Magnus Boström
Biographic Data
| ID | 255011 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Magnus Boström |
| GIVEN NAMES | Magnus |
| FAMILY NAME | Boström |
| SIGNATURE | BOSTRÖM M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Örebro University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1223-1311 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 79 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 168 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 36 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 43 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Reflexive inner conversations: Negotiating the shift to reduced consumption
This article explores the role of reflexivity in shaping how individuals engage with consumption reduction. We shed light on how ‘reducers’ -those who deliberately strive to limit their consumption–reflect on their practices, emotions, and identities in everyday life. Building on Archer’s modes of reflexivity and Davidson’s climate emotion framework, we investigate how internal conversations influence both motivations and strategies for reducing …
Normalising what’s outside the norm? The social life of consumption reduction
A better understanding of the factors at play in the normalisation of sustainable lifestyle choices is essential to achieve a large-scale transition to sufficiency-oriented lifestyles and societies. Aiming to contribute to this understanding, this article builds on literature on normativity and normalisation related to consumption and analyses interview material from a study with 25 Swedish individuals who aim to reduce their consumption. The ana…
Why and how lifestyle change to reduced consumption is an active part of the emerging sustainability transformation
Humanity exceeds or threatens to exceed the planetary boundaries. The problem of unsustainable lifestyles in affluent contexts is, therefore, increasingly up for debate. Despite growing attention, this theoretical article argues that there is, in science as well as policy, a lack of recognition of the problem of unsustainable volumes of consumption, and institutional failure to address radical lifestyle change. While there is broad consensus abou…
Is a Slower Life a Pathway to Sustainable Lifestyles: Experiences from the Pandemic
The restricted mobility and homebody life people experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic implied a dramatic change of the time–space configuration in everyday life. Based on a qualitative interview study with 35 participants in Ireland and Sweden, this article presents theoretical perspectives and empirical illustrations on how changes in the sociotemporal rhythms in everyday life can shape conditions for making people's lifestyles more environm…
Environmental Sociology and Social Transformation: Key Issues
Environmental Sociology and Social Transformation demonstrates how sociological theory and research are critical for understanding the social drivers of global environmental destruction and the conditions for transformative change. Written by two professors of sociology who are deeply involved in the international community of environmental sociology, Magnus Boström and Rolf Lidskog argue that we need to better understand society as well as the f…
Cross-cultural perspectives on ethical consumption: A study of Swedish and Iranian citizens
Ethical consumption can take different forms, each with its own justifications and underlying rationales. While countries in north-western Europe have well-established mechanisms for promoting ethically labelled products, the situation is different in many other regions across the world. This paper examines ethical consumption in Sweden and Iran to identify the societal factors that influence the phenomenon. Employing social practice theory and a…
The Social Life of Unsustainable Mass Consumption
The Social Life of Unsustainable Mass Consumption draws on a variety of theories and research to contribute to our understanding of unsustainable mass consumption. It addresses the role of identities, social relations, interactions, belonging, and status comparison, and how perceived time scarcity is both a cause and an effect of consumption. It examines the power of consumer norms and how overconsumption is normalized and shows how consumption i…
Ethical consumption in three stages: A focus on sufficiency and care
Given the excessive consumption of natural resources in affluent contexts across the world, this paper argues that there is a need to discuss, critique, and advance the concept of ethical consumption, which is commonly understood as involving only relatively minor practices of consumption refinement, such as acts of boycotting and buycotting.The paper does so by linking ethical consumption to the concepts of sufficiency and care and suggesting a …
Workplace bullying and harassment at sea: A structured literature review
Seafaring is a masculine-coded occupation with a strong professional culture that values practical experience. Traditionally, youths were accepted on board ships to be guided, socialised, and often bullied into the working and living cultures at sea. The maritime industry is characterised by several factors known from research to constitute a hotbed for workplace bullying and harassment, such as sustained high workload, role conflicts, jargon, an…
Social relations and challenges to consuming less in a mass consumption society
