Status consciousness in energy consumption: a systematic review

Making a dent in the climate targets will require a large and sustained action from societies from across the globe. This will warrant social sciences to function alongside natural sciences to offer comprehensive solutions to climate change problems (O'Toole 2017). Social sciences brings in the consumer perspective of energy use that is currently underrepresented in the climate and energy models. Collectively coined as demand-side solutions (Creutzig et al 2016, 2018), mitigation options—most relevant for long term climate strategies—emerging from interdisciplinary social sciences are increasingly gaining coverage in scientific and policy research. Recommendations for the inclusion of social sciences range from replacing stylized assumptions of human behaviour with data-driven theories (Stern et al 2016), using agent-based modelling and socio-technical analysis to address behavioural inadequacies in existing energy models (Geels et al 2016, Rai and Henry 2016), and to reconceptualising consumers as active stakeholders in designing new social routines around energy use (Schot et al 2016).

Social solutions so far focused on behavioural change for inducing carbon footprint reduction and promoting low-carbon options that narrow the focus level to individuals, households and community decision making. Routine decisions around food, mobility and housing consumption activities serve as promising domains to explore behavioural interventions. Yet at the same time, it is also clear that energy is essential to reaching wellbeing objectives, that would include meeting basic living standards for developing societies to adequate levels of wellbeing (Pachauri and Spreng 2011, Rao et al 2019). In culturally entrenched economies, low-income households often from rural areas and urban slums consume and purchase to conform to the socially acceptable norms to prevent being sidelined or excluded from community activities and interactions. Similarly, households from high income households consume goods to signal social distinction, awarding them uniqueness, status and appearance of nonconformity. When mimicked by aspiring middle income households, this status behaviour quickly transforms into a social norm. This trickling down of lifestyle standards, that often is not only expensive, but also energy intensive, may undo much of climate change mitigation measures in other domains. Consequences of such dynamics often result in higher levels of unwanted consumption that is unequal and contribute little to overall wellbeing.

The role of status related consumption for carbon footprints (amount of carbon dioxide (CO₂ emissions) produced by an individual, activity-good or service, or organisation) and climate change mitigations has so far only been partially explored. As one of the early works that looks at demand-side energy research, Lutzenheiser (1992, 2000) discussed the importance of culture, behaviour lifestyle, and social preferences in social stratification and status display. Laying the groundwork for future examinations, he poses questions of their implications on energy use and environment. In outlining the role of non-income factors, Stern et al (2016a) underline identity, status and social norms as key influencers on households' energy choices. People view their consumption as a signal to others. The pattern of such consumer behaviour, often associated with the notion of 'keeping up with the Joneses', has been examined from multi-disciplinary perspectives. Eastman and Eastman (2011) studied status consumption with economic aspects of value, price and brands through consumer consciousness. Kim and Jang (2014) examined the drivers of status consumption using the mental accounting framework (Thaler 1985) and signalling theory (Griskevicius et al 2007) to reveal the difference in income sourced and gender based consumption patterns.

Status as a form of social value associated with energy behaviours and consumption patterns plays out differently across geographies, urban/rural settlements, goods and services and socio-economic backgrounds. To comprehensively assess the interrelationship between households' energy choices and their status-seeking practices, it is useful to bring together existing research evidence on the status perceptions from across disciplines for a systematic analysis. Currently, there exists no comprehensive and systematic review work, formal or otherwise, that collates existing research on status to draw sectoral or theoretical insights on the energy consumption. This systematic review aims to fill that gap.

Specifically we ask: what does the evidence reveal about the role of status as a demand-side driver of household energy consumption choices?

Section 2 briefly explains the definition of status we adopt for the review. Section 3 outlines the review methodology and section 4 presents results of topic modelling and the literature heat map. Section 5 expands on the quantitative estimates and a synthesis of theoretical evidence on status and sector-wise consumption. Section 6 discusses the results with a focus on the evident research gap on positional goods such as housing and big cars when it comes to status. We conclude with recommendation for future research in Section 7.

