Xinyu H. Zhang

This research investigates the relationship between economic inequality and sustainable consumption, highlighting how socioeconomic disparities shape consumer behavior. Across three studies—using secondary data from 20 countries, a vignette experiment, and UK survey data—we provide empirical evidence that individuals report lower levels of sustainable consumption when inequality levels are objectively high, perceived as high, or experimentally manipulated as high. This effect can be explained through norm activation theory: As inequality rises, consumers feel less responsible for environmental damage and are less aware of the environmental impact of their consumption choices. These dynamics weaken sustainability-oriented personal norms and, in turn, reduce sustainable consumption. Our findings suggest that reducing economic inequality can significantly enhance sustainable consumption.

How to contain, to simultaneously host and hold (con-tinere) two thinkers––two irreducible figures of thought––with their two unexchangeable physical bodies? What will emerge out of it, and what will have already emerged out of it, by virtue of this sheer juxtaposition of the two, a parataxis itself initiated by a certain historical contingency, namely their contemporality or contemporariness, their having-found-themselves-together as mortal beings within discretely concrete time and space that is nevertheless structurally, experientially, and therefore differently shared, in which their paths overlay, intersect, reflect, emulate, traverse, subtend each other, sometimes confessedly so, yet more often unacknowledged: The “Long Twentieth Century,” the longue durée of colonialism, capitalism, and geopolitics; Algeria, Martinique, France, a concurrent Africa(n past) of which they were both dispossessed; an ever-globalizing earth, an unprecedentedly planetarized world? But, moreover, how do we think their contemporaneity––biographical, factual––when each of them is so remarkably a thinker of dis-continuity and dis-location, of anachrony and dis-placement, of the impossibility as well as undesirability of “identity,” of being self-identical?