Increasing numbers of people in welfare societies express worries about their ecological footprint. Some make efforts to significantly reduce their consumption. Because people have been socialized into a society of mass/excess consumption, there are great challenges. How can someone learn to downsize when society incessantly compels her to continue with mass consumption habits? This article demonstrates, theoretically and empirically, how social …
Social Relations and Everyday Consumption Rituals: Barriers or Prerequisites for Sustainability Transformation
Macro-institutional structures and consumerist culture force and urge people to reproduce unsustainable levels of consumption. A crucial role for sociology, the article argues, is to address theoretically and empirically the intersection between social relations and (over)consumption. The purpose with this article is to address how social relations are involved in both reproducing and challenging consumer culture. This is done by emphasizing the …
Other-initiated repair as an indicator of critical communication in ship-to-ship interaction
Communication is an essential part of most joint activities, and effective means to identify and rectify misunderstandings are necessary to reach mutual understandings. In the maritime domain, faulty communication is often a contributing cause to ship accidents, potentially putting human lives, vessels, and the environment at risk. This study explores the use of other-initiated repair in maritime ship-to-ship communication. The purpose is to clas…
The social life of mass and excess consumption
The article uses social science theory and literature to theorize mass and excess consumption. The purpose is to contribute a conceptual framework for studying how institutions and mechanisms of social life drive and reproduce patterns of mass/excess consumption, and to discuss the potential for bottom-up transformative processes to move us away from excess consumption. The article discusses material and non-material institutions and focuses in p…
Mass Consumption and Political Consumerism
This chapter focuses on the relation between mass consumption and political consumerism. Mass consumption concerns the omnipresent role of consumption in contemporary societies with associated problems of excessive resource use in current practices of consumption. The late modern context and forces of mass consumption can both trigger and prevent political consumerism as well as shape its outcome. The chapter offers a literature review that addre…
The Shifting Politics of Sustainable Seafood Consumerism
Seafood has emerged as a key testing ground for understanding the role of different value chain actors in driving sustainability. The conventional view, developed in the late 1990s, is that sustainable seafood is driven by the choices and practices of consumers in major importing markets, such as the United States and the European Union. This view led to the development of a range of boycott and buycott initiatives in the 2000s. Many of the buyco…
Facilitating Political Consumerism in an Emerging Economy: The Case of Political Consumerism in Thailand
Thailand, an emerging economy in Southeast Asia, has witnessed the emergence of political consumerism over the last five decades. The start of political consumerism was in 1972 with a boycott of Japanese products due to their economic domination in Thailand. Since then political consumerism has acquired multiple forms. Owing to urbanization and economic development, the expanding urban middle-class has become an “agent of change.” Consumer organi…
Tracing Political Consumerism in Africa and the Middle East
This chapter provides an overview of political consumerism in Africa and the Middle East. Regarding the African continent, consumption is discussed in terms of lifestyle issues related to corruption and Western consumer cultures. In the Middle East and North Africa, political consumerism is closely related to religious controversies. Africa is also central in various global supply chains, such as those for food and minerals, which engage politica…
Modes of Coordination in Political Consumerism
This chapter uses the concept of modes of coordination to differentiate between various forms of political consumerism, often generically treated as consumer movements. When consumer activism consists primarily of individual purchasing decisions, it is difficult to speak of social movements, although consumption takes place in the context of retail/production organizations embedded in a specific consumerist subculture and not purely oriented to t…
Household Appliances and Electronics: Discussing the Relative Absence of Political Consumerism
Household appliances and electronics have massive environmental implications caused by the consumption of energy and scarce materials and the release of hazardous chemicals related to production, use, and disposal as well as social issues related to working conditions and the north-south division in production and waste handling. Still, political consumerism is quite absent from this field. Public policy measures within this area include energy l…
Political Consumerism in the Oil and Mining Extractive Industries: Possibilities for Sustainability and Social Justice
This chapter draws on a range of cases where boycotts, buycotts, and discursive tactics have been used to target oil and mineral extraction. The chapter provides an overview of the key actors, strategies, and political and structural factors that facilitate political consumerism around oil and mining. In doing so, it offers insight into the possibilities and limitations of political consumerism for addressing the environmental and social justice …
