I had an interesting conversation with Gill and Tom yesterday following the lecture I gave on 'Behaviour change and Ipswich Town Football Club'.
Gill made the comment that the Save your Energy for the Blues campaign was essentially an example of community-based social marketing (CBSM) - a comment to which I would have to largely agree. But then I got thinking about the three strands of promoting sustainable consumption that the course has covered - Economics, Psychology and Sociology. Social marketing, when considered in that context, is deemed a 'psychological' approach - yet as I argued at some length yesterday, community-based approaches are, to my mind, inherently sociological in nature. So is CBSM a psychological or sociological approach to promoting sustainable consumption?
'Community', whether as an idea, locale, or symbolic construct, is a sociological construct. Traditional social marketing of the 'Act on CO2' and 'Are you doing your bit' kind adheres to the psychological approach, so if you combine the two what sort of hybrid have you created? Do we even need to classify it within such a framework? My own thoughts are that if its got 'community' in its title, it's sociological as you are creating a CBSM campaign with a clear target community in mind. Therefore, as community is a social construct, CBSM must at least in part be following the sociological pattern in that it is dealing with people not as individuals but as members of a group bound by certain lifestyle choices and routine practices - but I'd be interested to know the views of anyone else out there...
Three years later...
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It was about this time three years ago I wrote my last blog. Why? A number
of reasons. First, I started a new job with InCrops and, second, I fell out
of t...
11 years ago
Thanks for starting this discussion, Richard, I'm keen to see how other people responded to your categorisation, too.
ReplyDeleteFor me, the important distinction between a psychological and a sociological approach is that the former deals with encouraging individuals (even individuals in communities!) to change their behaviour, and sociological approaches address the overarching systems within which individuals act, by reshaping institutions and systems of provision.
So for me, the Football case study is an example of, as you say, community-based social marketing - clearly defining, segmenting and targeting a particular audience in a very specific way. The fact that aspirational figures and team loyalty are motivating factors simply underscore this psychological approach for me, as they tap into people's need to feel part of a community, to meet their (social-psychological) needs of expressing their identity, esteem, aspirations and belongingness, through their (sustainable) consumption.
I don't see any attempt in this model to change systems of provision, so for me it doesn;t approach the sociological/infrastructural perspective.
Anyone else have a take on this question?
Hmm, an interesting discussion which, for me, hinges on the distinction between ends and means. I would agree with Richard that in targetting communities and trying to modify their social norms, CBSM seeks a sociological end. At the same time, however, in order to achieve this sociological end it employs wholly psychological means - i.e. trying to appeal to individuals as decision-makers and as seekers of social status. So, in this reading, CBSM is indeed a kind of hybrid of psychological means and sociological ends.
ReplyDeleteRichard then asks what sort of hybrid this creates, and here, I think one has to ask whether or not individualistic/psychological means are appropriate for the production of community/society. Arguably, the only kind of community/society the CBSM-hybrid can produce is a society of individuals, that is, a society implicitly based on individualism.
This poses still deeper questions, I think, about exactly what 'individuals' are, and what 'society' is. Is society simply the aggregation of isolated individuals, or is there something peculiar to 'society', some inter-subjectivity that constitutes Durkheimian 'social facts'? Here, I would argue that psychological approaches tend to assume that individuals are the essential, unchanging and fundamental unit of analysis. Individuals, in this view, may develop and change with regard to their attitudes, values, identities etc, but ultimately the individual entity is fixed and static at the root of it all. In contrast, a more authentically social perspective, and one I struggle with but think I subscribe to, would suggest that individuals cannot exist in isolation from society, that society makes us into the individuals that we are. In short that we are 'social individuals'. If we think historically about this, understandings of what it means to be an individual, what individuals should seek etc etc have changed radically through time, this suggests that the boundaries of 'the individual' are by no means fixed. In this respect, by using psychological means to pursue ostensibly sociological aims, CBSM is potentially missing its target.
In the context of Ipswich Town, I suppose this discussion centres on whether or not a team is made up of 11 individuals, or is more than the sum of its parts? Alternatively, this is like asking: Is there an 'I' in team? For which David Brent's answer was 'no, but there is a 'me' if you look hard enough'. Given Ipswich's current run of form, I'd suggest they could do with adopting a more sociological approach, looking to change structures rather than hoping that individuals can turn things around.