2.1 The Manufacture of Consumers through Market Devices

Markets are not neutral spaces where supply and demand meet spontaneously. Instead, they are constructed through a dense web of material devices, intermediation activities, and social relations that shape consumer preferences and behaviors. Economic sociology, inspired by the sociology of science and technology, demonstrates that markets are populated by “market devices” – such as brands, packaging, labels, digital platforms, and loyalty programs – which embed specific representations of consumers and prescribe their actions (Callon et al., 2007; Chessel & Dubuisson-Quellier, 2018; Karpik, 2010). Market devices are active engines of market expansion and play a vital role in the normalization of mass consumption (Dubuisson-Quellier, 2022), making it accessible, legitimized, and aspirational for individuals, and thus serving the interests of both economic actors and governments.

Market devices, such as advertising, branding, pricing, or merchandising, are designed by market professionals (such as marketers, advertisers, designers, influencers) to construct consumer representations and equip their choices (Chessel & Dubuisson-Quellier, 2018). For example, market research, focus groups, and digital tracking technologies (e.g., cookies, algorithms) do not merely reveal consumer preferences; they actively shape them by arbitrating between a limited set of pre-defined options (Beauvisage et al., 2024), defining the market qualities, categories, and values. These devices are “judgment devices” (Karpik, 2010) that provide consumers with criteria for evaluating products, such as brands, prices, rankings, or social media reviews. By doing so, they standardize consumer tastes and reduce the complexity of choice, making mass production and consumption possible.

Market devices are the material and symbolic tools that frame consumer-market interactions. They play a key role in developing consumer competencies (Chessel & Dubuisson-Quellier, 2018). For instance, the rise of self-service retail in the mid-20th century required consumers to develop new skills: navigating aisles, comparing products, and managing their own purchases (Cochoy, 2014). Today, merchandising techniques aim at guiding and channeling customers’ choices in supermarkets towards the most profitable products for the retailing company. Symmetrically, digital markets use algorithms and personalized recommendations to channel consumer choices toward products that maximize corporate profits (Alemany & Vayre, 2015). Loyalty programs, sales rankings, and limited-time offers further discipline consumers to adopt behaviors that align with business models, such as versatility (seeking variety) or loyalty (repeating purchases).

Consumer innovation has been extensively documented as a driver of product development, particularly in niche markets where users possess deep, practical knowledge of their needs. For instance, mountain bikers — acting as user-innovators — developed critical advancements such as improved suspension systems and brake designs by leveraging “local” information derived from their own experiences (Lüthje et al., 2005), becoming sources of novel product concepts. These studies collectively illustrate how user-driven creativity can lead to the emergence of entirely new product categories. However, this innovative work is largely shaped and framed by economic actors themselves, who transform these user-generated ideas into fully fledged market categories, thereby commercializing and standardizing what initially emerged as grassroots experimentation. Market devices can significantly contribute to shaping the conditions under which consumers can express their creativity. For instance, brands may establish consumer communities where individuals can test, evaluate, or suggest product innovations (Schau et al., 2009). Additionally, companies can draw inspiration from consumer creativity to develop new products or drive innovation. Consumer creativity thus becomes a resource that companies strive to stimulate and shape, with the primary aim of creating value that ultimately benefits them (Arnould et al., 2025).

Markets function as arenas of socialization, where consumers acquire dispositions aligned with corporate interests (Dubuisson-Quellier, 2022). Consumer tastes are not innate or spontaneous; they are actively constructed and maintained by market technologies, i.e., by the material devices, commercial strategies, and institutional arrangements designed by corporations to align consumer preferences with their business models. They function as socialization devices shaping consumers’ disposition for mass consumption: building tastes for variety, novelty, and availability, which are central to the functioning of mass markets, as they enable companies to sell ever-increasing volumes of standardized products while creating the illusion of individual choice and customization.

Variety is a key strategy for companies operating in saturated markets. While supermarket shelves and online platforms appear to offer an overwhelming diversity of products, this variety is carefully controlled and standardized. Market technologies such as packaging, branding, recipes, and range strategies create the perception of customization, allowing consumers to believe they are expressing individual preferences. However, this variety is often introduced at the end of the production process (e.g., delayed differentiation in the car or fashion industries), where a limited number of core products are adapted superficially to give the impression of diversity. For example, household appliances (e.g., washing machines or vacuums) from the same manufacturer may differ only in color or minor features, while sharing identical technical components. Fashion brands produce multiple “collections” per year, varying cuts or colors to encourage repeated purchases, but relying on standardized production processes. Variety has become a market value that legitimizes mass production by framing consumption as an expression of individuality, even though the underlying products remain largely standardized.