Political Food Consumerism between Mundane Routines and Organizational Alliance-Building
Food consumption is a mundane, embodied type of consumption as well as a target of multiple moral contestations. Politicized quite early, food consumption has remained a regular example of political consumerism, framed through a number of societal issues such as sustainability and global justice. This chapter shows that the research on political food consumerism is characterized by three tendencies. First, across other differences, researchers ap…
Political Consumerism: Research Challenges and Future Directions
This chapter highlights The Oxford Handbook of Political Consumerism ’s most interesting findings and identifies major characteristics and conceptual/methodological topics for advancing research on the phenomenon of political consumerism. It emphasizes how scholars study the phenomenon’s multidimensionality in a more fragmented context and explains differences in the forms and spread of political consumerism across industry sectors. The wide dive…
Political Consumerism and the Social-Practice Perspective
Social practice approaches, developed in sociology, contribute to the study of political consumerism by moving away from individual accounts of political consumerism and towards the study of everyday practices and their changes. This chapter presents the main conceptual tools and empirical orientations and connects these with political consumerism thinking. This leads to a focus on social practices, the embeddedness of different social practices,…
Boycotting and Buycotting in Consumer Cultures: Political Consumerism in North America
This chapter presents a historical overview of political consumerism in the United States and Canada, highlighting how societal and cultural shifts have influenced participation over time. The chapter begins by discussing the debatable origins of political consumerism in the Boston Tea Party to present-day examples, including fair trade and ecoconsumption. Throughout the chapter, there is an emphasis on the heterogeneity of political consumers, w…
The Successes of Political Consumerism as a Social Movement
The chapter aims at providing a set of interpretive tools to analyze the outcomes of consumer activism when performed through collective action. In the last years, there has been a shift from political consumerism understood as a practice of the individual citizen-consumer to political consumerism performed by a growing number of organized collectives like solidarity purchasing groups, consumer-producer cooperatives, ecological communities, etc. …
A missing pillar? Challenges in theorizing and practicing social sustainability: Introduction to the Special Issue
Since publication of the Brundtland Report in 1987, the notion of sustainable development has come to guide the pursuit of environmental reform by both public and private organizations and to facilitate communication among actors from different societal spheres. It is customary to characterize sustainable development in a familiar typology comprising three pillars: environmental, economic, and social. The relationships among these dimensions are …
NGO Power in Global Social and Environmental Standard-Setting
We have seen a worldwide increase in new nonstate, multi-stakeholder organizations setting standards for socially and environmentally responsible behavior. These standard-setting arenas offer new channels for political participation for NGOs. Scholars have drawn attention to the rise and the role of NGOs in global politics, but there is less research on the power and long-term implications of NGO participation in transnational multi-stakeholder s…
A reflexive look at reflexivity in environmental sociology
Reflexivity is a central concept in environmental sociology, as in environmental social science in general. The concept is often connected to topics such as modernity, governance, expertise, and consumption. Reflexivity is presented as a means for taking constructive steps towards sustainability as it recognizes complexity, uncertainty, dilemmas, and ambivalence. Critical discussion of the conceptual meaning and usage of reflexivity is therefore …
Framings of Science and Ideology: Organic Food Labelling in the US and Sweden
Organic food labelling debates in Sweden and the USA are examined in order to compare two different policy discourse climates on the basis of interviews, documents, and websites of governmental and non-governmental organisations. Framings in the Swedish debates mainly take place through eco-pragmatic metaframing, aimed at consensus, and based on a mixture of undefined scientific and ideological framings. The American examples indicate more advers…
A sociology of environmental representation
The environment cannot plead its own case but must be represented. The aim of this paper is to elaborate on the concept of representation and demonstrate its relevance for environmental sociology. Drawing on Pitkin’s classic work on representation, we discuss representation as both ‘acting for’ and ‘standing for’. We also make a distinction between actors (representatives) and devices used as representations (e.g. descriptions, graphs and images)…
State-centered versus Nonstate-driven Organic Food Standardization: A Comparison of the US and Sweden
Global multi-stakeholder standard setters: How fragile are they
