Energy Citizenship: Psychological Aspects of Evolution in Sustainable Energy Technologies

The perspective on energy system evolution taken in this chapter involves two interdependent levels of analysis: the socio-cultural level, where the main concern is how issues are socially constructed (cf. Berger and Luckman, 1967), and the psychological level, detailing the cognitive and affective processes involved in shaping behaviour. Whilst there is an extant literature on energy at each level (e.g. Guy and Shove (2000) at the socio-cultural level, embedded within a wider literature on the sociology of technology; and Black et al (1985) at the individual level, embedded within applied social and environmental psychology), these are rarely integrated into a single perspective that situates individual human experience and action within processes of socio-cultural communication and contestation.