Abstract
In urban markets of some developing countries, religious beliefs, rituals, and practices heavily influence consumer choices, including the adoption of eco-friendly technologies. The values religious consumers experience often conflict with one other and with market stimuli. Through qualitative interviews with 29 Pakistani residents, we offer novel insight into how these consumers navigate ethical dilemmas identified with their religious values to purchase and use electric vehicles. Advancing belief-congruence theories, we show how religious consumers navigate the self and non-self-contexts (the social-environment-oriented domains) to achieve self-control which sometimes reduce unsustainable automobile consumption behaviours. Such navigation create intra-value/domain and inter-value/domain cognitive conflicts which shape attitudes and behaviours towards (un)sustainable consumption of emerging technologies. We theorise and illustrate the malleability and temporality of the valuation process of religious beliefs and practices in such a developing country market context.