Status has been identified as one of the important non-financial factors motivating household energy choices (Steg et al 2015). The term status encompasses various definitions and forms, although to convey the same idea of the 'position or rank that a person holds within a social structure (groups and society) or is awarded to an individual by others'. Often social status has been linked to the hierarchical social differences derived from income level, education and occupation types (Coleman 1983) that is achieved overtime. While these hierarchical social differences allow for determining the amount of social status or those with whom one makes social comparisons, a consumer may also desire for status through the purchase or consumption of goods and services that confer the status, irrespective of the consumer's objective income or social class (Eastman et al 1999). This refers to status consumption, the utility of which is measured by the social advantage offered by their purchase onto the consumer and perceived so by the relevant others. The paper aims to review available literature focused status that emerges from the consumption of end-use energy (goods and services).

After defining the research question, the review process commenced with search for relevant studies on 2 March 2019. We used the Web of Science (WoS) database to implement the search query that aims at capturing documents that refer to: (a) status (or other expressions of social identity), (b) an energy consuming sector or activity, and (c) the final consumer (non-commercial in nature). A compilation of 'Status' in its various terminologies was done from previous studies on social drivers of household consumption.

The Boolean search string used in the WoS database was: ('status' OR 'social standing' OR 'positional goods' OR 'relative standing' OR 'social norm' OR 'relative income' OR 'reputation' OR 'lifestyle') AND ('transport*' OR 'mobility' OR 'infrastructure' OR 'electri*' OR 'building*' OR 'cooling' OR 'heating' OR 'thermal comfo*' OR 'lighting' OR 'cooking' OR 'fuel*' OR 'green' OR 'energy us*' OR 'greenhouse gas emission*' OR 'carbon footprint' OR 'climate change') AND ('demand' OR 'consumption') AND ('household*' OR 'domestic' or 'residential' OR 'individual*' OR 'consumer*' OR 'agent*' OR 'driver*' OR 'user*' OR 'inhabitant*' OR 'dweller*'). The search query was restricted to the English language but included all kinds of documents spanning over the time period from 1945 to 2019. In addition to searches through the WoS database, studies were individually identified through Google scholar that matched the review criteria of studying social status in reference to goods consumption or activities by end consumers. The WoS database yielded 2662 papers after two iterations of the search query, while the independent search results in 11 additional papers. Figure 1 details the step-wise flow of the systematic review process including the inclusion and exclusion critera.

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The first step of scoping review involved screening the titles and abstract to exclude articles that were irrelevant to the theme of the review. Exclusion was based on no mention or preliminary examination of status (social or otherwise), and neither household consumption (behaviour). The first level of screening reduced the article count to 200. In the second step, we extracted full texts of the 200 articles. In cases where the articles were not accessible through online subscriptions, the authors were contacted for copies of the same. All except one were retrieved. The full texts were focused on including articles that examined consumption of goods or activities by consumers (individuals or households). The search string was developed to include all forms of consumption undertaken by a household. This consumption was sought for the energy using sectors, such as transport, buildings, food, clothing, electricity and recycling, as well as consumer behaviour (such as environmental conservation, green practices), luxury goods and conspicuous expenditure. Upon examination of the corpus of literature, activities and domains that were not directly associated to household consumption such as visual media, hospitality industry, were excluded. We did not exclude any article based on a country. The second step of screening lowered the article count to 69.

The final screening step, and in some cases a parallel process to step 2, we screened for more precise reference to status being measured or theoretically examined. This was a key concern of the authors with respect to the definition of status to be considered for the review. A paper was included if there was a direct discussion in terms of status symbol, status signalling, social standing/class, prestige, reputation, status seeking, status-based consumption, social stratification. The paper was excluded if it referred to status as socio-economic status or alternatively mentioned educational attainment, occupational class, or household income as status indicators. With an initial literature set capturing all ways in which status was captured, it was realized that status from a social position, that is closely related to the image signalled via consumption needed to be separated from other definitions of status. Status that was defined as representative of profession/occupation types, income levels, education levels, marital/family status and other categories that were more indicative of the economic or demographic position of the household, were removed from the literature for review. Out of 69 papers that were selected for full text reads in step 3, 16 paper were removed as they considered status as socio-economic and demographic indicators as defined above. Most importantly, it was essential to the review that status was amongst the key components of analysis in the papers. And so, studies that mentioned status, even explicitly, but as background information or in brief or extended linkages were excluded. Lastly, studies that involved systematic reviewing, evidence synthesis or review of reviews but did not explicitly discuss status (as defined by us) or clear consumption sectors/behaviours were excluded from this review. The final number of articles selected for the review was 53.

