Purpose – This paper aims to provide insights into the link between sustainability, technology and Industry 4.0 (I4.0). The authors explore the reasons behind and ways by which digital solutions are implemented within the Swedish fashion industry. The authors demonstrate how I4.0 technologies are used in practice to enable a shift from mass production to mass customisation and mass personalisation, addressing sustainability issues such as overproduction. 

Design/methodology/approach – The study follows an exploratory qualitative case study design, comprising 15 fashion retailers working with personalised solutions and two tech firms working with developing recommender services. A total of 19 interviews were carried out with representatives from fashion firms and tech firms active in the development and implementation of digital solutions for mass personalisation within fashion production. In addition, observations have been conducted online, mainly via firm websites, to complement the interview material. 

Findings – The findings show that the development of sustainable innovation in the fashion industry through digitalisation is largely dependent on cooperation with external actors to access the knowledge necessary for innovation through I4.0. At the same time, the findings indicate the various ways in which successful implementation of digitalisation in fashion can contribute to more sustainable practices at a wider scale.

Originality/value – Due to traditionally unsustainable practices, the fashion industry faces great challenges in moving forward. I4.0 has in this context been held forward as a potential successful route for changing production as well as consumption patterns. The authors contribute to further the understanding of how innovative change in traditional industries with unsustainable practices can be promoted and understood.

Retail and consumption stand at a precipice, tethered to the urgency of the planetary crisis and propelled by the accelerating force of digital transformation. At this crossroads, we introduce imagined retail and consumption futures as the organising concept for this special issue on the Future of Retail and Consumption. Drawing on Jens Beckert’s theory of fictional expectations, we argue that the future of retail and consumption is a contested terrain of competing narratives that, by motivating present action, partially bring themselves into being and obscure others that go unfunded and unbuilt. We articulate three features of imagined futures (narrativity, performativity, and contestation) and four tensions that structure how they are negotiated in scholarship and in practice: accumulation (circular economy versus growth capitalism), accountability (consumer responsibilisation versus collective provisioning), sovereignty (consumer agency versus platform governance), and tangibility (physical circulation versus digital dematerialisation). The seven contributions to the special issue are illustrated through this framework, making plausible a future in which sustainability is approached as a systemic property of well-designed retail environments, irreducible to the cumulative outcome of individually enlightened choices. We close with a research agenda that considers how certain retail and consumption futures become plausible, funded, designed, and normalised, while others remain peripheral, underfunded, or difficult to imagine.

Safety is becoming an increasingly important concern for retailers, both in physical stores and online. Reports indicate that criminality is on the rise, with incidents of theft, violence and harassment becoming more common. While criminology research has addressed this issue to some extent, particularly within the area of crime prevention through environmental design, this remains a relatively under-researched topic. Simultaneously, research within the retail sector is still largely dominated by ideas centred on creating attractive environments and immersive experiences, with its roots in servicescape research. This paper challenges these assumptions by introducing safety as an additional consideration in retail design. A critical case study was conducted in Sweden during the pandemic, demonstrating how retailers had to balance service with safety. Insights from this case study, based on interviews and complementary observations, form the basis of an analytical framework in which safety is prioritised over service. This framework is referred to as a ‘safescape’. The results demonstrate how the informationscapes shifted from product- and brand-oriented information to safety-oriented information, how socialscapes shifted from encouraging social interaction to managing interaction to reduce risks, and how experiencescapes shifted from creating extraordinary experiences to creating safe and controlled environments, both in physical stores and online. Although many of the artefacts from the pandemic are no longer visible in stores, these changes have collectively normalised and legitimised increased behavioural control in retail environments. Furthermore, this development opens a discussion about how retailers can address safety aspects going forward. This paper contributes to the field by proposing an analytical framework for addressing safety considerations in retail.