The value of novelty has historically been a powerful driver of consumption, long before the advent of modern capitalism. As early as the 17th century, “novelty shops” in Europe regularly introduced new products to attract affluent consumers, framing novelty as a marker of social distinction (Trentmann, 2016). Today, novelty remains a cornerstone of mass markets, but its function has evolved: it is no longer just a tool for elite consumption but a strategy to accelerate product turnover and justify continuous purchasing. Market technologies play a crucial role in manufacturing this taste for novelty. With planned obsolescence, products are designed to become outdated quickly, whether through technical obsolescence (e.g., software updates that render older devices slower) or cultural obsolescence (e.g., fashion trends that devalue last season’s styles). Brands in fashion, electronics, and even food industries using seasonal and limited-edition products, seeking to introduce short-lived items to create urgency and encourage repeat purchases.

Finally, availability refers to the spatial and temporal accessibility of products, a value that has been central to the expansion of mass markets. Market technologies such as chain stores, globalized brands, and multichannel selling have trained consumers to expect instant access to goods, regardless of location or time. By standardizing their retail spaces, supermarkets, fast-food chains, and global brands offer identical products worldwide, creating a sense of familiarity and reliability for consumers. Devices like the shopping cart or one-click purchasing extended the time and volume of consumption, normalizing the idea that more is better. The taste for availability is thus a learned disposition, where consumers come to value accessibility over quality or necessity. This is particularly evident in the globalization of fast fashion and electronics, where the ability to purchase cheap, standardized goods is framed as a form of democratic participation in consumer society.

Market devices transform markets into spaces of socialization, where consumers learn to value certain qualities over others. But market devices also contribute to stratifying consumption.

2.2 The Social Stratification of Consumption

The sociology of culture, and particularly the Bourdieusian program, has effectively demonstrated the mechanisms of taste stratification, which manifest both in and through consumption. Individuals internalize the effects of past experiences in the form of a habitus, which guides both their perception and action, leading them to develop dispositions to appreciate certain things over others — tastes as well as distastes (Bourdieu, 1979, 1980). These tastes and distastes enable individuals to express their social affiliations while also distinguishing themselves from other groups. The sociology of culture has highlighted the role of socialization processes — whether familial or professional — in shaping these dispositions. Here, we aim to emphasize the role of markets in these socialization processes, proposing to demonstrate how they contribute to reinforcing processes of cultural distinction by transforming certain consumption practices into fundamental elements of social belonging (Dubuisson-Quellier, 2026).

Market devices, such as luxury or cheap packaging and pricing strategies, play a key role in stratifying markets (Dubuisson-Quellier, 2026). They create and activate different consumer dispositions depending on the economic model they want to perform. Variety can allow companies to segment consumers and target different social groups with slightly adapted products. The taste for novelty is not uniform across social classes. Historically, it was a distinctive practice of the elite, or in some cases the middle class, who used novel goods to signal their cultural capital. For example, sugar and coffee were initially consumed by elites but later promoted as “energizing” or “healthy” by factory managers and public health campaigns and adopted by working-class consumers (Bruegel, 2001). Indeed, as productivity increased, companies extended novelty to mass markets. In this way, novelty becomes a disposition that cuts across social strata, though its forms and meanings vary. For the affluent, it remains a tool of distinction; for the masses, it is a way to keep up with consumption norms and aspirations.

The stratification of consumption is not a residual effect of market dynamics but a structural feature of affluent economies, actively constructed and maintained by corporations, public policies, and cultural institutions. Far from leading to the homogenization of tastes, mass consumption relies on social hierarchies to sustain both volume production and the symbolic distinctions that drive demand. Markets simultaneously democratize access to certain goods while reinforcing exclusivity in others, ensuring that consumption remains a powerful tool for social differentiation and economic profitability.

Affluent economies operate through a dual mechanism that combines two consumer dispositions. The taste for exclusivity is a disposition to seek distinction through rare, high-status goods, historically associated with elites but now extended to broader social groups via aspirational marketing. The taste for exclusivity was first theorized by Thorstein Veblen (1899), who argued that the upper class used conspicuous consumption — lavish, visible spending on non-essential goods — to signal their superior social status. This consumption was ostentatious and oriented towards leisure activities, serving as a marker of distance from the working classes, who were constrained by necessity. Symmetrically, the taste for mass consumption is a disposition to participate in standardized, widely accessible consumption patterns, framed as a form of social integration or “keeping up with the Joneses”. While exclusivity drives demand at the top, the taste for mass consumption ensures outlets for standardized, high-volume goods. This taste is framed as a form of social participation, where consuming what “everyone else” has becomes a way to belong to the mainstream. Maurice Halbwachs showed how working-class households in early 20th-century France used the consumption of leisure goods or clothing to integrate into society (Baudelot & Establet, 1994). Later, owning washing machines or TVs was not just about utility but about symbolic inclusion, a way to reduce the stigma of poverty and signal “normalcy”. Both tastes are intertwined, as Veblen demonstrated, as conspicuous consumption by the super-rich leads to emulation and imitative consumption. Exclusivity trickles down from the top to other groups.