Worldwide we see the rise of new non-state, ‘multi-stakeholder’ organizations setting standards for socially and environmentally responsible practices. A multi-stakeholder organization builds on the idea of assembling actors from diverse societal spheres into one rule-setting process, thereby combining their resources, competences, and experiences. These processes also allow competing interests to negotiate and deliberate about their different co…
Cognitive practices and collective identities within a heterogeneous social movement: The Swedish environmental movement
Recent studies on social movements have highlighted the importance of cultural and ideational factors. Concepts such as collective identity, cognitive praxis, and framing have been used to better understand the emergence, development, and political and cultural impact of social movements. In this article I draw on different schools of thought in order to develop a new use of the concept of cognitive practice. I suggest the relevance of analysing …
Can we rely on ‘climate-friendly’ consumption
In policy and research on sustainable consumption in general, and climate-oriented consumption specifically, key questions centre around whether people are motivated and prompted to support such consumption. A common claim in the scholarly debate is that policy makers, in face of fundamental governance challenges, refrain from taking responsibility and instead invest unrealistic hopes in that consumers will solve pressing environmental problems t…
The social life of mass and excess consumption
The article uses social science theory and literature to theorize mass and excess consumption. The purpose is to contribute a conceptual framework for studying how institutions and mechanisms of social life drive and reproduce patterns of mass/excess consumption, and to discuss the potential for bottom-up transformative processes to move us away from excess consumption. The article discusses material and non-material institutions and focuses in p…
Can consumers save the world? Everyday food consumption and dilemmas of sustainability
Background Global consequences of environmental problems, particularly climate change, affect both political agendas and people’s everyday life. As food consumption forms a significant part of the environmental load of households (Carlsson-Kanyama & Gonzalez, 2009; Duchin, 2005), the sustainability of what we eat has become a topical question. A new ethics of food is emerging (Coff, 2006): food consumers are encouraged to “to develop a moral Self…
The green political food consumer: A Critical Analysis of the Research and Policies
This paper reviews the current literature on political and ethical consumers, and relates it to the topic of sustainable food consumption. A first aim is to problematise a somewhat simplistic view of the political and ethical consumer found in the literature. The paper sheds light on some of the dilemmas that confront green political consumers. We indicate that most existing studies say very little about consumers' thoughts, assumptions, and refl…
Social Relations and Everyday Consumption Rituals: Barriers or Prerequisites for Sustainability Transformation
Macro-institutional structures and consumerist culture force and urge people to reproduce unsustainable levels of consumption. A crucial role for sociology, the article argues, is to address theoretically and empirically the intersection between social relations and (over)consumption. The purpose with this article is to address how social relations are involved in both reproducing and challenging consumer culture. This is done by emphasizing the …
Other-initiated repair as an indicator of critical communication in ship-to-ship interaction
Communication is an essential part of most joint activities, and effective means to identify and rectify misunderstandings are necessary to reach mutual understandings. In the maritime domain, faulty communication is often a contributing cause to ship accidents, potentially putting human lives, vessels, and the environment at risk. This study explores the use of other-initiated repair in maritime ship-to-ship communication. The purpose is to clas…
Environmental non-governmental organizations and transnational collaboration: The Baltic Sea and Adriatic-Ionian Sea regions
Previous studies of environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGO) have primarily taken place within a nation-state perspective without considering multiple levels of politics and governance. Because environmental problems are usually cross-border phenomena, environmental movements must develop transnational features to play constructive roles in politics and governance. This study contributes to the theorizing and study of transnationalizat…
Environmental Sociology and Social Transformation: Key Issues
Environmental Sociology and Social Transformation demonstrates how sociological theory and research are critical for understanding the social drivers of global environmental destruction and the conditions for transformative change. Written by two professors of sociology who are deeply involved in the international community of environmental sociology, Magnus Boström and Rolf Lidskog argue that we need to better understand society as well as the f…
Ethical consumption in three stages: A focus on sufficiency and care
Given the excessive consumption of natural resources in affluent contexts across the world, this paper argues that there is a need to discuss, critique, and advance the concept of ethical consumption, which is commonly understood as involving only relatively minor practices of consumption refinement, such as acts of boycotting and buycotting.The paper does so by linking ethical consumption to the concepts of sufficiency and care and suggesting a …