As a first step in analysing the body of literature on status and household energy use, we use topic modelling that allows for an exploratory review of literature to identify concepts and subjects and the underlying thematic structure out of the corpus (collection of research papers). More formally, topic modelling an unsupervised machine-learning technique, where patterns of word co-occurrences are used to learn a set of topics (or group of words) that describe the corpus (Callaghan et al 2020). By providing a rough panorama of the research at hand, this statistical approach will facilitate organisation, understanding and summarisation of the large amount of textual information provided in the 53 papers into key words in order of association with underlying topics. For us, the results are useful in mapping out the research topics examined in relation to status in energy consumption. The search results were screened and managed using the software for evidence synthesis—'Scoping Review Helper' (developed by MCC ³ ). The software was used for eliminating duplicates, extracting data and conducting synthesis including Topic Modelling.

Additionally, we also created heat maps to visualize the literature that intersects across all consumption 'sectors' and the 'methods' used in studies to analyse status.

Using abstracts from the collected articles as the primary data, topics are machine learned using the non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) method (Lee and Seung 1999) for a comprehensive content analysis in the text corpus. A crucial consideration when applying topic modelling is the selection of an appropriate number of topics—k, for the corpus at hand. Choosing a value k too less would generate topics that are very broad, while choosing a value too high could result in 'over-clustering' of the data (Greene et al 2014). To tackle this challenge, we carry out various topic models for a k value ranging from five to ten topics. For each model iteration, the topics are hand-labelled and compared across the models (topics generated when k= 5 is compared with topics generated when k= 6, and 7, and so on), to ensure robustness in the topics that are finalized by us for the review. Furthermore, all topics derived from NMF method are also compared to the topics derived using latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) method (Blei et al 2003). Under the LDA method, the clusters produced were too similar to label with adequate distinction, less coherent as the number of topics modelled increased, and often had multiple topics with similar themes. For this reason, NMF for chosen over LDA method.

As the resolution of the topic models increased from five to ten, the topics seemed to become over defined for topics over seven, such that multiple topics consisted of similar terms thus reducing the meaning of the model results. The topics and highly-associated words from the seven-topic model extracted from the topic model NMF appeared to have the optimal coverage of topics and is presented in table 1 (the order of the topics in the table is not meaningful). Based on the top ten associated words describing the topic, the labelling was done to be semantically meaningful. These included 'Ethical Consumption', 'Conspicuous Consumption', 'Household Energy', 'Green Signaling', 'Transport (behaviour)', 'Organic Food', and 'Urban housing'. Text mining done through topic modelling uncovered latent themes in textual data that provided details on the various domains of literature on energy and status. The topic names in table 1 represent the ten highly-associated and representative terms, that have occurred the most when examining status and consumption.

The topics and words highly associates with it for five- and six-topic models as well as the proportion of the topics over the year of publication is provided in the appendix. The proportion of topics over the publication years present the changing literature landscape for research on status (social or otherwise) highlighting topics that have gained or lost references over time. Analysing the topic proportions in the seven-topic model, the past 10 years (2010–2019) saw a gradual increase in the proportion of papers on the topic of 'Conspicuous Consumption', while papers covering topics of 'Green Signaling', have severely fallen in share. Article on topics of 'Transport' and 'Ethical Consumption' have been relevant in proportion over the assessment period, though the proportion of the topic 'Ethical Consumption' reduced with topics of 'Organic Food' and 'Urban Housing' gaining proportion in the recent years. Over the past decade, papers including topic of 'Rural Energy' have constituted atleast 10% of the corpus.