Indeed, these two tastes are not contradictory but complementary: they allow markets to segment consumers while ensuring outlets for both high-end and mass-produced goods. This duality is functionally necessary for capitalist economies, as it prevents market saturation and sustains corporate profitability. Public policies and market work may reinforce these socialization processes. For example, consumer credit (e.g., “buy now, pay later” schemes) allows lower-income groups to access goods that signify middle-class status, even at the cost of debt (Prasad, 2012), while slogans like “You deserve it” frame mass consumption as a democratic right, masking the structural inequalities that limit real access. “Buy one, get one free” deals or family-sized packages are marketed as smart choices, training consumers to equate volume with value.

Given this context, green consumption should not be understood as an isolated or alternative economic practice; rather, it is deeply embedded within the logic of an economy of abundance, where markets must continually create new niches to absorb surplus production and sustain growth. Far from challenging the dominant structures of consumer capitalism, green consumption reproduces and reinforces the same dynamics of market expansion, standardization, and stratification that characterize conventional consumption. As we will discuss in section 4, it operates as a specialized segment of the broader affluent economy.

3.1 Framing Green Consumption as Both Ethical and Elite

Green consumption practices are diverse, reflecting both the market’s tendency to produce diversity to stimulate demand and the complexity of practices through which people meet their needs while producing ecological impacts (Cohen & Murphy, 2001). Markets deliver a variety of products and services that promise environmental benefits, encouraging consumers to shop their way to sustainability (Barendregt & Jaffe, 2014). The willing and able consumer can today green every aspect of their consumption, across domains of food, mobility, housing, and leisure. Public policy programs, in turn, encourage consumers to do their part in solving the ecological crisis by sorting waste, saving energy, or using active modes of transport. Eco-citizenship, a normative framework constructed by public authorities, seeks to shape individuals’ behaviors in line with sustainability goals (Ginsburger, 2020).

Yet, despite their diversity, a cultural representation exists of environmental practices as a middle-class phenomenon associated with educated, affluent, and urban populations (Anantharaman, 2018; Geerts, 2024; Huddart & Givens, 2019). While some green practices, such as saving energy, are more commonly observed amongst less-advantaged social groups and others, such as sorting waste, are not patterned by class (Geerts, 2024), the appropriation of green goods and services continues to be associated with more privileged segments of the populace (Coulangeon et al., 2023; Huddart, 2022). Even so-called “alternative” practices, such as participating in local food networks, zero-waste programs, or engaging in urban gardening, tend to concentrate amongst socially advantaged groups (Alkon, 2012; Anantharaman et al., 2019).

Explanations for this highlight both material and cultural factors as key to making green consumption more accessible to and more legitimate for higher status groups. Practice-based studies detail how the performance of green practices often requires access to resources, infrastructures, time, and skills that are more readily available to certain sub-sections of society (Brand, 2010; Sahakian & Wilhite, 2014; Shove et al., 2012). Relatedly, the “prosperity thesis”, the individualized explanation of ecological modernization, posits that people develop environmental concern when their material needs are satisfied (Franzen & Meyer, 2010). In political science, some studies have emphasized the political dimension of this type of consumption, framing it as a new mode of political engagement. This phenomenon has been characterized as a particular element of the collective action repertoire known as political consumerism, which is founded on what Micheletti called “individualized collective action” — that is, collective action based on individual choices (Micheletti, 2003). While these studies may have overestimated the political or collective dimension of such consumption practices and underestimated their social and cultural aspects, they have nonetheless accurately identified the segment of the social space they concern: primarily women and the more educated (Micheletti et al., 2011). Furthermore, so-called political or moral consumption practices may also coincide with more selfish forms of disaffection toward consumerist consumption, taking the shape that Kate Soper calls an “alternative hedonism”. This perspective holds that the negative effects associated with affluent consumption — such as pollution or stress — hinder access to true satisfaction (Soper, 2007). These accounts suggest that green practices concentrate amongst the well-off because they have the material resources and competencies to go green or have access to alternative hedonism.