Cognitive practices and collective identities within a heterogeneous social movement: The Swedish environmental movement
Recent studies on social movements have highlighted the importance of cultural and ideational factors. Concepts such as collective identity, cognitive praxis, and framing have been used to better understand the emergence, development, and political and cultural impact of social movements. In this article I draw on different schools of thought in order to develop a new use of the concept of cognitive practice. I suggest the relevance of analysing …
Framings of Science and Ideology: Organic Food Labelling in the US and Sweden
Organic food labelling debates in Sweden and the USA are examined in order to compare two different policy discourse climates on the basis of interviews, documents, and websites of governmental and non-governmental organisations. Framings in the Swedish debates mainly take place through eco-pragmatic metaframing, aimed at consensus, and based on a mixture of undefined scientific and ideological framings. The American examples indicate more advers…
Regulatory Credibility and Authority through Inclusiveness: Standardization Organizations in Cases of Eco-Labelling
This paper deals with the challenging task of permanently organizing projects that include a broad range of actors: enterprises, social movement organizations and state actors. It focuses on a special type of standardization activity, namely eco-labelling, and is based on case studies of two Swedish projects/organizations: labelling of organic food and sustainable forestry. In this paper, I theorize about the concept of inclusiveness, which is se…
State-centered versus Nonstate-driven Organic Food Standardization: A Comparison of the US and Sweden
The green political food consumer: A Critical Analysis of the Research and Policies
This paper reviews the current literature on political and ethical consumers, and relates it to the topic of sustainable food consumption. A first aim is to problematise a somewhat simplistic view of the political and ethical consumer found in the literature. The paper sheds light on some of the dilemmas that confront green political consumers. We indicate that most existing studies say very little about consumers' thoughts, assumptions, and refl…
Can consumers save the world? Everyday food consumption and dilemmas of sustainability
Background Global consequences of environmental problems, particularly climate change, affect both political agendas and people’s everyday life. As food consumption forms a significant part of the environmental load of households (Carlsson-Kanyama & Gonzalez, 2009; Duchin, 2005), the sustainability of what we eat has become a topical question. A new ethics of food is emerging (Coff, 2006): food consumers are encouraged to “to develop a moral Self…
Can consumers save the world
Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture by Ellen Ruppel Shell
NGO Power in Global Social and Environmental Standard-Setting
We have seen a worldwide increase in new nonstate, multi-stakeholder organizations setting standards for socially and environmentally responsible behavior. These standard-setting arenas offer new channels for political participation for NGOs. Scholars have drawn attention to the rise and the role of NGOs in global politics, but there is less research on the power and long-term implications of NGO participation in transnational multi-stakeholder s…
The problematic social dimension of sustainable development: The case of the Forest Stewardship Council
There is broad support worldwide for the concept of sustainable development and the integration of its three pillars: economic development, environmental protection and social development. Nevertheless, previous research shows substantial difficulties associated with fully incorporating and operationalising social sustainability features in various sectors. The present article aims to explore further the reasons why incorporation of social sustai…
Transnational Environmental Governance: The Emergence and Effects of the Certification of Forests and Fisheries – By Lars H. Gulbrandsen
A missing pillar? Challenges in theorizing and practicing social sustainability: Introduction to the Special Issue
Since publication of the Brundtland Report in 1987, the notion of sustainable development has come to guide the pursuit of environmental reform by both public and private organizations and to facilitate communication among actors from different societal spheres. It is customary to characterize sustainable development in a familiar typology comprising three pillars: environmental, economic, and social. The relationships among these dimensions are …
Global multi-stakeholder standard setters: How fragile are they
Worldwide we see the rise of new non-state, ‘multi-stakeholder’ organizations setting standards for socially and environmentally responsible practices. A multi-stakeholder organization builds on the idea of assembling actors from diverse societal spheres into one rule-setting process, thereby combining their resources, competences, and experiences. These processes also allow competing interests to negotiate and deliberate about their different co…
Dilemmas for standardizers of sustainable consumption
Social Sustainability Requires Social Sustainability: Procedural Prerequisites for Reaching Substantive Goals
