No description available.

According to the Bruntland Commission, sustainable development requires consumers in industrialized nations to reduce significantly their consumption of resources. This research brings a new perspective to the reduction of discretionary consumption, using both theoretical and empirical approaches. Demarketing programs have often been unable to achieve sustained reductions in consumption. It is argued here that they have incorrectly treated demand reduction as a variation on the usual marketing problem of building demand, when it is (1) more complex than typical marketing problems, and (2) essentially similar to clinical habit change problems. The dissertation reviews the literature on habits and automated processes, introduces the concept of “habit-like” behavior, and argues that reducing discretionary consumption can often be framed as a habit-change problem. The Prochaska and DiClemente (1984) Revolving Door Model of Behavior Change (RDM) describes how people change habitual behaviors in clinical situations. Study 1, an energy conservation (cold water laundry washing) survey (n=340), using a decisional balance framework, indicated that the RDM generalizes to demarketing situations and that it is consumers’ perceptions of the importance of disadvantages, not advantages, that influence consumption reductions. The research develops new theory to explain habit-like behavior changes. Based on previous theory and findings on automated processes, it is proposed that changing habit-like behavior proceeds in three steps: de-automation, volitional behavior change, and consolidation. Study 2 was a laboratory experiment (n= 117) in which two demarketing approaches (the traditional approach and the habit-change approach) competed in two situations (when the consumption behavior targeted for change was under volitional control, and when it was habit-like). Contrary to expectations, a persuasive message supplemented by limited practice of the new behavior was more effective when the old behavior was volitional than when it was habit-like, suggesting that the disadvantages of changing are more evident to people whose behavior is habit-like. There are two important practical implications: that (1) segmentation based on the RDM stages of change may be more powerful than other approaches; and (2) it is more important to address disadvantages of reducing consumption than to emphasize advantages.

According to the Bruntland Commission, sustainable development requires consumers in industrialized nations to reduce significantly their consumption of resources. This research brings a new perspective to the reduction of discretionary consumption, using both theoretical and empirical approaches. Demarketing programs have often been unable to achieve sustained reductions in consumption. It is argued here that they have incorrectly treated demand reduction as a variation on the usual marketing problem of building demand, when it is (1) more complex than typical marketing problems, and (2) essentially similar to clinical habit change problems. The dissertation reviews the literature on habits and automated processes, introduces the concept of “habit-like” behavior, and argues that reducing discretionary consumption can often be framed as a habit-change problem. The Prochaska and DiClemente (1984) Revolving Door Model of Behavior Change (RDM) describes how people change habitual behaviors in clinical situations. Study 1, an energy conservation (cold water laundry washing) survey (n=340), using a decisional balance framework, indicated that the RDM generalizes to demarketing situations and that it is consumers’ perceptions of the importance of disadvantages, not advantages, that influence consumption reductions. The research develops new theory to explain habit-like behavior changes. Based on previous theory and findings on automated processes, it is proposed that changing habit-like behavior proceeds in three steps: de-automation, volitional behavior change, and consolidation. Study 2 was a laboratory experiment (n= 117) in which two demarketing approaches (the traditional approach and the habit-change approach) competed in two situations (when the consumption behavior targeted for change was under volitional control, and when it was habit-like). Contrary to expectations, a persuasive message supplemented by limited practice of the new behavior was more effective when the old behavior was volitional than when it was habit-like, suggesting that the disadvantages of changing are more evident to people whose behavior is habit-like. There are two important practical implications: that (1) segmentation based on the RDM stages of change may be more powerful than other approaches; and (2) it is more important to address disadvantages of reducing consumption than to emphasize advantages. / Business, Sauder School of / Graduate

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2008. / Title from first page of PDF file. Includes bibliographical references (p. 101-106).

In this project, I argue that David Foster Wallace's 1996 novel Infinite jest (or IJ) is both about recovering from addiction through humility, and also it produces that humility in some of its readers by making us feel ourselves to be addicts to a certain kind of reading: a reading to find closure, certainty, and resolution. But, in frustrating the desires for closure, certainty, resolution, etc., IJ denies readers the satisfaction of completing the fix. It is precisely this denial that prompts readers to re-read, repeating the structure of addiction--but also destructuring it, by installing habits of reading that pleasure in the failure to close, the uncertainty, the impossibility of resolution--habits which I treat as humility. Following a thread in the performative theory of J.L. Austin, Jacques Derrida, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, I clear space for reconceptualizing the performative utterance through an unusual example of a performative utterance: I take IJ to be the utterance of humility. Drawing on Avital Ronell's "narcoanalysis" in Crack wars, I argue that IJ's performative or substantializing work is in exploiting one kind of habit (addiction) in order to replace it with another (humility). The rhetorical transformation (to humility) effects itself through IJ's performative formation (in the reader) of the humbled habit. This project is a reading of a performative utterance (IJ) that produces a rhetorical effect, which effect is the formation of the habit of humility. / text