Understanding Business Communication of Sustainability

Dan Welch's project contributes to the sociology of sustainable consumption through an empirical, historical and theoretical analysis of business communications relating to "sustainability". The developments of a number of trends that constitute the context in which "sustainability" has emerged are critically reviewed: brand management and modern marketing; "corporate social responsibility"; discourses of the environment; mass membership environmental NGOs; and "citizen-consumer" activism. The project draws on sociological theories of practice and resources within cultural sociology to examine the institutional organisation and everyday practices that constitute the field in which business sustainability communications are produced.

The research contributes to two growing bodies of sociological studies that take an empirical, practice-orientated approach to, on the one hand, the study of ‘knowledge workers' or ‘cultural intermediaries,' and on the other, consumption, and aims to further elaborate sociological theories of practice and their applicability to the study of sustainable consumption.

Dan is supervised by Professor Dale Southerton and Professor Alan Warde.