Cultural theorists emphasize that the uneven distribution of money and time only explains a part of the story. Specific tastes and dispositions are also required to consume green. In an influential paper, Carfagna et al. (2014) observe an eco-habitus emerging amongst the upper-middle class in the United States, arguing that an internalized ecological orientation has become a core component of the habitus of high-cultural-capital groups. The eco-habitus thesis proposes that a durable ecological disposition has emerged, manifesting in how consumers evaluate different activities and providing strong motivation to consume sustainably, in a way that is aligned with their concerns and interests. Eco-habitus provides the knowledge and “feel for the game” required to navigate the variety of green offerings in the market. Studies across France and the United States suggest that environmental commitment is enacted through coherence across certain consumption domains (such as food, mobility, energy-use) by high-cultural capital groups, supported by knowledge, networks, and reflexive capacities (Coulangeon et al., 2023; Huddart, 2022; Huddart & Givens, 2019). Importantly, this coherence does not necessarily imply low overall ecological impact or internally consistent environmental practices. Rather, coherence operates as a culturally recognizable repertoire of dispositions and practices through which privileged groups perform environmental responsibility and moral worth. Thus, the same groups that intentionally consume “green” in some domains may also fly frequently, travel long distances, or occupy larger homes, without this undermining the moral legitimacy of their ecological identities.

In this vein, a related but analytically distinct line of work challenges the assumption that green practices primarily express a stable ecological disposition that is coherently integrated into upper-middle-class habitus. Rather than focusing on (inferred) ecological dispositions as the core motor driving green consumption practices, this perspective examines green consumption as a dynamic, relational strategy of symbolic distinction, whose meaning is produced through opposition to other classed lifestyles (Anantharaman, 2017; Comby, 2024; Flemmen, 2025). Green consumption has become an identity project among culturally privileged groups. Actors rich in cultural capital but less endowed in economic capital oppose materialism and greed through what Flemmen (2025) describes as the “symbolic asceticism” of green consumption, positioning restraint and self-limitation as moral virtues. Green consumption thus becomes a way for culturally secure but economically unstable actors to reap symbolic rewards, defend their positions, or move up in social space.

This relational understanding of green consumption helps explain why all environmentally impactful practices do not automatically get recognized as green. What is at stake is not simply the practice itself, but the social conditions (which include but are not limited to the market) through which practices are recognized and interpreted. In the next section, we detail how symbolic boundaries emerge to stratify groups in the domain of ethical consumption, by differentiating legitimate forms of environmentalism from practices that remain unrecognized or devalued, even when their environmental impacts are significant.

3.2 Performative Environmentalism

The green practices of cultural elites accrue their symbolic rewards through distinction. The enactment of green consumption practices produces symbolic boundaries that distinguish the cultural “ethical elite” from a materialistic elite (Dubuisson-Quellier & Gojard, 2016). But another, equally important, set of distinctions is also at play, directed towards what Huddart and Horne (2020) term “accidental environmentalism” and others describe as a vernacular or pragmatic sustainability (Greenberg, 2013). Across these accounts, ecological legitimacy — which Pulido (1996) describes as the moral authority to speak for the environmental good — accrues to practices framed as voluntary, reflexive choices (Anantharaman, 2022). Concomitantly, environmentally consequential practices rooted in pragmatic necessity are rendered morally suspect and symbolically inferior (Malier, 2019). Simply put, while distinction operates upwards, it also operates downwards, against the working classes, the poor, and groups without dominant cultural capital. Yet, sustainable consumption scholarship has paid limited attention to how green lifestyle activism frames and engages “poor others”.

Empirical studies illustrate how such dynamics of distinction are enacted in everyday practice. French scholars identify how working-class subsistence practices (such as growing urban gardens or participating in repair networks) or rural “débrouilles” are often invisibilized or folklorized, and rarely recognized as ecological practices (Comby & Malier, 2022; Malier, 2019; Paddeu, 2021; Saunier et al., 2025). Moreover, working-class practices (such as barbecuing) are criticized for their negative ecological impacts. Meanwhile, “ecological” practices of upper classes (veganism, cycling) become status markers (Dubuisson-Quellier & Gojard, 2016), while the same practices in working classes are devalued (e.g., “biking is for the poor”) (Classes Vertes , 2025). Even Soper (2007), in her critique of consumerism and her advocacy for alternative hedonism, proposes rethinking the pursuit of pleasure around the quality of experiences, time spent in nature, authentic social relationships, and creative activities. However, she acknowledges that this alternative hedonism is not equally accessible to all social groups, as the affluent classes have greater ease in adopting more sober lifestyles due to their better access to the necessary infrastructures.

