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This introductory chapter discusses the general development of sociological thinking as regards its conceptualizations of nature and its potential to deliver knowledge in inter- and transdisciplinary research. The chapter starts with an overview on sociology’s attempts at theorizing society as part but also as opposing the natural world. Recent debates in complexity theory and ecology have fostered...
For quite some time environmental sociology has been preoccupied with understanding the fundamental causes of environmental crises. It is only since the 1990s that attention has shifted stronger to understanding environmental reform. This contribution reviews three generations of environmental sociological theory on environmental reform, labelled ‘policies and protests’, ‘ecological modernisation’,...
The chapter gives an analysis of the shifting social discourse on climate change in Germany and the U.S. Climate Change Discourses (CCD) are defined as thematically focused coupled sequences of arguments that different social actors use in order to influence one another or their social contexts in order to improve the chances of their resource endowments, interests, and worldviews to prevail in collective...
In 2001, the four global change research programs ‘urgently’ called for ‘an ethical framework for global stewardship and strategies for Earth System management’. Yet this notion of ‘earth system management’ remains vaguely defined: It is too elusive for natural scientists, and too ambitious or too normative for social scientists. In this chapter, I develop an alternative concept that is better grounded...
Due to their view of the constitution of the ‘social’, social sciences tend to exclude the biophysical environment from their subject matter. In order to prevent naturalistic explanations, only social explanantia have been taken up in explanatory approaches to social facts. However, increasing environmental problems and the discourse on sustainable development cast severe doubts regarding the exclusion...
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