The seven-topic model highlights evidence on transport, housing and food as sectors most prominent in literature surrounding status and energy demand. Along with the growing number of studies in recent literature, the model findings are consistent with our assumption that exploring status-based energy consumption is gaining high relevance. A deeper review of existing evidence of housing and transport from the lens of positionality ('Positional Goods', Hirsch 1976) is carried out in section 5.

The heatmap (figure 2) reiterates the findings of the topic modelling, such that the studies under review are concentrated in residential energy (housing, cooking, lighting etc.), transport, food and consumer goods sectors. The studies for most part use similar analytical methods and incorporate status either as proxies though symbols or signals of status. Qualitative and Statistical methods are the most frequent applications across sectors. Statistical analysis methods include ANOVA, factor analysis and regression, while qualitative methods include narrative (also interview-based) analysis, phenomenological techniques, literature review, and theoretical analysis. Other methods, while adopted in few studies include material flow analysis and diffusion models.

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5.1. Quantitative estimates of the effect of status on consumption

5.2. Theoretical underpinnings for role of status in consumption

5.3. How theories explain status consciousness in energy consumption decisions?

Status by consumption has become a hallmark of postmodern society and is gaining relevance in the emissions versus wellbeing debate. An association, and in most cases positive, between green consumption and status has been found in environmental research (Griskevicius et al 2010, Welsch and Kühling 2016, Kohlova and Urban 2018). However, from the perspective of materialism, travel habits (to distant destinations) of a materialist, that are often emission intensive, are correlated with high status considerations (Andersson and Nässén 2016). Brooks and Wilson (2015) examined the impact of contextual information on the perceived status of consumption-reducing behaviours, highlighting the significance of social acceptability of sustainable consumption. More recently, Ramakrishnan et al (2020) established status as a key social dimension that impacts the increase in household car and appliances ownership in urban India. Yet, the research on status in the context of energy use is only emerging and is often disjointed. A possible reason is the subjective nature of status that necessitates contextual understanding thus preventing an overall generalization. The terminologies used to explain or describe 'status' is evolving, and often leads to multiple phrases used to explain the concept. As a result, there is no standard measure of status that is accepted theoretically or otherwise.

A common thread across the most reviewed studies were theories that provided the basis for analysing status effects or significance. While some were explicit in the theories they use, others indirectly use the theories without obvious referencing. Certain theories such as the theory of conspicuous consumption, costly signalling theory, practice and behaviour theory were common to explaining the role of status for multiple end-use energy sectors. This allows comparison across sectors (using different methodologies) easy, and serves as evidence for future studies. However, this was not the case for other studies. Most theories were referred to by a single study (sector), limiting a detailed comparative analysis. But what it did exhibit was the wide theoretical base that is available for status to be investigated as a potential mitigation solution.

Although the evidence that the quest for status signalling and positionality influences household consumption choices is mostly consistent, it is difficult to quantify a standard magnitude of impact on the demand for energy embodied in the household goods and the effect on actual energy consumption and subsequent emission levels. Status ties up well with energy consumption (indirectly) through various correlations. Most evidenced in the transport sector, 'status seeking' is seen to increase car ownership by 5%–20%, while need for 'status signalling' increases the value of a hybrid car in the United States (US) between $400 and $4000. In promoting energy use reduction in the residential sector in the US, the pursuit of status or reputation leads to a 20% reduction in energy or increase willingness for low-carbon consumption behaviour by 0.81, while the loss of status positively drives sustainable behaviour. Organic food choices, examined for UAE and Finland, is strongly (60%–70%) associated with social prestige. Social status signalling is found to have a stronger impact on greening products (2.5) amongst Czech adults than on high carbon conspicuous behaviours (0.23) by urban Chinese residents. Though the quantitative estimates have been tough to standardize for comparability, status is found to have positive effects on both high as well as low carbon consumption choices and behaviours.

An exploratory topic modelling revealed topics of ethical consumption and green signalling to be strongly associates with the term 'status'. At the same time, topics of transport, urban housing, and organic food though distinct and intuitively relatable to status, did not have status in the top-ten highly associated words. This low association reflects the existing gap in literature of articles examining status in associated with consumption levels in the transport, housing or food sector. And so a prominent exclusion is the discussion around status-related decisions such as big houses and cars.

