Field Vignette: 1

I’m sitting in front of my laptop. I’m opening up day 2 on dscout. It’s the first market. There’s the relief in finishing a discussion guide, wrestled over between you, your local team and the client, and then the tension of it landing in the messy lives of humans. Are they the right questions? Are they worded well? Have we connected with people enough? Today people are sharing videos of us of what’s in their fridge and pantry. I start watching. There’s the familiar pleasure in hearing people narrate what they see in their kitchen. At the end of the first video, I notice an awkwardness or silence. We had asked people to finish by showing us the most sustainable item in their fridge or pantry. The person paused. For a long time compared to the last two minutes. “I guess this” as they landed on a bottle of water. I watched other videos. Other people also were silent, hesitant and even reluctant to name anything in their fridge or pantry ‘sustainable’. What made it more intriguing was they had been recruited for behaviours that the client had identified as relevant, sustainable behaviours so as to spend time with people already practising sustainability in some way.

In 2019 we were struck how differently people conceptualise and experience sustainability. People inside organisations and agencies talk as if there is a tangible and universally accepted understanding of sustainability that is actionable at scale through products, policies and practices. The embedded organisational talk (‘sustainable practices’, ‘sustainability creative agency’, ‘making sustainability’, ‘achieving true sustainability’, ‘the influence of sustainability’) assumes a shared understanding. Individuals talk at a human scale across a diverse range of small, personal practices (recycling, plant-based diet, shopping local, workers’ rights) that enable them to feel like they’re doing something “good”.

There appeared to be language gaps. If we introduced sustainability into discussion, yes, people would politely talk about it, and respond to examples provided of possible candidates for sustainable packaging or communications. But people did not talk comfortably, or even consistently, about sustainability. My sustainability is not necessarily another individual’s or organisation’s sustainability. Interpretations could be anchored in economic concerns (viability in business or in wages); social concerns (my family or community); environmental concerns (anything from the degradation of my local environment to global warming); or any elements within the means of production.

Our interviewees struggled to define sustainability and to produce tangible examples in the context of their lives. The Better Futures Report by Colmar Brunton New Zealand (2019) is an annual survey focusing on consumer behaviour towards socially, environmentally and economically responsible brands. The survey found seven out of ten respondents were unable to name a brand leader in sustainability. When asked to pick from a list, sustainability credentials seem to align most closely with overall brand communications and advertising spend. Does this lack of recognition, even after decades of promotion, indicate the word sustainability has limited commercial value and meaning?

The finding contrasted with the experts we spoke to who had roles inside organisations who talked about sustainability as a knowable thing. The experts might allude to the ‘intention action gap’ around sustainability but not that the word ‘sustainability’ has a language problem. We detected a ‘consumer’ silence and also a type of organisational silence. The global brief requested we compile global and market-specific commercial research reports on food, sustainability and millennials for our client. As we spent time with people in different cities, we returned to the commercial reports to see how they framed and managed this language gap. Did they talk about the gaps in language? Trend reports were breathless in their announcement of shifts and changes, including changes in consumer activity in supermarket aisles and social media, but most reported attitude shifts captured in response to statements in surveys. The subheading of the 2018 Nielsen Report The Evolution of the Sustainability Mindset is, tellingly, Get With The Program: Consumers Demand Sustainability’. This trends report claims sustainability has increasing value for consumers but is not translating into consumers discussing sustainability. Can actions and discourse, therefore, be captured by the word ‘sustainability’ anymore?

A global project gives you the time and space to ruminate on significant issues. When we spoke with experts inside organisations, such as the Head of Sustainability at a corporation or university, they were comfortable discussing sustainability. This stood in contrast with ‘regular’ people we interviewed who mostly struggled to talk about sustainability, but what they did talk about was smaller behaviours. There were noticeable silences when we gently questioned organisations’ assumptions about the inherent good and usefulness of sustainability, the language gaps, and what we miss in the present if the brand discourse assumes a particular future (bright, good, optimistic). What are we not discussing? Is sustainability a useful concept-metaphor? Moore (2004) claims concept-metaphors are valuable because they can maintain ambiguity and a productive tension between universal claims and specific historical contexts, as well as acting as a mechanism for all of us to communicate. Is sustainability valuable in this sense? Or is it worthy, but so vague and encompassing so many different associations that it is an essentially meaningless term? Further in her article, Moore cites Appadurai’s use of ‘scape’ as a “space for action and thought not only for anthropologists, but also for… families and individuals.” (2004,79). We have observed that sustainability can be a space for thought for anthropologists (based on books that continue to be published), but little evidence that it is a space for thought for families or individuals. What if “there is no there there” and by introducing sustainability as a topic into conversation we are introducing an artificial construct? We are, in effect, superimposing a concept on the field, rather than understanding how families and individuals might make sense of the conceptual space.

We aren’t, of course, the only people raising issues around the language of sustainability. Hasbrouck and Scull, in Hook to Plate Social Entrepreneurship: An Ethnographic Approach to Driving Sustainable Change in the Global Fishing Industry comment on the use of the word in the seafood industry:

The imprecision surrounding the definition of “sustainability” has been passed on to consumers, who are largely confused about what it is that “sustainability” means when it comes to fish. “Sustainability,” as a food label term, stands out in its ambiguity even among other ethical food choice labels, whose names are varyingly self-explanatory, such as “free-range,” “shade-grown,” “cruelty free,” and “fair trade.” (2014, 471)

Mike Youngblood uses a textbook definition in his introduction to the Sustainability & Ethnography in Business Series, stating that “Sustainability is an approach to acting in the world in a way that consumes resources and produces waste at a rate that could be continued indefinitely” (2016, 1). If we pause on that definition, what if sustainability as a concept does not connect sufficiently to how people are acting in the world in relation to their consumption or their waste?

What could it mean to work at a human scale? In her chapter ‘Design Ethnography, Public Policy, & Public Services: Rendering Collective Issues Doable & at Human Scale’, Kimbell argues the value of ethnographic practices is:

not that they are human-centred but rather they provide a way to understand sociomaterial assemblages involving complex political, financial, social, and technological systems at human scale…even given limited resources, the analytical orientation of ethnography is productive for asking different questions and provoking new thinking. (2014, 163)

What would it look like to closely attend to human experiences and how people interpret them—to be in the room in a tiny way? What if people did not know that sustainability was on the agenda? What if we let the participants define the challenge—letting the language and concepts emerge from what participants experience and talk about as important and “remain open to what is actually happening” (Glaser 1978, 3)?

At the start of 2020, we recruited eight people across Auckland and spent time with each of them in their homes. (The fieldwork took place between the end of January and the start of February. At the time, COVID-19 was present but unnoticed in New Zealand.) Rather than ask the questions we wanted answers to directly, we let people talk about what they wanted to talk about. Practically, we asked three questions. We asked them to talk a bit about themselves; we explored what was currently on their minds, and finished up with discussing the future. We used listening, probing, and replaying to explore what emerged.