Michael Foucault argued that 'the self' is socially constructed. So far as that is true, inhabitants of consumer societies have probably all internalized the social and institutional celebration of consumption, to varying extents, and this will have shaped our identities and worldviews, often in...

This paper explores how consumer societies are structurally set up to oppose practices of sustainable consumption and how those structural obstacles could be overcome.Our lifestyle decisions, especially our consumption decisions, are not made in a vacuum. Instead, they are made within social,...

After briefly summarising the critique of growth, this essay describes in some detail an alternative economic system, which I will call ‘the sufficiency economy.' This term is typically applied to so-called ‘developing economies,' which either have not yet industrialised or are still in the...