Generating Social Practices

Changing consumer behaviour is key to reducing the environmental effects of industrialised societies. Social practice theories provide an integrated approach to understanding consumer behaviour. The mechanisms underlying the emergence and diffusion of social practices are however until now poorly understood. This paper presents a conceptual framework and an abstract agent-based simulation model for generating social practices which use and extend approaches from social practice theories. The main results are twofold. First, the simulation model is able to generate social practices, what confirms that the conceptual framework captures relevant elements and processes. Second, a new mechanism for behavioural lock-in is identified that provides additional insights into the widely acknowledged challenge of changing social practices and respective consumption.

• Publication year

  2014

• Venue

  Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation

• Publication date

  2014-01-31

• Fields of study

  Computer Science, Economics, Business, Environmental Science, Psychology, Sociology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.18564/jasss.2333
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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