Young Finnish and German consumers’ furniture acquisition – wooden, inherited or just low price?

Abstract

Home decorating is an arena to build up identity and reflect individual taste. Home also represents people's lifestyles and culturally defined aesthetic values and norms. In our study, we focus on the procurement of furniture amongst young Finnish and German consumers who are in the life phase of building up their homes. We study more specifically which aspects of furniture are meaningful for them, and what kind of furniture they consider most valuable for them. Our study shows that for consumers in both countries, visual appearance, price and quality are the most important aspects in furniture acquisition, followed by functionality and ecological aspects. They picture wooden furniture as aesthetic, ecological, durable and expensive. To express their stance towards environmental and ethical values, and because of budgetary reasons, young consumers favour second-hand, inherited and recycled furniture instead of eco-labelled furniture. Consumers also stress the productivity in the process of creating something new. It seems that recycled or inherited furniture appears as a safe ground for young adults struggling to meet their contradictory economic and environmentally sound ideals. A global retailer Ikea represents for young people convenience, availability, low price and youthful design as well as globally shared metaphor for discussing furniture choices and values in live.

Consumption, lifestyle and social movements

“…Similarly, articles of this special issue underline how we can challenge the individualised understandings of political consumerism (Balsinger, 2010;Holzer, 2006) by visualising collective action frames (Dubuisson-Quellier, 2015;Laamanen et al, 2015), and other tactics of mobilisation, such as drawing from other social movement experience or consumer cynicism (Forno, 2015;Helm et al, 2015;Wahn, 2015). Others (de la Peña and Quintanilla, 2015;Hakala et al, 2015;Weij et al, 2015) elaborate on the dynamic ways in which lifestyle politics and the practices of daily life and the self are enacted through consumption choices.…”

A consumer-driven bioeconomy in housing? Combining consumption style with students' perceptions of the use of wood in multi-storey buildings

“…The literature suggests that young consumers’ housing choices depend strongly on price, location, and social status (e.g., Hoolachan et al 2017 ; McKee et al 2017 ), rather than building material preferences. Research suggests that young people would have a greater interest towards the use of wood in housing if wooden homes were a more affordable option (Roos and Hugosson 2008 ; Hakala et al 2015 ; Høibø et al 2015 ). This signals a tight relationship between the young consumers’ finances and their capacity to act out on their environmental preferences.…”

Retracted: Function Matching of Terminal Modules of Intelligent Furniture for Elderly Based on Wireless Sensor Network

“…Inkeri elaborated the concept of intelligent pension. Intelligent pension is a combination of current information technology products such as Internet, cloud computing, big data, intelligent hardware, etc., which realizes the allocation of pension resources and promotes the upgrading and optimization of intelligent pension services [17]. Enrico put forward that intelligent pension should avoid entering into the wrong area.…”