Dagens modebransch står inför ett antal hållbarhetsutmaningar. Dessa utmaningar utgörs exempelvis av omfattande utsläpp, hög användning av primära råvaror, linjära leveranskedjor och en fast fashion-kultur bland företag och konsumenter som bland annat resulterar i låg användningsgrad för kläder. Cirkulär ekonomi är ett sätt att ar-beta med förändring med fokus på dessa utmaningar och syftar till att bryta den linjära ekonomin. För att få till detta ”slutna” kretslopp krävs stöd i cirkulära direktiv och policyer, tekniker som kan etablera och stödja minskning, återanvändning och återvinning av resurser, material och produkter, samt affärsmodeller och distribution av cirkulära produkter och tjänster. Men för att den cirkulära ekonomin ska bli möjlig krävs även att konsumenten involveras. Den här rapporten redovisar resultaten från en konsumentstudie med fokus på konsumenters erfarenheter av digitala tjänster för cirkulär ekonomi och visar på att det finns möjligheter, men också svårigheter, med att vara en cirkulär konsument.

Till exempel kräver denna form av konsumtion att det finns en tillgänglig infrastruktur och olika hjälpmedel (såsom digitala plattformar, butiker, utlåningsverksamheter och så vidare), samt att konsumenten både har kunskap och kompetens att använda den typ av tjänster som skapats. Våra resultat visar att cirkulär konsumtion är en tidskrävande aktivitet som ofta kolliderar med vardagens redan inarbetade rutiner. Dessutom kan det vara ekonomiskt krävande att vara en cirkulär modekonsument. Detta betyder att cirkulär konsumtion behöver uppfattas som meningsfull för att konsumenten ska engagera sig i en förändring mot mer cirkulär modekonsumtion.

Många tjänster uppfattas också som dyra och därmed blir värdet av tjänsten en fråga. Avslutningsvis visar studien att cirkulära tjänster fyller en funktion för de som vill anpassa sin konsumtion av kläder för att vara cirkulära, men att de tillgängliga digitala plattformarna för cirkulär klädkonsumtion lider av ett antal problem som be-höver åtgärdas för att integrationen av cirkulära tjänster i konsumenters vardag på en större skala ska vara möjlig.

How is the ongoing “datafication” in society experienced by consumers? Critical discussions regarding the impact of datafication on consumers seldom study consumers’ actual experiences. Conversely, the studies that do exist of consumers and their experiences of datafication tend to take an individualistic approach, arguing that how consumers experience and respond to the ongoing datafication is the result of their individual psychological make-up or the result of processes of cost–benefit calculations. Against that background, this article will instead show that the ways in which consumers experience and respond to datafication is linked to a number of broader sociotechnical imaginaries. Based on in-depth user interviews and drawing on previous work on sociotechnical imaginaries, this article develops an analysis of consumers’ multiple imaginaries of data collection practices. Findings show that how consumers approach data collection operations is shaped by sociotechnical imaginaries that were both individually and collectively performed by consumers interacting with and using data-collecting devices. 

New digitally enabled modes of food provisioning are being developed. The aim of this paper is to examine, empirically illustrate, and conceptualize how and under what conditions these digital food platforms become routinized and what this means for the enabling of sustainable food consumption. Drawing on an ethnographically inspired study of three digital food provision platforms - i.e. meal box schemes, digitalized local food markets, and a food aggregator app – the paper explores how new digital food platforms are introduced and become routinized. The study shows that to create a shopping routine, specific combinations of meanings, materialities and competencies had to be interlinked and configured to enable the consistent reproduction of a shopping practice mode. Furthermore, the analysis also shows that there are multiple ways of carving out a space for new food shopping routines. The digital platforms studied and the modes of food shopping that they enabled were able to replace, complement or reconfigure already-established food shopping practices. Finally, the conclusions suggests that while these new modes of food provisioning became routinized, it was unlikely that they would remain so over time. Only a temporary stabilization was possible as built-in dynamics meant that the shopping routine was unable to last. This brings to the fore the challenges faced by those trying to promote new digitally enabled modes of sustainable food consumption. © 2021