The synergies and trade-offs between the various dimensions of sustainable development are attracting a rising scholarly attention. Departing from the scholarly debate, this article focuses on internal relationships within social sustainability. Our key claim is that it is difficult to strengthen substantive social sustainability goals unless there are key elements of social sustainability contained in the very procedures intended to work toward …
Environmental non-governmental organizations and transnational collaboration: The Baltic Sea and Adriatic-Ionian Sea regions
Previous studies of environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGO) have primarily taken place within a nation-state perspective without considering multiple levels of politics and governance. Because environmental problems are usually cross-border phenomena, environmental movements must develop transnational features to play constructive roles in politics and governance. This study contributes to the theorizing and study of transnationalizat…
A reflexive look at reflexivity in environmental sociology
Reflexivity is a central concept in environmental sociology, as in environmental social science in general. The concept is often connected to topics such as modernity, governance, expertise, and consumption. Reflexivity is presented as a means for taking constructive steps towards sustainability as it recognizes complexity, uncertainty, dilemmas, and ambivalence. Critical discussion of the conceptual meaning and usage of reflexivity is therefore …
A sociology of environmental representation
The environment cannot plead its own case but must be represented. The aim of this paper is to elaborate on the concept of representation and demonstrate its relevance for environmental sociology. Drawing on Pitkin’s classic work on representation, we discuss representation as both ‘acting for’ and ‘standing for’. We also make a distinction between actors (representatives) and devices used as representations (e.g. descriptions, graphs and images)…
Environmental SMOs and resource mobilization in the post-communist vs the Northwest European context
Purpose This paper focuses on differences in resource mobilization opportunities among environmental social movement organizations (ESMOs), with empirical focus on ESMOs from five European Union countries – two Northwest European countries (Sweden, Germany) and three post-communist countries (Poland, Croatia, and Slovenia). Whereas mass-membership mobilization is a reality in the Northwest European context, ESMOs from post-communist countries fun…
Can we rely on ‘climate-friendly’ consumption
In policy and research on sustainable consumption in general, and climate-oriented consumption specifically, key questions centre around whether people are motivated and prompted to support such consumption. A common claim in the scholarly debate is that policy makers, in face of fundamental governance challenges, refrain from taking responsibility and instead invest unrealistic hopes in that consumers will solve pressing environmental problems t…
Environment and Society
Conditions for Transformative Learning for Sustainable Development: A Theoretical Review and Approach
Continued unsustainability and surpassed planetary boundaries require not only scientific and technological advances, but deep and enduring social and cultural changes. The purpose of this article is to contribute a theoretical approach to understand conditions and constraints for societal change towards sustainable development. In order to break with unsustainable norms, habits, practices, and structures, there is a need for learning for transfo…
Mass Consumption and Political Consumerism
This chapter focuses on the relation between mass consumption and political consumerism. Mass consumption concerns the omnipresent role of consumption in contemporary societies with associated problems of excessive resource use in current practices of consumption. The late modern context and forces of mass consumption can both trigger and prevent political consumerism as well as shape its outcome. The chapter offers a literature review that addre…
The Shifting Politics of Sustainable Seafood Consumerism
Seafood has emerged as a key testing ground for understanding the role of different value chain actors in driving sustainability. The conventional view, developed in the late 1990s, is that sustainable seafood is driven by the choices and practices of consumers in major importing markets, such as the United States and the European Union. This view led to the development of a range of boycott and buycott initiatives in the 2000s. Many of the buyco…
Facilitating Political Consumerism in an Emerging Economy: The Case of Political Consumerism in Thailand
Thailand, an emerging economy in Southeast Asia, has witnessed the emergence of political consumerism over the last five decades. The start of political consumerism was in 1972 with a boycott of Japanese products due to their economic domination in Thailand. Since then political consumerism has acquired multiple forms. Owing to urbanization and economic development, the expanding urban middle-class has become an “agent of change.” Consumer organi…
Political science (66 works) · Sociology (58 works) · Politics (54 works) · Law (45 works) · Consumerism (42 works) · Social science (34 works) · Business (32 works) · Economics (32 works) · Political economy (24 works) · Global trade, sustainability, and social impact (21 works)