Care, Gender, and Change in the Study of Sustainable Consumption: A Critical Review of the Literature
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Western countries, moving toward more sustainable lifestyles often involves the disruption of well-established routines and habits in relation to consumption domains such as food, washing and cleaning, heating and cooling, transportation, and managing “stuff” more generally. These activities are deeply embedded in our everyday lives and often tied to care, which is the work invested in maintaining the well-being of oneself and others. In this paper, we are interested in the ways sustainable consumption and care interlock within the household, how they relate to gender inequalities, and how change toward more sustainable lifestyles can both impact and be impacted by these inequalities. With this in mind, we conducted a critical review of the academic literature by analyzing a corpus of 75 papers on household consumption and sustainability, paying particular attention to the role authors attribute to care and gender. The analysis shines light on the relational character of care and consumption, emphasizing the ways sustainable consumption is dependent on relationships within and outside the home. We suggest that care often acts as a barrier to the establishment of more sustainable consumption practice. Care work, per definition, upholds routines and habits while mobilizing the very resources that are needed to transform them. This insight invites us to rethink the role of households as a site for change. We suggest that the transition toward more sustainable consumption practices within the home relies on reducing and redistributing care work, transforming the world of work, and actively promoting an ethos of care that includes people, other beings, the material world and the planet.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.014 | 0.024 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.014 | 0.021 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".