The aim of this paper is to advance our understanding of the complex material arrangements involved in the formation of AFNs by applying the concept of market infrastructure and turning our attention to the process of infrastructuring. Based on an ethnographic study of REKO rings, a network of local food markets, we show how disparate elements, e.g. digital interfaces, parking locations, and Swish (an electronic payment system), are interconnected and configured to form the REKO ring market infrastructure patchwork – an infrastructure made by linking together previously unrelated elements and re-purposing them. We then demonstrate how this patchwork infrastructure enables the formation of market actors, coordination of the market actors’ activities, and the qualification and valuation of foods, thereby making the exchange of alternative food possible. Our analysis of infrastructure patchworking illustrates a different type of infrastructure-making resulting in a temporary and fragile infrastructure which, despite its instability, enables exchange. Drawing on this analysis we argue that the potential of AFNs to take form and impact contemporary modes of food provisioning cannot be understood without exploring the process of infrastructuring.

The COVID-19 pandemic has greatly impacted consumer food shopping. This paper aims to conceptualise, illustrate and explain how and why online grocery shopping has changed during the pandemic. Taking a shopping-as-practice approach and drawing on ethnographic interviews with 31 Swedish households, we analyse how online grocery shopping was performed during the pandemic. Our findings show that online grocery shopping was reinvented during the pandemic, it was no longer only a convenient mode of shopping, but became also a way to cope with the crisis brought about by Covid-19. This change, however, was demanding as developing and routinizing a new mode of shopping practice required substantial work on the part of consumers. Consumers had to engage in detailed planning, to learn to shop anew, and to develop temporal sensitivity. By developing this new mode of online grocery shopping consumers were able to cope, both practically and emotionally, with the challenges brought on by the restrictions. This study provides insights into consumers’ capacities to manage a food crisis, showing that this capacity depends on both retailers’ digital food platforms as well as consumers’ pre-existing shopping competencies and social networks. We conclude by discussing both the managerial and societal implications of these results.

New digital food platforms are being launched accompanied with the promise of also promoting more sustainable food consumption. However, despite some success, many of these efforts to digitally reconfigure consumers food practices fail. The aim of this paper is to empirically explore, conceptualize and explain such failures. Taking a practice theory approach, and drawing on a field experiment using the Karma app – an anti-food waste app – the paper shows that the inability of this app to promote a new way of acquiring food is due to glitches - app failures of different sorts - but also practice conflicts. Two types of practice conflicts, practice mismatch and practice competition, make the fostering of a new sustainable food provisioning practice difficult.

Mobile shopping is becoming an increasingly widespread phenomenon and an emerging field of research (Groß, 2015). While much of the early research in this field has been focused on understanding what affects the acceptance of technology for mobile shopping and intentions and attitudes driving mobile shopping, there is a growing body of work that sets out to understand how mobile shopping is carried out in practice and what this entails (for an overview of this field, see Fuentes & Svingstedt, 2017).

Studies within this activity-based stream of research show that consumers are using mobile phones to for example search for product information, check store availability, compare prices, and purchase products online (Spaid & Flint, 2014). Consumers are also using mobile phones to chat about products with friends, to check blogs on the go, and to coordinate their shopping trips with friends and family (Fuentes & Svingstedt, 2017). Mobile phones, it would seem, are both used as practical and social shopping tools, offering consumers a broad range of possibilities (Spaid & Flint, 2014). The use therefore of mobile phones is having significant impact on shopping. Some studies even indicate that as mobile phones are becoming increasingly integrated into shopping practices, they are reconfiguring the practice of shopping. 

