, and Arpita Khare. 2013. Gender as a Moderator of the Relationship Between Materialism and Fashion Clothing Involvement Among Indian Youth. Journal of Consumer Studies 37: 112–120. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1470-6431.2011.01057.x.
Hartmann, Patrick, and Vanessa Apaolaza-Ibáñez. 2012. Consumer Attitude and Purchase Intention Toward Green Energy Brands: The Roles of Psychological Benefits and Environmental Concern. Journal of Business Research 65 (9): 1254–1263. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2011.11.001.
Hedlund-de Witt, Annick. 2012a. Exploring Worldviews and Their Relationships to Sustainable Lifestyles: Towards a New Conceptual and Methodological Approach. Ecological Economics 84 (C): 74–83. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2012.09.009.
Hedlund-de Witt, Annick. 2012b. Exploring Worldviews and Their Relationships to Sustainable Lifestyles: Towards a New Conceptual and Methodological Approach. Ecological Economics 84 (1): 74–83. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2012.09.009.
Hedlund-de Witt, Annick. 2014. Rethinking Sustainable Development: Considering How Different Worldviews Envision “Development” and “Quality of Life. Sustainability 6 (11): 8310–8328. https://doi.org/10.3390/su6118310.
Hedlund-de Witt, Annick, and Nicholas H. Hedlund-de Witt. 2017. Towards an Integral Ecology of Worldviews: Reflexive Communicative Action for Climate Solutions. In The Variety of Integral Ecologies: Nature, Culture, and Knowledge in the Planetary Era, ed. Sam Mickey, Sean Kelly, and Adam Robert. New York, USA: SUNY Press.
Hedlund-de Witt, Annick, Joop de Boer, and Jan J. Boersema. 2014. Exploring Inner and Outer Worlds: A Quantitative Study of Worldviews, Environmental Attitudes, and Sustainable Lifestyles. Journal of Environmental Psychology 37: 40–54. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2013.11.005.
Hudders, Liselot, and Mario Pandelaere. 2012. The Silver Lining of Materialism: The Impact of Luxury Consumption on Subjective Well-Being. Journal of Happiness Studies 13 (3): 411–437. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-011-9271-9.
Hurst, Megan, Helga Dittmar, Rod Bond, and Tim Kasser. 2013. The Relationship Between Materialistic Values and Environmental Attitudes and Behaviors: A Meta-analysis. Journal of Environmental Psychology 36: 257–269. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2013.09.003.
Johnson, Katherine A., Eric D. Hill, and Adam B. Cohen. 2011. Integrating the Study of Culture and Religion: Towards a Psychology of Worldview. Social and Personality Psychology Compass 5 (3): 137–152. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2010.00339.x.
Kashdan, Todd B., and William E. Breen. 2007. Materialism and Diminished Well-Being: Experiential Avoidance as a Mediating Mechanism. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 26 (May): 521–539.
Kasser, Tim. 2016. Materialistic Values and Goals. Annual Review of Psychology 67 (1): 489–514. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-122414-033344.
Kilbourne, William E., and Gregory Pickett. 2008. How Materialism Affects Environmental Beliefs, Concern, and Environmentally Responsible Behavior. Journal of Business Research 61 (9): 885–893. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2007.09.016.
Koltko-Rivera, Mark E. 2004. The Psychology of Worldviews. Review of General Psychology 8 (1): 3–58. https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.8.1.3.
Kumar, Sanjeev, Radha Garg, and Anita Makkar. 2012, October. Consumer Awareness and Perception towards Green Products: A Study of Youngsters in India. International Journal of Marketing and Business Communication 1 (4): 35–43. ISSN 2277-484X. Available at http://www.i-scholar.in/index.php/ijmbc/article/view/38407.
Latouche, Serge. 2009. Farewell to Growth. Polity Press.
Lorek, Sylvia, and Doris Fuchs. 2013. Strong Sustainable Consumption Governance—Precondition for a Degrowth Path? Journal of Cleaner Production 38: 36–43. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2011.08.008.
Maheshwari, Shruti P. 2014. Awareness of Green Marketing and Its Influence on Buying Behavior of Consumers: Special Reference to Madhya Pradesh, India. AIMA Journal of Management and Research 8 (1). Accessed from https://apps.aima.in/ejournal_new/articlespdf/3_dr_shruti_p_maheshwari.pdf.
Dev, Mallika. 2017. Indian Culture and Lifestyle for Environment Conservation: A Path Towards Sustainable Development. International Journal on Emerging Technologies 8 (1): 256–260. ISSN No. (Online):2249-3255 https://www.researchtrend.net/ijet/current_issue_ijet.php?taxonomy-id=25.
Mathur, Nita. 2010. Shopping Malls, Credit Cards and Global Brands: Consumer Culture and Lifestyle of India’s New Middle Class. South Asia Research 30 (3): 211–231. https://doi.org/10.1177/026272801003000301.
Mawdsley, Emma. 2004. India’s Middle Classes and the Environment. Development and Change 35 (1): 79–103. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7660.2004.00343.x.
McNeill, Desmond, and Harold Wilhite. 2015. Making Sense of Sustainable Development in a Changing World. In Emerging Economies and Challenges to Sustainability, ed. Arve Hansen and Ulrikke Wethal. London: Routledge.
Myers, Norman, and Jennifer Kent. 2003, April 15. New Consumers: The Influence of Affluence on the Environment. PNAS 100 (8): 4963–4968. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0438061100.
Parikh, Jyoti, Manoj Panda, Anand Ganesh-Kumar, and Vinay Singh. 2009. CO2 Emissions Structure of Indian Economy. Energy 34 (8): 1024–1031. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.energy.2009.02.014.