Similarly, in qualitative research conducted in India, middle-class cyclists distinguish their cycling activities from both the car-driving “unethical” elite and from the cycling poor through the utilization of both economic and moral discourses (Anantharaman, 2017). They emphasize the voluntary and enlightened nature of their mobility choices to differentiate themselves from those who cycle out of necessity, while simultaneously adorning their expensive bicycles with “bells and whistles” that signal purchasing power and property ownership — communicating, in effect, that cycling is a choice rather than a default. The proliferation of high-end bicycle stores that sell imported cycles and accessories, along with the emergence of cycling groups and communities that are exclusively middle-class, allows these class distinctions to be instantiated in markets and communities.

Other studies in India echo these findings. A study looking at millet consumption and organic food shops found that the resignification of millet as a lifestyle superfood, enacted through new ways of talking about its health benefits, was used to create and maintain symbolic boundaries that excluded lower-middle-class people (Erler et al., 2022). This restyling of a long-standing provisioning and consumption practice indigenous to the drought-prone Deccan plateau disassociates the practice from its rural and non-dominant caste origins. Studies of urban gardening found that middle-class gardeners position themselves as carriers of knowledge, sophistication, and technologies, and in turn describe their hired gardeners as backward (Frazier, 2018; van Holstein, 2019).

These dynamics result in concrete power differentials. Lifestyle environmentalism practiced by high cultural capital groups excludes and stigmatizes the poor and aspirational working classes, who lack the surplus time, financial resources, and cultural competencies required to participate in recognized forms of green consumption. As a result, they are unable to attain the moral recognition and social distinction associated with living green, even when their environmental impacts are circumscribed, or they perform green practices. Further, when poor and working-class people are seen as environmentally suspect, “greening the poor” operates as a disciplinary project that frames poverty itself as an environmental problem to be corrected (Baviskar, 2011; Classes Vertes, 2025; Malier, 2021).

One outcome of this dynamic, which is visible in Indian cities, is the further disenfranchisement of working-class and poor populations from environmental debates and politics. In India, when the new middle classes successfully claim cultural authority over sustainable consumption, it obscures the daily environmental practices of the poor in a manner that further disenfranchises their already tenuous right to the city and its environments. Performative environmentalism exacerbates the exclusion of the working poor from participation in environmental politics by reinforcing class inequalities, restigmatizing poverty, and monopolizing ecological legitimacy for higher status groups.

Moreover, individualizing environmental action through green lifestyles can hide the fact that doing environmentalism through green consumption is tied to gendered, raced, classed, and ability-based possibilities and preferences (Anantharaman, 2018; Comby, 2024; Dubuisson-Quellier, 2025). It can perpetuate the false impression that everyone has access to environmental practices and then stigmatize those who do not consume ethically as ill-informed or uncaring (Malier, 2019).

These dynamics, in turn, affect how working-class and poor groups engage with environmental discourses and politics. In contrast to the eco-habitus of the cultural elite, i.e., feeling that being “green” is both good and achievable, Huddart and Givens find that lower-status consumers in Washington, USA, express “eco-powerlessness”: a sense of fear and uncertainty in the face of environmental issues. Lower-status actors experience environmental concern as a form of powerlessness rooted in dominant, consumer-based models of ecological action, and resign themselves to the idea that their daily actions have little bearing on trajectories of environmental change (Huddart & Givens, 2019).

Taken together, these accounts suggest that the association of green consumption practices with socially advantaged groups cannot be explained by material resources or ecological conviction alone. Rather, it emerges from an interaction between unequal access to resources, cultural dispositions, and the relational processes through which certain practices come to be recognized as green and acquire ecological legitimacy. These processes of recognition and misrecognition, and the stratifications that result from them, implicate both market activities and the discourses produced by consumers. Green living is being promoted in a context where consuming power is a sign of social status and worth, and conversely, being perceived as poor is stigmatized (Lamont, 2018; Lawson & Elwood, 2014). When already privileged actors actively use social status as a strategy to popularize green lifestyles, they other the poor, while gaining more ecological legitimacy themselves.

Crucially, these processes of recognition are actively shaped by markets and public infrastructures, which define, label, and circulate certain goods and practices as environmentally virtuous. As we discuss in the next section, through certifications, product categories, pricing structures, retail environments, and policy programs oriented toward individualized behavior change, markets and states communicate what counts as legitimate environmental action and equip some consumers to perform it. Eco-citizenship is thus not merely a set of individual practices (e.g., recycling, energy saving) but a political project that individualizes responsibility, moralizes behavior, and depoliticizes ecology (Ginsburger, 2020). By focusing on individual “virtue”, it obscures the conflicts of interest between social classes, races, and genders in environmental governance.