In order to face the coming environmental, economic and social challenges, a transition to more sustainable practices is needed. This is why research has focused on emerging models such as Product-Service Systems (PSS) – referring here to the sale of the use of a good rather than the possession of the good itself. However, this model has trouble recruiting and retaining a large enough number of consumers to be viable. This is clearly visible in the clothing sector where, despite the presence of collective consciousness of the need to adopt more sustainable consumption practices, the appeal of personal ownership has not decreased. This stays true even despite the availability of new kinds of offers, such as clothing libraries, an implementation of PSS-type solutions in the clothing sector.
The postulate of this thesis is the following: a detailed understanding of the ingredients and drivers of current consumption practices is essential to foster the spread of this new economic model, which could potentially lead to more sustainability. This is why the objective of this thesis is to study the lock-ins to consumption practices changes, in particular the difficulty consumers face in changing their habits in the clothing sector to PSS-type solutions.
In this regard, this thesis highlights the existence of two levels of lock-ins: the deeper lock-ins related to socio-cultural constructs – such as dress codes, clothing as a means of expressing social status or the answer to desires created by marketing – and the shallow lock-ins – resulting from the entanglement of ingredients that routinize the practice of clothing consumption. The hypothesis addressed in this thesis is that it would be possible, at first, to initiate practices change without necessarily having to modify the socio-cultural lock-ins linked to current clothing consumption. In other words, it would thus be possible to initiate a transition towards more sustainable consumption by unlocking the shallow lock-ins of the habitual practices. Characterizing the lock-ins related to socio-cultural constructs requiring deconstruction over a longer period of time, will then allow for adoption of more profound actions.
This analysis then serves as a basis for a broader reflection in addressing the PSS conditions of deployment in the clothing sector and then in those of mobility and tools and objects. This thesis also highlights that obstacles to the adoption of functional offers are partly generic – inherent to PSS – and partly due to the context of product use specific to each sector. More specifically for clothing libraries, this research shows that the obstacles to adoption of clothing libraries differ (1) whether the usage is occasional or daily, and (2) whether it is based on the consumption profiles of the carriers of the practices.
Through this thesis, these analyses are part of a broader discussion on sustainabilizing consumption.