Southerton, D. Chappells, H. Van Vliet, B. (2004) Sustainable Consumption: Implications of Changing Infrastructures of Provision. Manchester: Edward Elgar. 4. The limited autonomy of the consumer: implications for sustainable consumption Dale Southerton, Alan Warde and Martin Hand INTRODUCTION It is widely believed that current levels of consumption required to maintain acceptable standards of living in affluent societies are unsustainable. A host of explanations are put forward to account for such unprecedented volumes of consumption. Some point the finger at the relationship between a capitalist system of production and resource distribution, which places profit before ecological concerns (Daly, 1996). The system must reproduce itself by selling ever more goods and services in order that economic growth, which is unproblematically taken to be the key indicator of ‘social progress’, can be attained (Levett et al., 2003). Advertising and the marketing of mass- manufactured goods reproduces the system by driving increased consumption, and does so by masking the true social relations of production, generating false needs that reverberate around materialistic values but fail to increase subjective senses of well-being. Ironically, part of the ‘consumer attitude’ is that the solution to personal fulfilment is thought to be found in the consumption of more, not less (Bauman, 1988). Other accounts highlight how particular social and economic changes have led to significant shifts in the priorities and objectives of social actors in daily life, and how our identities are formed and maintained. Instead of identity and social status being anchored through one’s role in a moral community or in relation to the means of production (such as occupational status), it is now more readily formed in relation to consumption (Veblen, 1998 [1899]); Bourdieu, 1984). In such circumstances it is not surprising that volumes of consumption have increased.