A cognitive approach to sustainable lifestyles

In both sociology and marketing, it is increasingly acknowledged that people may not just have one, but possibly several interconnected lifestyles. This chapter introduces a deductive, cognitive approach to identifying domain-specific lifestyles, as an alternative to the common inductive, macro-approaches. This approach is compatible with contemporary sociological conceptions of lifestyle and can serve as a useful micro-foundation for sociological lifestyle research. The chapter also presents a summary of my empirical research on the relationship between domain-specific lifestyles and sustainable consumption patterns in the food, transport and housing domains, based on a 10-country survey. From five to seven lifestyle segments and two to three country clusters produce the optimal compromise between data representation and parsimony. By means of the proposed lifestyle instruments it is possible to identify pan-European lifestyle segments, whose relative shares of the population are identical within broad clusters of countries from the same region of Europe.