Petty, Gregory, and Pallassana Balagopal. 1998. Multigenerational Conflicts and New Immigrants: An Indo-American Experience. Families in Society: The journal of contemporary human services 79 (4): 410–423.
Podoshen, Jeffrey S., and Susan A. Andrzejewski. 2012. An Examination of the Relationships Between Materialism, Conspicuous Consumption, Impulse Buying, and Brand Loyalty. Journal of Marketing Theory and Practice 20 (3): 319–334. https://doi.org/10.2753/MTP1069-6679200306.
Polanyi, Karl. 2002, May 10. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, 2nd ed. Boston: Beacon Press. (Originally Published 1944).
Polonsky, Michael, William Kilbourne, and Andrea Vocino. 2014. Relationship Between the Dominant Social Paradigm, Materialism and Environmental Behaviors in Four Asian Economies. European Journal of Marketing 48 (3/4): 522–551. https://doi.org/10.1108/EJM-07-2011-0351.
Richins, Marsha L. 2013. When Wanting Is Better than Having: Materialism, Transformation Expectations, and Product-Evoked Emotions in the Purchase Process. Journal of Consumer Research 40 (1): 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1086/669256.
Richins, Marsha L., and Scott Dawson. 1992. A Consumer Values Orientation for Materialism and Its Measurement: Scale Development and Validation. Journal of Consumer Research 19 (December): 303–316. https://doi.org/10.1086/209304.
Ringmar, Erik. 2005. Surviving Capitalism: How We Learned to Live with the Market and Remained Almost Human. London: Anthem Press.
Rook, Dennis W., and Robert J. Fisher. 1995. Normative Influences on Impulsive Buying Behavior. Journal of Consumer Research 22 (3): 305–313. https://doi.org/10.1086/209452.
Sreen, Naman, Pradip H. Sadarangani, and Bidyut Jyoti Gogoi. 2019. Profiling Green Consumers Through Culture, Beliefs and Demographics: An Indian Study. International Journal of Indian Culture and Business Management 19 (2): 166–188. https://doi.org/10.1504/IJICBM.2019.10019641.
Stapleton, Lee, Steve Sorrell, and Tim Schwanen. 2016. Estimating Direct Rebound Effects for Personal Automotive Travel in Great Britain. Energy Economics 54 (February): 313–325. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eneco.2015.12.012.
Tonn, Bruce E. 2007. Futures Sustainability. Futures 39: 1097–1116. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2007.03.018.
United Nations (UN) COP25. 2019. UN Climate Change Conference, December 2019. Retrieved December 3 2019 from https://unfccc.int/.
United Nations (UN) Framework Convention on Climate Change. 2016. Report of the Conference of the Parties on its twenty-first session, held in Paris from 30 November to 13 December 2015 (COP21 2015), FCCC/CP/2015/10/Add.1. Retrieved February 2016 from https://unfccc.int/sites/default/files/resource/docs/2015/cop21/eng/10a01.pdf.
Upadhya, Carol. 2009. India’s ‘New Middle Class’ and the Globalising City: Software Professionals in Bangalore, India. In The New Middle Classes, ed. Hellmuth Lange and Lars Meier. Dordrecht: Springer. (Chapter 14).
Urry, John. 2016. What is the Future? Cambridge, UK: Wiley Press.
Varman, Rohit, and Russell W. Belk. 2009. Nationalism and Ideology in an Anticonsumption Movement. Journal of Consumer Research 36 (4): 686–700. https://doi.org/10.1086/600486.
Varman, Rohit, and Russell W. Belk. 2012. Consuming Postcolonial Shopping Malls. Journal of Marketing Management 28 (1–2): 62–84. https://doi.org/10.1080/0267257X.2011.617706.
Welzer, Harald. 2011. Mental Infrastructures: How Growth Entered the World and Our Souls. In The Publication Series on Ecology, vol. 14, ed. Heinrich Boll Foundation. Berlin: Heinrich-Boll-Stiftung.
Wilhite, Harold. 2008. Consumption and the Transformation of Everyday Life: A View from South India. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Wilhite, Harold, and Arve Hansen. 2015. Reflections on the Meta-practice of Capitalism and Its Capacity for Sustaining a Low Energy Transformation. In Sociologie de l’énergie, ed. Marie-Christine Zelem and Christoph Beslay. CNRS Editions: Gouvernance et pratiques sociales.
Winther, Tanya, and Harold Wilhite. 2015. An Analysis of the Household Energy Rebound Effect from a Practice Perspective: Spatial and Temporal Dimensions. Energy Efficiency 8: 595–607. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12053-014-9311-5.
World Population Review. 2019, July. India Population. Retrieved August 2019 from http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/india/.
Worldometers. 2019a. European Population 2019. Retrieved August 2019 from https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/europe-population/.
Worldometers. 2019b. U.S. Population 2019. Retrieved August 2019 from https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/us-population/.
WWI. 2013. State of the World 2013: Is Sustainability still Possible?. Washington, DC: Island Press.
Zhao, Anita Lifen, Nicole Koenig-Lewis, Stuart Hanmer-Lloyd, and Janine Dermody. 2018. Promoting Sustainable Behaviours in China: The Interplay of Traditional Cultural Values and Identity. Paper presented at The 3rd International Conference on Marketing, Strategy and Policy: ‘Technology, Sustainability, Wellbeing and Shared Economy: Role of Marketing Strategy and Policy’, Newcastle University (London Campus), April 10–11, 2018.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Dermody, J. (2020). Tales of Materialism and Sustainable Consumption in a Marketizing Urban India. In: Roy Chaudhuri, H., Belk, R. (eds) Marketization. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4514-6_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4514-6_7
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore
Print ISBN: 978-981-15-4513-9
Online ISBN: 978-981-15-4514-6
eBook Packages: Business and ManagementBusiness and Management (R0)