A challenge facing our future society is how to address the excess volumes being produced and consumed, as our current lifestyles are threatening planetary boundaries. The fashion industry is one that has a major impact on the environment. While previous research on the industry has focused on either unsustainable production or consumption, this study demonstrates how overproduction and overconsumption are linked by conceptualising discounting as the missing link. The study clarifies how discounting, on the one hand, is a sign of overproduction and, on the other, how discounting sustains a high degree of consumption inside and outside firms. Using an ethnographic study of the Swedish fashion industry, three types of discounting practices were identified: pre-season, in-season, and end-of-season sales. The reasons for discounting were grouped into four categories: procurement, financial and spatial, market, and design. Most retailers reported discounting as problematic, but difficult to eliminate. Hence, companies have developed strategies for reducing end-of-season sales, for example, optimising the supply chain and stimulating the market, as well as alternative solutions with a more sustainable future consumption at their core. The final discussion revolves around alternative solutions for how to address the issues of overproduction and overconsumption in the future. 

Purpose: The aim of the paper is to demonstrate how programs of action and anti-programs, concepts developed by Bruno Latour, are of excellent value in interpreting current world developments through a study of the effects and responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Design/methodology/approach: The study was inspired by actor-network theory (ANT) and Bruno Latour's inclusion of nonhuman actors. In this case, I have studied how signs and other artifacts leave traces of anti-programs against the COVID-19 pandemic. Observations, in physical stores and online, are presented as the main empirical material used to identify traces of five anti-programs. Findings: The five types of anti-programs identified were, namely (1) fighting the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic through prompts, (2) verbalizing responsibility, (3) creating a feeling of collectivity, (4) aspiring to heroism and (5) mobilizing support for continued business. The anti-programs were organized via a connection between human and nonhuman actors. Originality/value: The study illustrates the usefulness of Latour's terminology in exploring contemporary sequences of events by means of using programs of action and anti-programs to study the case of retailers' responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. The study echoes ANT and Latour's ideas about including nonhuman actors in social studies. Moreover, the study demonstrates how these concepts can be productively introduced into studies of complex phenomena, by discussing the choice of viewpoint, how actors can be conjoined into one entity, the inclusion of nonobservable actors and the co-existence of an actor in both the program of action and the anti-programs. 

This study aims to provide insights into the transformation of retail caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, using the Swedish fashion industry as an example. In an institutional perspective, combined with Actor-network theory, both new actors and the changing role of existing ones were identified as influencing how the market was organised. An empirical field study of the Swedish fashion industry has illustrated the changes caused to retail by the outbreak of COVID-19, and the subsequent actions taken to limit its spread. Interviews with and observations of retailers’ actions contributed to a more in-depth understanding of the changes caused to retail. The study finds that the market was subject to two exogenous shocks: Firstly, that a non-human actor, i.e. the COVID-19 virus, influenced the Swedish fashion market in combination with humans and secondly, that new actors entered the market and influenced its organisation. This has led to a situation where digitalisation has accelerated and experience design has stagnated, and there has also been a re-definition of sustainability. Using an institutional perspective, combined with thick descriptions of the empirical material, this study challenges the existing narrow understanding, i.e., that the actors in the field are barely tied together as supply chains or networks, by including non-human actors in its analysis. This allows us to gain a greater understanding of how a virus and its antagonists have had a major impact on the organisation of the field, in turn having consequences on the trends prominent in the fashion retail industry before the outbreak of COVID-19. 

Problemet är inte enbart nya kläder som människor köper och i ett senare skede lämnar för återvinning, utan även de som säljs med nedsatta priser, skriver konsumtionsforskaren Gabriella Wulff. 

Som forskare känner jag tveksamhet inför att ställa upp på intervjuer som hamnar bakom betalväggar. Det krockar med forskningens ”tredje uppgift”.

Debatt: Fenomenet Black Friday har spridit sig som en löpeld. Men vad som började som ett kul jippo blir alltmer en börda för många företag. Frågan är om det inte är dags att vi tar oss ur rävsaxen och upptäcker alternativ som är mer hållbara för både näringsliv och klimat, skriver konsumtionsforskaren Gabriella Wulff.