Sustainability research is expected to incorporate concepts, methods, and data from a diverse array of academic disciplines. We investigate the extent to which sustainability research lives up to this ideal of an interdisciplinary field. Using bibliometric data, we orient our study around the ''tripartite model'' of sustainability, which suggests that sustainability research should draw from the three ''pillars'' of the environmental, economic, and social sciences. We ask three questions: (i) is sustainability research truly more interdisciplinary than research generally, (ii) to what extent does research grounded in one pillar draw on research from the other two, and (iii) if certain disciplines or pillars are more interdisciplinary than others, then what explains this variation? Our results indicate that sustainability science, while more interdisciplinary than other scientific fields, falls short of the expectations inherent in the tripartite model. The pillar with the fewest articles published on sustainability-economics-is also the most integrative, while the pillar with the most articles-environmental sciences-draws the least from outside disciplines. But interdisciplinarity comes at a cost: sustainability research in economics and the social sciences is centered around a relatively small number of interdisciplinary journals, which may be becoming less valued over time. These findings suggest that, if sustainability research is to live up to its interdisciplinary ideals, researchers must be provided with greater incentives to draw from fields other than their own.
Efforts to explain why some people incorporate ethical concerns into everyday shopping for food and household goods, while many do not, have so far left significant variation in "ethical consumption" unexplained. Seeking to move beyond explanations that rely mainly on differences in consumers' social class, gender, and political engagement, I draw on concepts associated with "practice theory" to argue that ethical consumption is closely tied to people's willingness and ability to spend time, while shopping, on distinct activities associated with breaking old routines and establishing new ones. The central insight of practice theory is that most consumption is the product of unconscious routine. And it is precisely because consciously departing from routine is, according to my study, a fundamentally time-consuming process, that lack of time emerges as a crucial obstacle to translating abstract ethical concerns into concrete action as a consumer. . 2 The terms ethical consumption, political consumerism, and conscious consumption have all been used to describe buying products based on ethical or political views (Willis and Schor 2012). I use ethical consumption-as well as ethical consumers and ethical products-because most people interviewed for this study preferred to describe their actions as "ethical" rather than "political." I do not mean to suggest that some consumers are, in an objective sense, behaving ethically, or that certain products are necessarily more ethical than others.
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