Section 6.1 delves deeper into literature, not captured through the search query but externally selected, on positional consumption in terms of cars and housing, highlighting the role of status in such consumption, particularly in high-income countries.

6.1. Positional consumption—housing and cars

In this review, we identify 53 studies and examine these studies for trends, contexts and correlations between status and consumption (behaviour). A topic modelling of all documents confirms literature focus on transport, housing and food, with topics of conspicuous consumption, organic food, ethical consumption and urban housing increasingly gaining reference in literature from 2010 to 2019. Where applicable, the effect of status on consumption was mostly estimated using statistical and qualitative methods of analysis. This opens scope for exploring additional methods to better understand the nature and impact of status on end-use energy consumption and behaviour.

Our results demonstrate that status seeking has an effect on levels of end-use energy consumption. A suggestion for future research is to closely consider the impact of status effects emerging out of positional consumption on the actual energy and emission levels. Changes in lifestyles (downsized) beyond meeting basic material needs, will require the collective works of institutional and societal power (Wiedmann et al 2020), individual attitudes and behavioural leaps (Hurst et al 2013), and stronger pathways to integrate sustainable consumption and production in daily consumption practices. This calls for disciplines including Economics, Psychology and Environmental sciences to explore, where linkages between energy and status seeking hold high research scope.

Another important direction of research can be on examining the policy implications of such consumption. Policies, such as carbon pricing, not only have a direct effect on marginal cost-benefit calculations, but also serve as signalling devices, communicating the social desirability or non-desirability of products. The welfare-enhancing effects of social status concern as examined by Rege (2008) or the classes distinctions driving political consumption (characterized by sustainability or social justice), such as FairTrade by Adams and Raisborough (2008) can extend learnings to leveraging status for conscious consumption. This raises important questions for economists, sociologists and political scientists in studying how to be support a status-aided transition to low-carbon products.

Our findings also have implications for cultural and religious leaders, and those observed as role models, in promoting values and communicating social norms closely linked with the nature of consumption. The relationships with sustainable consumption is examined for the goods marketplace by Holt (2012) and that between conspicuous motives and sustainable consumption by Hammad et al (2019) An adjustment of what is considered high status as communicated by social norms, especially in the case of major carbon emitting products, such as cars and floor-space intensive housing, is likely to have huge benefits for GHG emission reductions. As status is positional, net effects on the self-perception and wellbeing of citizens will be neutral. There will be however individual costs associated with such an adjustment. Sunk investments into the current set of high status products translates into opposition by the moneyed elite, who would like to maintain the culture of contentment through status displays (Galbraith 1993). The rate of adjustment is likely to vary across cultures and with regard to the economic changes in intertemporal trajectories, especially for emerging economies. This is an important area to explore further by the Environmental Humanities.

The understanding of status consciousness is limited in terms of energy implications of high carbon consuming goods such as bigger houses and large cars. Research on the positionality of such goods has recommended progressive taxation as a solutions to address welfare impacts on the society (Frank 2005). Importantly, we here make the case that big status items, such as housing and cars, have negative positional good effects on the economy, but also negative environmental externalities. Hence, a progressive consumption tax would capture two externalities at once, and thus become not only an instrument fostering societies with healthier social balance but at the same time systemically addressing climate change mitigation.

One caveat is that the higher costs of high consumption only increases the social desirability of these items. However, evidence suggests that price signals, if accompanied with social messages explaining the high costs of high consumption, crowds-in the desirable social attitudes and behaviour. For example, Ockenfels et al (2020) observe direct pricing or taxation underpining moral behaviour surrounding consumption decisions with negative externalities. Price signalling to influence moral decision-making could have a similar effect on the consumption of positional goods. Nevertheless, there is insufficient research is out there to adequately understand the dynamics at play between status and emissions through the demand for larger homes and bigger cars. This review could serve as an entry point to steer mitigation research in the direction.

Authors thank Max Callaghan for his constant support and guidance in using the Scoping Review Helper. AR would like to acknowledge the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD-57299294) for financial support.

The data that support the findings of this study are available upon reasonable request from the authors.