Academic Events

It is clear that if global society is to address the many environmental and other sustainability challenges that confront us in the 21st century, it will be necessary to make significant changes in our patterns of consumption, production and distribution.  There is a growing realisation that while changes in production and distribution are formidable, proposed solutions may not succeed unless it is possible to persuade consumers to change their lifestyle choices, both directly and indirectly through the role of households as voters.  It is therefore vital that policy-makers have the best possible advice on which actions will be most effective in shifting patterns of consumption.

Consumption forms the bedrock of modern economics and many of the empirical economic models used by policy-makers in international agencies, governments and businesses to underpin policy advice. Yet it is conceptualised there in a way that is at variance with some of the empirical evidence, and with theories and findings in anthropology, sociology, psychology and other disciplines. The Sustainable Consumption Institute (SCI) at The University of Manchester is therefore holding a 2-day conference in Manchester on 8th and 9th March 2012 at which the robust findings on consumption behaviour will be presented by a number of invited leading international experts from a range of disciplines. Some of our invited experts include:

Maureen Cropper, University of Maryland: "How should benefits and costs be discounted in an intergenerational context?"

Steven Durlauf and William Brock, University of Wisconsin: "Identifying social effects on consumption."

Rachel Griffiths, Institute for Fiscal Studies: "Food purchasing behaviour, nutrition and obesity in UK households."

Frank Trentmann, Birbeck, University of London: "Past and present: Power, inequality and public spending in modern consumption."

Peter Fletcher, University of Cambridge: "The hungry brain."

Alan Warde, The University of Manchester: "Sociology, consumption and habit"

Harold (Hal) Wilhite, University of Oslo: "The body in consumption"


The papers we have invited these experts to present will reflect on the latest thinking about consumption behaviour from the perspective of their disciplines, assess the strengths and weaknesses of their disciplinary approaches, and, ideally, suggest how further conceptual links might be made between these different approaches, how empirical evidence can be brought to bear to illuminate the pertinence of the different factors that might affect consumer behaviour, and the policy issues for which the different aspects of consumer behaviour may be most pertinent.

Professor Partha Dasgupta will deliver a free public lecture at Whitworth Hall, The University of Manchester on Thursday, 8 March 2012.