While much can be said about what this means for the practice of shopping, one of the more significant changes is the temporal and spatial shift that comes as the result of the ubiquity of mobile phones. Because we carry these devices with us at all times (more or less) and because of the development of wifi and mobile internet, consumers today have access to retailscapes wherever and whenever they are. In addition to allowing consumers to shop on the go, as other studies have shown (Fuentes & Svingstedt, 2017), this also means that a considerable amount of shopping is today done digitally from home. Smartphones are central in this new home-shopping practice, enabling consumers access to multiple retail sites as well as a plethora of shopping tools (budget apps, shopping list apps) and third-party sites (such as price runner). While shopping from home has been possible ever since the advent of catalogue shopping, we propose that the introduction of the smartphone and other mobile digital devices is leading to the reconfiguration of mobile shopping from home, changing both how we shop at home but also how we approach and perform our homes. 

The aim of this paper is therefore to examine and explain how and under what conditions mobile phones are reconfiguring both the practice of mobile shopping from home and the spatialities and temporalities of the home. This is important both to understand the developing practice of mobile shopping but also to be able to comment on the impact that digitally enabled commercialization is having on consumers everyday lives. Theoretically we draw on the theoretical framework of practice theory and the geographically influenced concept of retailscape (Fuentes, Bäckström, & Svingstedt, 2017) to conceptualise home shopping as mode of practice both anchored in and capable of reconfiguring the spatial and temporal make-up of the home. 

Empirically, the analysis draws on an on-going ethnographically inspired study of home shopping consumers. Participants are asked to document their at-home mobile shopping using a research app, taking photos and writing comments, for a period of two weeks. They are then interviewed using the collected material but also going beyond it about their home shopping and how/when/where it is performed, what other practices it is connected to/inhibits and how this practice has developed over time. 

Preliminary results indicate that at home mobile shopping – defined in the broad sense to include – is a practice that has been increasing in intensity, particularly during the pandemic. While consumers approach and conduct mobile shopping from home in different ways, they all developed more or less routinized forms of mobile shopping. In establishing these new modes of shopping, the practices “carved out” space for themselves, being often conducted in specific home place – in the kitchen/by the fridge, in bed or the sofa – depending on the practice. Moreover, mobile shopping from home required that the practice be “wedged-in” between other practices. Temporal ordering and synchronizing with other practices were crucial for the reconfiguring effects that mobile shopping had on everyday lives. It was thus clear that mobile shopping from home was a practice that had to be actively worked into the nexus of everyday practices and what once in place it reconfigured by the spatial and temporal organisation of the home. 

This digitally enabled reconfiguration had both positive and negative outcomes for consumers. While mobile shopping from home often helped consumer juggle their busy lifestyles, they were also often worried that this practice was conducted at the expense of other social and work-related practices. Similarly, while mobile shopping from home made their home a more functional space, particularly so under the pandemic, it also connected their homes to multiple retailscapes, at times with perceived negative results. 

To conclude, while we do not claim homes had previously been free of commercial influence, on the contrary the home has a long history as a retailscape (see for example catalogue shopping and the phenomenon of TV-shop), mobile phones lead to the enactment of new domestic retailscapes. Both the mechanisms involved in this process and the outcome of it warrants scholarly attention.

The aim of this paper is to conceptualize and discuss how plant-based food consumption is accomplished in an environment pre-configured by meat-based food practices. Drawing on ethnographic interviews with thirteen consumers, and using a socio-material practice approach, the paper demonstrates how plant-based shopping, cooking and eating practices are enabled and shaped by material reconfigurations. The paper shows how developments such as an expanding range of plant-based food products, the increased use of social media, and the re-appropriation of shops and kitchens all entail the continuous reconfiguration of the materials involved in shopping, cooking and eating practices. Together, these material reconfigurations form a socio-material landscape that is mutable and changing, thus enabling plant-based food consumption. In addition, the paper also suggests that these material reconfigurations are not something that can be managed due to having evolved as a collective process in which multiple actors take part, all guided by their own interests. In doing so, the paper illustrates that, in order to understand plant-based consumption, as well as its emergence, performance, and complexities, we must take into account the practical and material aspects involved, not just the cultural or cognitive mechanisms.