Educational Organisations as ‘Cultures of Consumption’: cultural contexts of consumer learning in schools

High levels of consumption in the industrialised parts of the world such as Europe mark a central threat to global sustainable development. In recent years, growing attention has been paid to the contributions of education and educational organisations to the socialisation of youths and young adults into consumer culture. It is the contention of this article that educational responses to the consumption challenge both within the European Union (EU) consumer policy strategy and in current practices in consumer education in European countries build on an understanding of consumer learning in schools that is too narrowly defined and thus insufficient. The aim of this article is therefore to help overcome this shortcoming by unfolding a socio-cultural view on consumption-related formal and informal learning environments in educational organisations. It is assumed that in response to external framings such as curricula or policies and as a result of inner-organisational negotiations, schools bring about distinct ways of relating to consumption and youth consumers that have socialising effects on their students. This article presents a conceptual elaboration of these contexts and processes. It draws on research into the genesis and characteristic fields of school culture and relates this to the domain of consumption. As a result, a detailed framework of organisational ‘cultures of consumption’ in schools with six thematic domains is presented. The article concludes with a discussion of implications and demands for a new research, practice and policy-making agenda that is needed to advance a more holistic promotion of sustainable consumer education in schools in Europe. Today’s society is often characterised as a consumer society (Schor & Holt, 2000; Baudrillard, 2006), and its culture as a consumer culture (see Featherstone, 2001). These terms highlight the fact ‘that the world of goods and their principles of structuration are central to the understanding of contemporary society’ (Featherstone, 1987, p. 57). Consumption has become a way of life that is so embedded in affluent western societies that it is often not recognised as a cultural construction but ‘simply seems to be natural’ (Assadourian, 2010, p. 8). With the emergence of consumer culture and the growing importance of consumption, the world has witnessed a tremendous increase in consumption levels, particularly in the industrialised countries after World War II. Today, consumption levels are identified as a central driver of several syndromes of global change, such as overexploitation of natural ecosystems and environmental degradation through depletion of non-renewable resources (WBGU, 1996), which pose major threats to the very existence of humanity in the twenty-first century. In light of this, the 2010 Worldwatch report on the state of the world emphasises the critical relationship between consumption and sustainable development, and in its subtitle calls for a cultural transformation ‘from consumerism to sustainability’ (Starke & Mastny, 2010). In their review of different major societal institutions, these US-based authors criticise the fact that education has not fully tapped its potential as a facilitator of the cultural transformation aspired to. Elsewhere, it is contended that ‘education plays a powerful role in cultivating consumerism’ and that ‘schools... represent a huge