Understanding the diffusion of Sustainable Product-Service Systems: Insights from the sociology of consumption and practice theory

By Josephine Mylan. 2015

197 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The sustainable product-service system (SPSS) concept highlights that achieving sustainability requires changes in both ‘production’ and ‘consumption’. Nevertheless, attention has focused mainly on ‘production’. This paper enriches the SPSS approach with insights from the sociology of consumption and practice theory to provide a deeper understanding of the use of products and services in daily life contexts. The paper advances three key insights related to: a) the internal dynamics of user practices, b) the strength of linkages of practice elements (loose and tight coupling), c) external linkages to other practices. These insights are mobilised to provide a deeper understanding of the uptake and diffusion of innovations such as SPSS. The insights are illustrated with two cases in which interventions designed to stimulate diffusion have had differential success: energy efficient light bulbs and low temperature laundry. Implications for understanding the diffusion of SPSS are discussed.

Subfields: Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Marketing

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1c3bdf7cd27cee2b3a481f71679ef2d416c6f5ca

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Citations in the corpus

Re-Introducing Consumption to the ‘Circular Economy’: A Sociotechnical Analysis of Domestic Food Provisioning (2016, background): “This is particularly relevant for CE solutions which require consumers to incorporate new products, use existing infrastructures in new ways, or to become enrolled in entirely different ways of meeting needs, such as required by the adoption of consumer-facing product-service systems [6–8].”
A critical appraisal of Sustainable Consumption and Production research: The reformist, revolutionary and reconfiguration positions (2015, background): “Furthermore, practices have external linkages to other practices (Mylan, 2015), which means that a change in one practice (where people work) can trigger changes in another practice (e.”
Consumption in the Circular Economy: A Literature Review (2018, methodology): “Finally, Mylan [134,135] investigated how practices’ elements change, and their relationship transforms to allow for more participants to join.”
Product/Service‐Systems for a Circular Economy: The Route to Decoupling Economic Growth from Resource Consumption? (2019, unknown): “Rebound effects in relation to PSS are also a commonly known issue (Kjaer et al. 2016), because a PSS often causes changes in user behavior, which counteracts the resource reduction potential (Mylan 2015; Goedkoop et al. 1999).”